It is not just the self-awareness. What truly hits home with Ben Davies is the willingness to articulate how it feels to have all of those eyeballs trained on him; in the stadium and far beyond – to be at the centre of the madness.
“This game comes with insane amounts of pressure,” the Tottenham defender says. “And you’ve seen some players find it incredibly difficult. Let’s be honest, we are in a pressure cooker as Premier League players, of tough times being around the corner. Every action you do is judged by millions of people around the world. It’s pretty intense.”
The question for Davies is: how does he cope? Or, to put a related spin on it: how does Ange Postecoglou, as the Tottenham manager, create an environment for Davies and his teammates to best express themselves? Because another part of it is that this is Spurs, a club synonymous with violent shifts in the mood music.
When they beat Crystal Palace on 27 October, they remained top of the table with eight wins and two draws from their opening 10 matches – their best start to a league season since 1960-61, when they finished as champions. They were nailed on for a top-four finish and, who knows, even a title challenge.
What followed leading up to the international break was a pair of wild defeats against Chelsea and Wolves. They not only conceded four times against the former, they lost four important players to injury and suspension – Micky van de Ven, James Maddison, Cristian Romero and Destiny Udogie. After the Wolves game, when they conceded twice in stoppage time to lose 2-1, people wanted to know whether everything was falling apart. Do Spurs deal only in extremes? “That’s up to you to decide,” Davies says; so calm, almost softly spoken.
The 30-year-old is sitting in a room that overlooks some of the club’s training pitches. He is getting ready for Sunday’s visit of Aston Villa; Spurs are fourth, Villa fifth and it promises to be a cracker. But on the wall is a fabulous photograph of the 26-man squad that Spurs took to Madrid for the 2019 Champions League final against Liverpool – they lost 2-0 – and it does demand a quick look back. “Good times, weren’t they?” Davies says. “We knew we were a good side but getting that far was probably more than we expected. Hey, on another day, it could have been different.”
If the subject at hand is the motivational techniques of managers, then it follows that Mauricio Pochettino’s Champions League final buildup work should get a mention, specifically the mind over matter bit when he had his players walk barefoot across red-hot coals.
“You’re like: ‘It doesn’t sound so bad,’ but it’s a very different story when it’s right in front of you,” Davies says. “It was a few techniques, showing self-confidence and tricking the brain to realising it’s not as bad as it actually is.”
What has most struck Davies about Postecoglou is how everything he does comes from a place of love and respect for the game. If his players can channel that themselves, almost going back to an age of innocence, then they will be freed to perform. “It’s just stripping it all back,” Davies says.
“When you’re a kid, it was everyone’s dream to play football. Everybody has achieved that dream by being at this level but in the manager’s mindset, that has to be our fuel, the motivation of why you are here. Don’t lose sight of that. It’s to be the best of you, really – that personal side of it, why you play football in the first place. It’s a good reminder for people to have.”
It is natural to compare Postecoglou with Pochettino – inevitable, perhaps – and it is the same with two of his more recent predecessors: José Mourinho and Antonio Conte. Davies makes the point that “the comparisons are quite easy looking at where we ended up with Pochettino” but it “definitely wasn’t smooth sailing” in the Argentinian’s first few months in 2014. Mourinho and Conte started more positively only to blow up and Davies believes the club is on a more even keel with Postecoglou, better set for longer-term progress.
“When you’re doing well, people get excited by the first sign of any sort of wobble,” Davies says. “It’s no time for panic. If we focus on the next game every single time, don’t get distracted by things going on outside, the narrative, the question marks over style of play or personnel … if we stick together, we’ll hopefully be there or thereabouts at the end.
“We are probably in a mini period right now when a couple of results haven’t gone our way. But we are all determined, knowing the manager has got our back, that we can bounce back. And we’re going to go at it playing our way of football.”
In other words, with a back four squeezing high up the pitch – which against Villa, as at Wolves, is expected to feature Davies in the middle, alongside his good friend Eric Dier.
Davies is into his 10th season at Spurs; he is the longest serving player behind the out-of-favour goalkeeper Hugo Lloris, with 318 appearances to his name. He might have thought he had seen it all but his recall to the starting XI against Wolves posed a stern new test. Davies had played for Postecoglou only in his favoured position of left-back – and not very much at that. “To start as a centre-half in a back four for Spurs … the previous time was maybe under Pochettino – Arsenal away in the League Cup [in December 2018],” Davies says. “We won 2-0. It was when Dele [Alli] got hit with a bottle. Remember that one?”
Davies will continue to take the can-do Postecoglou attitude into battle. “With the high defensive line, you’ve just got to be more concentrated because you know you don’t have that extra layer of cover, the deeper you are,” he says. “But I think it can give you a false sense of security when you plant on the edge of your own box. You invite more pressure, you end up having to do a lot more defending and consequences can be worse if you mess up on the edge of your box. Whereas you’ve always got a chance the higher up you are.”
