Robbie Earle has been speaking on The 2 Robbies podcast about the frustration he saw from Tottenham Hotspur’s Ivan Perisic on Saturday evening.
In what was a very bizarre came at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium as they found themselves behind early on and were then pegged back at 2-2, before finally running out 6-2 victors against a poor Leicester City side.
Perisic was deployed on the right-hand side for the first time in his Spurs career but it seemingly wasn’t his best of performances despite a first-half assist as he was hooked off by Antonio Conte before the hour mark.
Earle has claimed that when he was substituted off, the Croatian was far from impressed.
(18:40) “There’s still a few things to tweak in that backline and he played Perisic off the right-hand side instead of the left and he had to bring him off.
“He switched him and he was still getting done on the left, I think [James] Justin coming down that side and I think he [Conte] decided [to sub Perisic off] they brought on [Emerson] Royal and Sessegnon [on the other side] but Perisic didn’t look too happy actually when he came off, he had a little shake of the head.”
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TIF Thoughts on Perisic…
It may only be natural that Perisic had a slightly off game given he did also play 90minutes last Tuesday evening in the Champions League and then started against on Saturday night and at the end of the day, he is in the latter years of his career at 33.
However, he was also played on the right-hand side, something he hadn’t done all season for Spurs, so that may well have weighed heavily in terms of him having a slightly poorer game than usual, although it is great for Conte to have someone so versatile as Perisic.
The Croatian will know that despite having played under Conte before and being a vastly experienced player all over Europe, his place is far from guaranteed given that Ryan Sessegnon is improving every week and managing to stay fit for a prolonged period of time, something he’s struggled to do thus far in his Tottenham career, so it should be healthy competition.