Igor Tudor has insisted honesty is the best remedy for Tottenham, as he continued to describe the club’s fight against relegation as his biggest challenge.
“Without honesty you are dead,” Tudor said before Thursday’s home game with Crystal Palace. A third defeat in three games would bring into serious question the Croat’s interim appointment. Though having not held back after Spurs’ loss at Fulham last Sunday, he asserted there is far more to his coaching approach than simply bawling players out.
He said: “There’s not one coach in the world who can come and go with the stick. The players will say: ‘Who are you?’ There is a relationship, there is honesty. There is a right way to do it. I’m not coming here to shout at players or to scream at them. You have totally the wrong image of me.”
Tudor shooed away comparisons of Tottenham’s plight to previous assignments including twice saving Udinese from relegation, and also returning Juventus to the Champions League, but did not underplay the difficulty of inheriting an injury-riddled squad on a ruinous run of Premier League form.
“The problems are totally different. At Juventus, there were 20 players for all these positions. Here, you come, you have 12 players. There you fight for the Champions League. Here, you fight for relegation.
“You go player by player and there are big differences everywhere. It’s not like you go and do the job in the same way and have the same results. It’s impossible because the level of difficulty is always different. There is no copying in anything, it’s a different team, different league, different position, different players.”
He echoed his damning Craven Cottage assessment, saying: “You can only compare the levels of difficulty. Where are the biggest problems? For me, this problem of Tottenham is bigger … There are no mathematics but what I feel, what I can see, this problem is bigger.”
Tudor was similarly candid when asked about the pressure he has taken on, rating the levels at a “seven”. He continued: “It’s part of my life, and all the coaches live with that. But you need to find in the job some beauty, otherwise you don’t do this job.
“The beauty sometimes is difficult, the challenges are very difficult but you need to find beauty in that, don’t go in the direction of being too worried, too anxious, too much the pressure, otherwise you stay at home. Stick with the players, stay together and find a way because it’s always about finding the right solution.”
Admitting he feels “less beauty in this moment”, Tudor must turn around a team whose last league win came at Palace on 28 December. He said: “Real pressures are other jobs. That is real pressure, when you earn money for the family, work jobs like doctors who [perform] operations. They are dealing with and decide about life and death. That is the real pressure. This is sport.”
Tottenham hope to add Ivan Javorcic, the coach who worked alongside Tudor at Lazio and Juventus, to the staff but are yet to receive his work permit. “It is an ongoing thing,” said Tudor of his fellow Croat. “Still we wait.” Javorcic, like Tudor, has spent the majority of his football career in Italy, serving as a key lieutenant in those Serie A rescue jobs.
