Postecogou admits annoyance with “leaks” inside Tottenham

Postecogou admits annoyance with “leaks” inside Tottenham

In the hours before Tottenham Hotspur kicked off against Eintracht Frankfurt in the first leg of their Europa League tie yesterday, something rather predictable happened — someone, apparently from inside the club, leaked out news that Wilson Odobert had “done his hamstring.” As you can imagine, Spurs fans on social media freaked out.

Later on (but still before the match) various Spurs ITK clarified that Odobert had reported some tightness in his hamstring and the club had sent him for some precautionary scans, but the contextualized news wasn’t nearly so dire as the initial report, which was gleefully spread by social media aggregators and other fans.

Odobert was named to Tottenham’s bench for the Frankfurt match, but he was not utilized as a substitute.

Now, news of this leak apparently got to the press, because in this morning’s press conference ahead of Sunday’s Premier League match at Wolves, he was directly asked about the leaking of injury news before matches. This is how Ange responded.

“Look, there is no doubt we have got a leak inside the club. Somebody who continues to leak out information. They have all year. I don’t know why. It doesn’t help us. It just makes our job more difficult. We try really hard to keep things in-house like all clubs because we don’t want on game-day opposition being aware of any sort of team selection, but we’ve got somebody within our camp who continually gives out information.

“We’ve narrowed it down, we’ve been looking at it for quite a while and kind of have a fair idea of where it is coming from. We’ll deal with it but it’s not helpful for us and half of it is mis-information, half of it is half of the information but irrespectively, it certainly doesn’t help our cause because on game-day what you want to try and do is keep as much information in-house. We try really hard to find out information about the opposition and very hard to, but with us, someone has an open line to what we do. It’s disappointing because you’d like to think everyone who is in our camp is working with us, not against us.”

Ange also addressed Wilson Odobert’s status directly.

“Yeah, he’s OK. Again, with all the guys who have come back from long-term injuries, we’ve taken a different approach and we kind of know we need to always be monitoring how they’re going. We did it with Micky, Destiny, Romero and all these guys who came back from long-term injuries. There are different times when they’re going to get sore in different areas, but Wilson trained today and we’ll see how he is tomorrow. He should be available for the weekend but certainly nothing wrong with him.”

Honestly, I find this fascinating. There have always, historically, been leaks at just about every football club. It’s part of what’s so fun, and at times infuriating, about covering news and rumors. Now the club has locked down a lot of the leaks already — we’ve described Johan Lange’s tenure as a “sealed black box of nothingness” with regards to transfer leaks last summer and in January — but this is the first time that we’ve had a manager actually directly talk about information leaks coming out of the club and the impact it has.

And he’s right! I hate the social media aggregators who leak shit like this because, as Ange says, it’s often either wrong, only half right, or lacks any sort of context. It’s probably infuriating for Postecoglou and club officials to know there’s someone at the club yapping to their buddies on WhatsApp about player or personnel matters.

Honestly, it makes me wonder if the Odobert injury news that got leaked yesterday was some sort of misinformation campaign that the club is using to ferret out whoever’s leaking. Wouldn’t surprise me!

But as I said recently, the game is the game. I suspect whatever sources have been leaking info are going to shut up for a while. That’s arguably bad for people in my business, but it’s a much better situation for the club.

Or maybe the new ITK will be to find out who is leaking all the ITK.

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