No lack of effort and commitment from players

I have listened to the comments about Spurs concerning the money they have spent and their current position at the bottom of the Premiership without a win this season.

And I listened on Sky to David Platt’s scathing comments about Tottenham’s lack of appetite and lack of work, with players almost going through the motions which is alarming for any club.

To be fair to our players, that is not happening with us.

We are working tremendously hard, we are trying to play in a manner that we have worked at in training and, what we are paying a heavy penalty for now, is lapses in concentration.

We continue to say that you get punished for mistakes the higher up you go and Leeds’ winner last Saturday was a case in point.

Following quite a disciplined and organised first half, where players generally did their jobs quite well, there were four or five players in the build-up to Leeds’ winning goal who failed to carry out their task in the team organisation.

And for that we paid a heavy price.

It was not an isolated incident, there were a number of others where Leeds finished up with shooting opportunities and it was only some outstanding work from Darren Randolph that kept them at bay.

But after they failed to kill us off, we continued to show a spirit which is encouraging for the future and could, and should, have scored an equaliser in the last 10 minutes of the match.

We had at least a couple of decent opportunities, one of which Moses Ashikodi will be kicking himself for, for some time to come. He missed the target on what seemed to be very good scoring opportunity.

The willingness to work is there, the willingness to listen is there and the message continues to be the same about concentration.

We introduced a player into the squad on Friday. Under normal circumstances, if we are staying overnight we go straight to the hotel and the players will have a light training session in the grounds of the hotel.

But because we had got Bruno N’Gotty joining us, we stopped off at the National Football Centre in Burton and did a more functional session concerning team play.

He is a player with vast experience having seen service at clubs like Paris St Germain, AC Milan and Olympique Marseilles and had 150 games for Bolton in the Premiership.

We are delighted to have him in the camp and it is a further indication that we will take any measures necessary to try to get ourselves out of trouble.

Again, the important thing is - using the cliche - ‘you don’t flog a willing horse’.

The players are still very willing at the moment and, although we will study a video of the Leeds match, we are far from the criticism for lack of effort being levelled at Spurs.