Tottenham interim boss Igor Tudor has said he is “100 per cent” confident the club will avoid relegation from the Premier League.
Spurs are 16th in the table and sit just five points above the drop zone having sacked Thomas Frank last week after only eight months in charge.
Tudor’s first match is Sunday’s north London derby against league leaders Arsenal but the 47-year-old insisted he is not thinking about the possibility of going down.
Asked whether Spurs were in a relegation fight, Tudor said on Friday: “This is not important. To be more clear, fighting for every position – relegation, first position, UEFA [European qualification] – it is for me, how can I explain, it is all about you achieving what you do during the week.
“You achieve your position [based on] how you do things on Sunday. So it is always a consequence of that. This brings you nothing if you start to think about relegation or ‘I’m fighting for this.’
“All these goals, they are far away. I never give them importance. I never speak about results. I never speak about what we need to achieve at the end of the season. I don’t believe in this. I believe in today’s training.
“This is all I want the players to think about. I go strong on things we need to do on training, after we speak, I go man to man to give concrete advices, all I have – love, also support – but the right advice, It is all about that. The position [in the table] is a consequence of this.
“[The gap] can be five [points], ten, two, The behaviour needs to be the same. We need to be focused on what we need to become as a team. That’s the process, that’s the path so let’s focus on this and see what we can become.”
Pushed on how confident he is that Spurs will be a Premier League team next season, Tudor replied: “100 per cent.”
Dominic Solanke is expected to be fit after battling a sickness bug but Tudor revealed he is training with just 13 players ahead of Sunday’s game as Spurs continue to operate without Cristian Romero due to suspension and a lengthy injury list including James Maddison, Pedro Porro, Dejan Kulusevski, Mohamed Kudus and Lucas Bergvall.
“This is a very rare situation that you find, 10 players [out], big injuries also,” Tudor said. “So we made training with 13 players, it is how it is. It’s not fantastic [or] beautiful, but it’s in this case an even bigger challenge to succeed, to come out from this situation.
“Thirteen we will have, for sure, and it’s quite enough to achieve what we want on Sunday. That’s the first goal of all. Of course, I understand the importance of this game.
“This is a derby, a north London derby. Everybody expects three points from us and we are aware of this.
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“But my goal in these first sessions we made is that we became a team. That we became a team with the right meaning of the words. A team that wants to suffer, to fight, to run, to have the right mentality.
“Also, this is the start. I was working on a lot of things, on everything because football is not all about that. It’s about having a clear idea of what we want to do, very specific things we want to do. With the ball, without the ball. When we are pressed, when we are low.
“So we work a lot but the start is always about mentality because the people come before the football player.”
