Frank Lampard is confident that his Coventry City players are growing into the Premier League, showing belief that they can compete at the level.
The Sky Blues earned their first win with an element of luck and gutsy determination to secure a narrow 1-0 verdict at Nottingham Forest before backing that up with a more convincing 4-1 thumping of Newcastle United at home. And although they lost 3-1 to Tottenham on Monday night, the head coach was pleased with the performance which he felt was packed with positives – so much so that he revealed that his half-time team talk was ‘easy’.
“Some half times are difficult,” he said in his post-match assessment from the impressive Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. “This one was easy; keep going. Tottenham are sort of set up with rotations of the midfield, with Maddison and Marmoush. I mean there was no tactical instruction of you follow him and you follow him – we just have to defend as a unit as we did.
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“And when you think what we restricted them to in terms of big chances with that quality in their team, I thought we continued that in the second half.”
He added: “I felt we believed today. There have been some games where I have said, ‘believe more, lads,’ – Nottingham Forest where we were tentative in the last ten minutes but I didn’t feel the same today. And on another day Tatsu might score early in the game and things might drop for us or whatever, maybe. I thought there was a real feeling in the team and that’s progression for us from the first period of the season.
“And that’s credit to the players and they must now keep their feet on the ground and not just take great feeling from what I believe is a good performance.
“They must know that every game has to have all the baseline things that it had today to try and get results. And you won’t always because Maddison can put it in the top corner, Marmoush can put in the top corner. That’s football.
“But if you just take the performance, I was very pleased with what they showed.”