Antonio Conte fires warning to Son Heung-min as he insists out-of-form forward is no longer untouchable
Son Heung-min, who is currently out of form for Tottenham , has received a warning from boss Antonio Conte to not take Tuesday night’s match against Sporting lightly.
Despite Spurs’ unblemished start to the season, Son has yet to score despite starting in each of the team’s seven games thus far.
His performance is a far cry from that of last year, when Son earned the Premier League Golden Boot after a productive year that saw him score 28 goals in all competitions for club and country.
The emergence of Dejan Kulusevski and the £60 million acquisition of Richarlison from Everton mean the Tottenham boss is no longer exclusively dependent on the Korean’s combination with Harry Kane.
In March, Conte stated it would take him to be “crazy” to cut Son from his team given his importance.
When directly questioned about Son’s position in his team on Monday, ahead of Tuesday night’s match against Sporting, Conte made it clear that his star attacker is no longer untouchable.
Conte said: “I think when you try to build something important, when you try to build something with ambition and try to be competitive and fight to win, you have to change old habits, otherwise it means you want to stay in balance and it means you don’t want to have ambition.
“For this reason all the players have to accept the rotation especially up front, we have four players. For me especially it’s very difficult right now to drop one of these four players, but I have to make the best decision for the team, also for the players.
“Sometimes it’s better to rest and don’t start a game, to come in and play only 20 or 30 minutes and then play the following games.
“For sure I’m here to try to change the old habit. The old habit was that the players were used to playing in every game. What happened in this type of situation is that you don’t have great possibilities to win.
“You try to make the players happy, but big clubs have a big squad, a deep squad. In this moment we don’t have a big squad but we have just started to try to follow this path.
“For this reason what happens with one of these four players will be normal and you have to know it’s good for a coach like me to have these options.”
However, Conte claims that his conundrum regarding striker selection isn’t keeping him up at night, adding, “For sure I think every manager likes this kind of problem.
“For sure I have the possibility to pick three important players and know that I have another player on the bench who is ready to come on and help us, like in the last game against Marseille.
“It was 0-0, I decided to put Kulusevski into the pitch and to keep also the three strikers to become more offensive.
“I think this is an important solution for me.”
Antonio Conte fires warning to Son Heung-min as he insists out-of-form forward is no longer untouchable
