Kaboul: We are ready for City test

Tottenham were embarrassed home and away by Manchester City last season, but captain Younes Kaboul is confident there will be no such humbling when the teams meet again in a fortnight.

Spurs were ripped apart by eventual champions City last term, with Andre Villas-Boas’ side returning from the north west on the back of a 6-0 defeat in November.

Things did not go much better in the return fixture at White Hart Lane, where Manuel Pellegrini’s side ran riot 5-1 against a side by this point under the tutorship of Tim Sherwood.

Now it is Mauricio Pochettino’s turn to try and overcome City, who lie in wait after the two-week international break.

It is a match Kaboul says Spurs approach without any form of hangover from last season’s defeats, with the players looking to right some wrongs at the Etihad Stadium.

“What happened last season was last season,” the Frenchman said. “In football the most important thing is the present and we look at the future. We look forward to this game.

“Football is football, you never know what can happen, but mentally and physically we have to be ready for this game.”

Tottenham will head into that match buoyed by Sunday’s 1-0 win against Pochettino’s former side Southampton.

It was the ideal follow-up to last weekend’s 1-1 draw at neighbours Arsenal, where Kaboul says they showed the attitude and aptitude required to hurt City.

“We need to produce a similar performance to the one against Arsenal,” the Spurs skipper said.

“I know each game is different, but we need to learn from the Arsenal game because it is a big team, we’re are going to play a massive team again. We need to be similar but even better.

“Simply they are more of a threat in front [than Arsenal]. They’ve got a lot of players attacking and they are ready for the fight.

“They are champions of England so we need to produce a big performance there.”

Such a performance was lacking in Tottenham’s matches last season against the Premier League’s biggest names.

As well as shipping 11 goals to City, they conceded nine as Liverpool did the double and suffered a 4-0 defeat at Chelsea – the kind of losses that may actually help Spurs in the long run.

“When you lose, you learn, especially Man City or Man U or Chelsea,” Kaboul said. “We look forward to this game.

“We’ve got two weeks to prepare. It was very important to win today because we’ve got a two-week break.

“Last time we didn’t and it was hard. Today we won and it is very important because before the kick-off we were 12th, now we are sixth. We are very happy.”

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