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Dele Alli wants Tottenham to be more ruthless

We need to make sure that we learn from our mistakes and start games quicker and brighter. In the second half we dominated it but we weren’t clinical enough.

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Dele Alli admits Tottenham must be ruthless if they are to qualify for the knockout stages of the Champions League.

“We now have to start again Sunday”. “It’s just ourselves. We knew what to expect, we had tactics, I just think the slow start killed us”.

“I’ve just got to keep working hard and I know the goals will come”. It’s the first loss of the season.

However, the England worldwide has made a habit of silencing his doubters – he scored one in nine at the start of last season before winning the Premier League Golden Boot – and says he is ready to do so again.

“We’ve been playing quite well”.

Pochettino introduced Vincent Janssen and Moussa Sissoko in an effort to get Spurs back into the game but neither man could find a way through Monaco’s stoic defence.

“We’ve got another game [at CSKA Moscow] in a couple of weeks and we have to be ready for that”.

“That’s one of the problems with Spurs, you never know what you’re going to get”.

They were cheered on by a bigger crowd than ever before – the attendance of 85,011 was a club record for Tottenham and, indeed, the largest ever home crowd for an English club.

As the post-mortem on the defeat continues, some have attributed the lacklusture performance to the fact that Spurs were forced to play at Wembley, rather than White Hart Lane. But it’s important we pick ourselves up and keep learning from these experiences and make sure we win the next game.

They did manage to pull one back through Toby Alderweireld but their first Champions League game since the 2010/11 season ended in disappointment, causing Mauricio Pochettino to say of his players afterwards: “If this was basketball, I would have taken them all off”.

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“It’s a fantastic occasion for us, with all the fans, and you have to give a lot of credit to the fans who showed up and filled it, and they kept singing”.

Shaun Botterill
Mauricio Pochettino surveys the sideline during Spurs defeat by Monaco on Wednesday