Harry Kane has stated that Tottenham's FA Cup defeat at Sheffield United "put a dagger in our hearts" as their nightmare week went from bad to worse. Following their cup exit at Bramall Lane and then their 1-0 loss at Wolves three days later, Wednesday evening saw Tottenham's Champions League journey come to an end after a 1-0 aggregate defeat against AC Milan.
The Lilywhites produced an extremely flat performance on such an important night for the club, which in turn has raised even more questions about the club and Antonio Conte going forward. Another season without a trophy or a good cup run, Kane fully understands the frustrations of supporters at this moment in time.
"I totally understand it. Top four [alone] is not good enough for anyone at this club, especially the fans," he outlined. "They have the right to voice their opinion. The last week especially just hasn't been good enough.
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"Before the Sheffield United game, the season could have been a whole lot different. You go through there, you take that momentum into the league game [at Wolves] and this game. But I feel like that loss last week put a dagger in our hearts and as you can see we haven't really recovered from that."
Following such a limp display against the Rossoneri, Conte's future in the capital has come into serious question with a number of Tottenham fans chanting Mauricio Pochettino's name come the full-time whistle. Failing to commit beyond the end of the current season and with so much uncertainty surrounding the 53-year-old, Kane was quizzed on if the question marks over Conte is impacting the players.
"That's his decision, he's going to be the one that makes that choice. All we can do as players is try to perform for him, work as hard as we can. That's what we're doing," explained the 29-year-old. "I said after the Wolves game at the weekend, you can't fault the effort of the players. We're trying, we're training but we're just lacking something. We've talked about mentality before and that ruthless hunger to be better, to be the best, to be one of the best teams in Europe. We just haven't quite found that yet."
Tottenham's Champions League exit now means that Spurs have just the Premier League to concentrate on between now and the end of the season. Although Spurs did benefit 12 months ago from no cup football in the final few months as they secured a top-four finish against the odds, Kane doesn't believe top four is enough for a club of Spurs' stature.
"No, I don't think so," said Kane. "Where we're at as a club, we should be winning trophies. That's always the aim.
"The top four [being our only target] is a consequence of not playing as well as we want to play. Now that's all we can fight for so that's going to be the goal and hopefully we can achieve that come the end of the season. But for sure, it's not enough for this club."
On what he puts that failure down to, he added: "It's hard to put a finger on it. Especially over the last week we've lacked quality in key moments against teams that we've had good opportunities against.
"Not just opportunities where you're one-on-one with the keeper but opportunities where you're in a good position on the pitch and we need more from all of us. To be more direct, more clinical. The last three games we haven't scored a goal and that's not good enough,"
On a night when Tottenham needed to show character and desire to help overturn their 1-0 deficit, AC Milan were extremely comfortable with the hosts barely troubling them. They quite simply just didn't offer enough over the two legs to progress through to the final eight of the competition.
"We gave it a good push in the second half especially," admitted Kane. "Obviously when we went down to ten men it made the game a lot more difficult. We never gave up, we kept fighting until the end but at this level if you don't take key moments in the game it's not enough and over the two legs we can't really say we did enough to get through. That's just the reality of it. We need to improve in a lot of aspects and that's the bottom line."
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