Villarreal right-back Serge Aurier is in the UEFA Champions League final with The Yellow Submarine, who will be taking on Liverpool, but with the defender in England, the 29-year-old rehashed his time with Tottenham Hotspur.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Aurier spoke about what went wrong in north London during the tenure of José Mourinho, who now manages at AS Roma, and the issues he had with his former assistant João Sacramento.
Aurier states that Sacrament didn’t have a positive relationship with anyone in the Tottenham dressing room during his stint under Mourinho. The veteran defender adds the assistant lacked empathy for the person behind the player.
“Sometimes players need more love and attention. I’m not speaking for José; I’m speaking for his assistant. João is a badass, and he didn’t have a good relationship with the dressing room; that’s why everything went downhill. There was a lack of good communication. It was one of his first experiences in a first-team, and he lacked calm with the players,” Aurier said.
“He needed to care more about the person behind the player. Sometimes when you’re not playing, a lot goes through your head, and you need someone to calm you down and help you, to give you good vibes, not send you negative messages. And I think it all started there.”
Mourinho was sacked in April 2021; meanwhile, Aurier also departed a year ago when he and Tottenham agreed to terminate the final year of his contract, resulting in him signing with the La Liga side last October.
Spurs hired Nuno Espírito Santo to be Mourinho’s permanent replacement, but that didn’t last long, and the north London club appointed Antonio Conte as the manager in November.
Maybe they could just trying to play defense. Walker is playing defense over at City. The last time I saw Walker chasing a ball towards his own goal, he was wearing a Spurs Jersey.
Don’t start on the dart playing chimps now😂🤣
I heard that before that Sacramento was seen as basically a bit of an a*shole. Jose has since relived him of his duties as his assistant at Roma. So perhaps he was a bad egg after all. I didn’t like his vibe in the Amazon thing somehow, looked like a bit of an arrogant dick.
Aurier at least offered something going forward. Emerson is Aurier Lite – worse in just about every aspect of the game.
Time to move on the ‘head of recruitment’ at Spurs?
It wasn’t so much selling Walker as it was to whom that really crystalised Enic’s intentions. Can you think of any other instance in recent years where a supposed “big club” sold a starter to a direct competitor? Only Sterling comes to mind and he was still unproven when Liverpool sold him for 49m.
My take on this is that Aurier would have suited Conte’s tactics much better than Royal. However we would have had a number of games when we’d of been down to 10 men! Arguably we’re almost at that level with Royal anyway.
I think selling Walker, who was also prone to a brain fart moment, was the beginning of the end for Poch’s excellent team. I never thought Trippier was as good and then we sold him and bought Aurier and Doherty. To compound the felony, we also sold Walker Peters and later on bought the utterly useless Emerson. What a complete sh**show. The transfer committee, you might as well have a couple of chimps throwing darts.
I see the CL semi final is the new final.
occasional rash/bone-headed, defensive lapse, – I think it was a lot more than occasional.
Actually this is an interesting and quite revealing interview with Serge Aurier. I liked Serge, although I know that opinion is probably a minority one on this board! However, despite the occasional rash/bone-headed, defensive lapse, he was a half decent footballer and better than the two current incumbents at the position, Doherty and Royal, who we acquired at a combined cost of 40 million to replace him.
He admittedly was not better than Bonzo though, who we shot ourselves in the foot by selling, ill-advisedly used the money to buy Davinson Sanchez and then never adequately replaced. A big thanks to the ‘Transfer Committee from Hell, brains trust, of Hitchin and Levy! (THFC’s very own version of the ‘Axis of Evil’, the ‘Axis of Incompetence!’).