1-0 win against Villarreal<\/a> in Spurs’ Champions League opener was the fourth clean sheet they had kept in five games so far this season under Thomas Frank.<\/p>\nIn contrast, they had kept just one at the same stage of last season, when the more attack-minded Ange Postecoglou was in charge.<\/p>\n
“We talked a lot about ‘clean sheet mentality’ this year because we conceded a lot last year,” Tottenham midfielder Lucas Bergvall told Amazon Prime.<\/p>\n
“They [Villarreal] did not have a shot on target, so we did a really good job.”<\/p>\n
Defender Micky van de Ven added: “I think we are a difficult team to play against, for sure. Structure-wise we are standing really good and we all know what to do, so we’re a difficult team to beat.”<\/p>\n
The style of Frank’s Tottenham side against Villarreal was in stark contrast to the swashbuckling football played under Postecoglou.<\/p>\n
They were much more cautious, even after being gifted a fourth-minute opener thanks to a calamitous mistake by Villarreal goalkeeper Luiz Junior.<\/p>\n
But their defence was excellent, with Van de Ven in particularly halting most of Villarreal’s attacks.<\/p>\n
Even though the visitors had 10 shots, Guglielmo Vicario didn’t have a save to make throughout.<\/p>\n
The price for that level of pragmatism was that Tottenham themselves only had one shot on target – very little for the home fans to get excited about.<\/p>\n
“We defended really well and gave little away throughout the game against a really good Villarreal side,” Frank said.<\/p>\n
“I think offensively we didn’t hit the highest level. There was definitely a spell second half where we decided let’s give it to the Villarreal guys and then we’ll sprint back, that’s a very good fun thing.<\/p>\n
“It was a very even game that we just edged.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Outscoring the opposition was the mentality at Tottenham last season but now the focus is on keeping out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-149736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-soccer","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}