Mourinho reveals the moment he knew Spurs would suffer against Wolves

Tottenham came away with a dramatic 2-1 win at the Molineux Stadium against Wolves courtesy of an injury-time header from Jan Vertonghen.

It was the gritty performance from the away side with the players having to dig deep during phases of play where the home side were dominant.

In his post-match press conference, Jose Mourinho claimed that the character which his players displayed during the match shows that they are a real team and insisted that the players had to fight to overcome a team who were unbeaten in their last eleven matches.

Speaking to Football.London, the Spurs boss said: “It’s one of these victories where quality is not enough. If you are not a team, a real team in the sense of what the word team means it’s impossible. They are very, very good. I said that before the match and I say the same after the match. They are a very good team and very difficult to play against.

“Tactically they are very well worked, three years with Nuno. Very good players and it’s difficult. We tried and we did start well, to put pressure on them and try to attack them to take them away from their comfort zone.

“That comfort zone is to have the ball and to project Doherty and Jonny and Jota and Traore are unstoppable. They are trains. But then we had the difficult part of the game and it was very important to deal with that difficult part.”

Mourinho admitted that he knew the second half was going to be difficult when Spurs missed a golden chance to extend their lead to 2-0 at the end of the first half when Eric Dier’s effort came back off the foot of the post.

However, he insisted that he was pleased with the way the team coped with the pressure in the second half.

The Tottenham head coach added: “So when I saw Dier hit the post I had immediately the feeling that if we don’t score it now we are going to suffer and we did, but incredible attitude and we put ourselves in a position where we arrive in the end of the game to arrive in conditions at the end of the game to do what we did and everybody was going a little bit down, the intensity of the game was going a bit down.

“Both teams wanted to win and not play for the draw. So the game was open, it was broken and we had fantastic service from Christian on the cross and a great header by Jan and three very important points for us.”

Spurs Web Opinion

This was a very untypical Spurs performance in a way with the game intelligence, time-wasting and tactical fouling the players displayed. Even at 1-1, I thought none of our players’ shoulders dropped. All the forwards were willing to drop deep and help with the defensive work which was great to see.

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