Tottenham manager Igor Tudor has come out to defend his brutal 17th-minute substitution of Antonin Kinsky during a chaotic defeat to Atletico Madrid. He recently had his say while speaking to the press, and fans have been reacting.
According to him, despite facing intense scrutiny for ignoring the tearful goalkeeper as he left the pitch, his touchline reaction was a deliberate strategy to prevent a bad situation from spiralling out of control.
Tudor added that he never bothered to give his goalkeeper a hug because the youngster was angry at the time.
His words, “When you make this decision to change, you always lose. When you do that substitution after 15 minutes, the coach loses in both cases. First case, because you put him in so everyone says ‘why are you doing this? You killed the guy’.
If you don’t, you are taking risk to concede one or two more goals, so I took the decision after thinking and if I needed to, I would do the same again. It was an act of helping to preserve the guy and to preserve the team.
Why didn’t I go to give him hug? Because maybe he was angry. Maybe coaches do things to avoid this scene and make a situation worse than it was. Sometimes it is better to stay there and we hugged each other at half-time. At half-time we spoke and nothing [more], the situation happened there. It finished there.”
WOW.
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