Jose Mourinho has admitted that Eric Dier has made defensive mistakes this season but insisted that he continues to have full trust in the centre-back.
It seemed until December like Mourinho had settled on Dier and Toby Alderweireld as his first-choice pairing in central defence but the Spurs boss has chopped and changed at the back frequently over the last few weeks.
The North Londoners have conceded some poor goals recently mainly due to individual errors at the back and it was thus not surprising that a new central defender was reportedly a priority for Mourinho during the January transfer window.
Spurs ended the window empty-handed and the Tottenham boss does not look like he has settled on his first-choice defensive pairing yet.
He admitted that several of his defenders, including Dier, are lacking in confidence at the moment in light of their recent mistakes but backed them through ride through this spell.
Mourinho told Football.London: “I believe that players … they have moments. They can be very good, they can be strong personalities, they can be experienced, they can cope with a mistake but in the end players are players, they are men, and they feel more than anyone else these little moments of confidence, of crisis.
“You can see that in the striker that doesn’t score goals, you can see that in the goalkeeper that makes mistakes and accumulates another one after.
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“You can see that in defenders, you can see that in the midfielder that instead of showing himself all the time, he is hiding behind some shadows on the pitch because he is not so confident to get the ball, but these are moments.
“I have to admit that recently, our team makes little important mistakes that are punished in terms of our results, and Eric was there, he was one of them.
“They feel it, and I believe confidence, that drops a little bit, but great personality, a team guy, as happy as we were when we won on Sunday.
“[He’s] a guy that loves it here, a guy that is loved by the teammates, a guy that I trust, a guy that I consider one of the ones, and he will be back to normality and his normality, of course, is to play and be solid.”
Spurs Web Opinion
Even though Mourinho has left Dier out of the team for a few matches, I suspect he mainly did that in order to rotate the side due to the fact that we are now in a busy period of fixtures. It was always going to take some time for the 26-year-old to readapt to central defence after playing as a midfielder for so long. I still think Dier has the attributes necessary to become a top centre-half and he just needs to cut out the lapses in concentration he is suffering from.
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