Kulusevski and Doherty explain what mid-season training is like under Conte

Dejan Kulusevski and Matt Doherty have admitted that they have been worked quite hard by Antonio Conte and his coaching staff since returning to training.

Conte has a reputation for working players extremely hard during pre-season and that was certainly in evidence back in the summer, with many players dropping to the floor after being made to run 42 lengths of the pitch at a quick pace in the 30C heat of Seoul (Daily Mail).

From the sounds of it, the Italian and his coaching staff have worked the players just as hard during the mini pre-season ahead of the resumption of the Premier League campaign.

Doherty admitted that the training is made easier by the fact that the players only had a short two-week break, which meant that their fitness levels are largely intact.

Speaking after Tottenham’s 4-0 win over Motherwell in a friendly on Thursday, the former Wolves man told Spurs Play: “It hasn’t happened before (the mid-season break), but we were only off for two weeks, so it’s not like we lost a lot of fitness or sharpness.

“We’re training hard again, as if it’s a new pre-season to try to improve and taking everything as we did in pre-season.

“We’ll do whatever they (coaching staff) tell us to do, we’ll work hard, try to get better because we know we’ve a game in two weeks (Boxing Day) against Brentford that we have to be ready for. We took the two weeks off, took our rest and now we’re back and taking training very seriously.”

Kulusevski stated that he has is enjoying working hard on the training field, and remarked that the players were able to execute some of what they had been working on against Motherwell.

The Swede said: “I feel very good. It’s been two hard weeks, a lot of hard training, so this game was a little hard, but also fun, because like Matt said, we did it the right way.

“We pressed well, played well with the ball and did some new stuff that I liked as well. We keep working and we’ll have some good weeks ahead.”

Spurs Web Opinion

With so many big names not being involved due to the World Cup, this mini-preseason is a great opportunity for the likes of Doherty, Spence, Skipp and the others who did not get much game time in the first part of the campaign, to win over Conte and his coaching staff.

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