Published: 4 January, 2014
by DAN CARRIER at the Emirates Stadium

TIM Sherwood defended his team after watching rivals Arsenal dump them out of the FA Cup this evening – and said they would now turn their attentions to getting vital points on the board to push for a Champions League spot.

“We are disappointed with the result,” the Spurs boss said after the 2-0 defeat.

“Our performance was better in the second half but we did not open Arsenal up. We had a few half chances but we were playing against a side that are top of the league for a reason. We did not disgrace ourselves.”

Sherwood said the game came at the end of a busy Christmas that has seen his squad suffer injuries to key players.

“It was not tough to motivate our side – it was against Arsenal – but there was some fatigue,” he said, after watching his team play at the Emirates just three days after beating Manchester United at Old Trafford.

“Some sharpness was missing but I felt it could have gone either way,” he said. “We were in the ascendancy when they broke and scored their second.”

He said the defeat meant he could draw breath after a hectic 17-day spell since taking over in which his team have played six games – during which he has seen his team dumped out of both cups while remaining unbeaten in the league.

“We will put this out of our minds,” he said.

“We can now get on the training pitch and we can show the players what we want from them. I have had a lot to say to them but you don’t create sides by talking or looking at the telly – it is about getting out on the grass and showing them what we want them to do.”

And he said youngster Nabil Bentaleb, who made his full debut, repaid his faith in selection.

“Nabil did well,” he said.

“He was one of our best players. He wasn’t fazed, he was industrious and used the ball well.”

SPURS COMMENT by Dan Carrier

TIM Sherwood made a brave – and, with hindsight, perhaps questionable – decision to start with his prodigy Nabil Bentaleb and leave the French midfield enforcer Etienne Capoue on the bench.

It wasn’t that Bentaleb had a bad game – as Sherwood said afterwards, Bentaleb did all that was asked from him – it was just he offers something different from Capoue, and found himself chasing the ball as Arsenal made their superior numbers count in the middle.

Capoue likes to close things down quickly, snap into the tackle, and it seemed pretty obvious from the start that Spurs needed something to counter Arsenal’s ability to create triangles and play one-touch stuff.

Capoue, with hindsight, would have offered that, and allowed the shackles to come off Christian Eriksen and Mousa Dembele a little more. Without him, it meant Sherwood’s team were tactically on the back foot from the start.