CHANGING MENTALITY. Spurs take on Chelsea – Martin Ho speaks

Chelsea and Spurs have already met twice this season, with the West London outfit narrowly victorious in both games. In previous years you might have had this down as another straightforward win for Sonia Bompastor’s Blues.

But this is the FA Cup, Bompastor has acknowledged that Spurs are a different proposition now, and sees their boss Martin Ho as one of the “good guys”.

Plus Chelsea might still be licking their wounds from their Champions League exit to Arsenal and bruised by some bumpy recent games in the WSL.

Tottenham Hotspur head coach Martin Ho tells me about their own excitement and mindset…

The FA Cup has always meant quite a lot to Tottenham as a club and obviously came quite close a couple of years ago with the women’s team, and I wonder what it means for you and for Spurs?

Martin Ho: Yeah, it’s the most prestigious competition in England, for a cup competition.

You play at Wembley as a final, so who doesn’t want to play there?

As a coach, as a player, and as a club, you want to make sure that you can get to those finals and… as you said, they’ve been there before, so they know what it feels like to be there as a team and as a club.

So we need to make sure that we can give the fans and the club more days like that.

Yeah, we’ve got a task in front of us now in Chelsea and to get there, you have to beat these teams.

I also wonder, looking across the season, what you enjoy most about coaching and working with and watching this Spurs team at the moment?

The desire, the passion they play with, their enthusiasm for the growth and development of the team.

Then furthermore, seeing players play with a smile on the face, play with freedom.

And then when we’re performing and we know we’re at our best, the energy and enthusiasm that it gives not just the team, but gives the staff, the wider staffing group, the wider club.

I get a lot of pride in watching the team play.

They’re playing a really brave way of football and a brave way of playing.

And when we do that, I think we’re at our best.

And actually this year, I think in many games we’ve shown a real mentality to when we’ve been behind, we’ve responded and we’ve come back and won games.

I think that mentality has changed from maybe the previous seasons where when we went behind, we haven’t been able to come back in the games.

And that’s a big thing to take forward that when you’re down, you’re not out. And this club dies on its sword when we’re in those moments, and I think the players have started to really live the values of this club and team.

Both your defence and Chelsea’s have shown a bit of weakness recently.

Spurs were a bit light on the left-hand side in defence against Arsenal, and for Chelsea, it’s behind the centre backs who have been a bit slow to turn.

I wonder if you can exploit Chelsea’s centre backs?

Yeah, I think there’s areas we feel we can exploit and don’t get me wrong, you’ve got really strong centre backs there.

Kadeisha Buchanan, Buurman, you’ve got some really strong players in those positions and vastly experienced. A lot of them from really high levels of football in European football and in big competitions.

So we know that we’re going to have to make sure when we exploit those areas and we look to get into certain areas of the pitch that we’re effective.

When we get in those positions we’ve got to be prepared to be ruthless because you won’t get numerous chances against these teams.

If we don’t capitalise, we won’t come out on top, but also on the other side, we’ve got to make sure that we defend our box well, we defend those spaces well, which they try to go into, which is down the sides of the pitches and behind the back line.

And if we defend those spaces well, and we look to pick up the first and second contacts, which is going to be important in the game with the way they play.

If we do that, we’ll come out on top in those duels, and that then should enable us to go and push the game.