Less than a year after the World Cup final, I found myself in the Champions League final against Liverpool. This made me one of the few who had played in a Euros final, a World Cup final, and then a Champions League final in quick succession. The day before the match in Madrid, I ran into Dejan Lovren, Liverpool’s defender and my former teammate at Lyon. ‘Hey, Hugo,’ he said. ‘You got the World Cup, so you can let me have the Champions League!’ I didn’t let him have it. Unfortunately, it was taken from us. The penalty awarded by referee Damir Skomina just 24 seconds into the match – when the ball hit Moussa Sissoko’s body and then his hand – ended the final for us. From 2 June 2019, a rule change meant that a penalty would no longer be given if the ball struck a player’s hand after touching another part of their body. The final took place on 1 June 2019, and something that wouldn’t have been an issue the following day decided the fate of the final before it had really started.
Liverpool focused on a strong defense. For us, we could only try our luck and take risks in the last 20 minutes. It wasn’t a great final. I played three finals with Tottenham – two League Cups (2015 and 2021) and one Champions League – and we didn’t score a single goal in any of them. It was incredibly disappointing to experience all those emotions and have the adventure end that way. I’m not sure everyone at the club and in the team realized how hard it is to reach a final and come back from that. I’m not sure we understood that this might be our only chance to win the Champions League; that the club we played for wasn’t destined to win it; that we could have avoided hearing that Tottenham never won anything again; that our names could have been forever etched in the club’s history. That penalty took all that from us.
We do have one engraved memory, though. Four days before the final, Daniel Levy gathered us to announce that, with the support of a sponsor, we would each receive a luxury aviator watch from the club. Initially, we were excited to see the elegant boxes. Then we opened them and found that the back of each watch was engraved with the player’s name and ‘Champions League Finalist 2019’. ‘Finalist.’ Who does that at a time like this? I still haven’t gotten over it, and I’m not alone. If we had won, he wouldn’t have asked for the watches back to have ‘Winner’ engraved instead.
I have great respect and admiration for Daniel Levy and all he’s done for the club as chairman – I got to know him – but there are things he’s just not sensitive to. As beautiful as the watch is, I’ve never worn it. I would have preferred it without any engraving. With an engraving like that, Levy couldn’t have been surprised if we had been 1–0 down after a couple of minutes: it was almost like it was written in advance.
At the post-match reception at the hotel, I felt that some people from the club and certain players weren’t as upset about losing as they should have been. I would have liked someone to come up to me and say, ‘Don’t worry, Hugo. It won’t happen again. We’ll give you the means to come back stronger.’ But when I returned to my room on the night of the final, I think I felt the same as Mauricio and Harry: does the club really want to win? Real Madrid would never celebrate a lost final, and neither should we.
Everything was tough after that, for Mauricio and for us. The club had finally invested in recruitment, but we hadn’t recovered from the Champions League final, and the squad wasn’t fully revitalized – not to mention the tensions that grew following a decision by the club to install cameras everywhere for Amazon’s series about Spurs, without the consent of the squad or the manager. In light of the sum mentioned – around ten million pounds – we wondered if those whose season and activities would be affected, all those being asked to wear microphones every day, would get a share. The answer came quickly: no.
So when the film crew placed little microphones on some of the canteen tables, we moved to others. We had to be careful all the time. The only place where we could speak freely was the training dressing room – we managed to get them to agree that it would remain off-limits. Otherwise, they had microphones and cameras everywhere – even at some practice sessions, which was a significant constraint and had consequences.
I found Antonio Conte to be quite a character, driven by victory, which gave him energy, but he found it very hard to control his frustration when we started drawing, let alone losing, because his inner turmoil had to come out; and if he was tormented, then everyone had to share that torment too, and things could get very complicated very fast. He once told me that in any given week, his happiness lasted an hour, just after winning, and that was it. In training, he oversaw everything, organizing tactical sessions with 10 outfield players against one goalie; but it was hard for the creative players to find their place in his restrictive gameplay. The rigidity of the structure and set sequences did us a lot of good at first but, after a few months, teams learned how to play against us and it became tougher to win.
During matches, Conte was as extreme and explosive as he appeared, garnering respect and fear. Such a strong personality pushed wingers to prefer to play on the side opposite the dugout. I’ll never forget our first defeat under Conte: a 2–1 loss to NS Mura in Slovenia in the Uefa Conference League. Even though I wasn’t playing, I was still subject to his screams and reproaches, just like everyone else. In squad meetings, we spent at least 30 minutes a day doing video analysis, not forgetting the endless preparation camps at our training center.
After the defeat in Maribor, he screamed: ‘Mura, Mura, who’s Mura?! We lost to Mura!’ I can still hear him. If a player needed a little love, they’d better not knock on Conte’s door. For Conte, trust is earned in training. He has no filter; he’s sincere, honest. He’s a manager who lives only by results, whereas from a player’s perspective, performance is important too. That season, when we lost 3–2 to Manchester United (a Ronaldo hat-trick), a result that didn’t reflect our performance, I told Pierre-Emile Højbjerg and Harry Kane in the dressing room: ‘They may have just beaten us, but I bet you we finish above them.’ And so we did, ending up in fourth place after beating Arsenal 3–0 on the last day, balancing Conte’s demanding nature with a bit of self-management because, after being constantly pushed and shouted at, we eventually learned to ignore it.
Source link: https://www.theguardian.com
