Tottenham have had an extremely busy schedule this season particularly from November to February as they were involved in all four competitions. To make matter worse, Spurs suffered a terrible injury crisis in the same period as they were without several key attackers as well as midfielders.
This meant that the likes of Moussa Sissoko, Harry Winks, Christian Eriksen and Son Heung-Min pretty much had to play every 3 days across the last few months.
While the fixtures have slowed down a bit over the past few weeks after Spurs were knocked out of both domestic cup competitions, the fatigue seems to have taken its toll on the players as Pochettino’s men looked tired and struggled to get going in the games against Burnley, Chelsea and Arsenal last week.
When asked why it was that his team tended to start games slowly, Pochettino put Spurs’ lack of aggression in games down to fixture congestion.
Speaking in the pre-match press conference ahead of the game against Dortmund, Pochettino told Football.London, “If you are going back, we play a lot of games with a lot of disadvantages. If you remember we played against Manchester City in the Premier League on Monday and Carabao Cup on Wednesday against West Ham.
“When West Ham played Saturday and then had three or four days to prepare. How do you prepare in 48 hours a game.
“It’s normal that the players – I think Jesus [Perez] can explain better because he’s a specialist – but you know always it’s so difficult when you’re tired and you don’t have time to recover and you start the game and it’s so difficult. After 15-20 minutes you start to feel better.”
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