MICKY VAN DE VEN has revealed that he and his teammates had to convince former boss Ange Postecoglou to change his tactics at Tottenham – and it led to silverware.
Spurs ended a 17-year wait to add to their trophy cabinet when they beat Manchester United in the Europa League Final in May.
But it was not enough to save Postecoglou’s job because he was sacked a matter of weeks later.
And lightning-quick centre-back Van de Ven, 24, has admitted that members of the Tottenham dressing room were forced to intervene when rivals had worked out how to get the better of them.
Speaking on The Overlap, sponsored bySky Bet, the Dutchman said: “At the beginning of the season [the first under Postecoglou] everything was new, so no team was used to playing against our system at that point.
“We were playing unbelievable football but then the injuries came and suspensions came, which changed things, but before we were flying.
“Managers these days analyse everything – they have four or five people around them who analyse everything about the opponent.
“And at that point people knew what we were doing and sometimes we didn’t really have a plan B, so we were getting exposed without having solutions.
“At one point, we spoke with the manager and said that sometimes we need to change some things because we were getting too exposed.
“Of course, we won the Europa League and knew that this was a big opportunity for us to bring silverware to Tottenham, but we needed to change things.
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“In games where we were 1-0 up, we can’t keep playing our football, sometimes we needed to sit back and make sure that nothing was coming through us.
“And that helped us at the end to, of course, win the Europa League.”
Postecoglou, 60, had a torrid 39-day spell in charge of Nottingham Forest after being shown the door by Spurs.
But Tottenham have still been inconsistent since Thomas Frank was appointed as his successor.
The North Londoners suffered a 3-0 defeat to Forest on Sunday and are already six points adrift of the Premier League’s top four.