Dejan Kulusevski has slammed Tottenham's latest painful grind through the gears and admitted: “If we want to be a big team, we have to play from the first minute.”
Spurs fell behind, for the ninth consecutive game in a row, and trailed 2-0 at Brentford on Boxing Day before Harry Kane and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg rescued a point. But Swedish winger Kulusevski was unimpressed with their sluggish start, saying: “We have to improve. It’s not OK to start games like this.
“If we want to be a big team, then we have to start playing from the first minute. It’s not enough with words. We have to do it on the pitch. If I knew how to change it, I would tell everybody, but I don’t know. We have to figure it out as a team, everybody together.
“We didn’t expect this and we worked so hard to not play like this. When you work hard, you want to see the results and we didn’t do that. But there’s another game soon and we’ll be prepared. The first game is always the difficult one after such a break.”
Head coach Antonio Conte is also losing patience over Tottenham's tendency to play catch-up, but for an hour their performance at Brentford was alarming.
It needed Kane, rising above Bees fans' taunts of “You let your country down” following his costly World Cup penalty miss for England in Qatar, to inspire a fightback in the last half-hour.
But Kulusevski conceded: “The first half was very bad. We didn’t feel ready. We lost every second ball and didn’t do nothing with the ball so we’re very, very disappointed by the game. It’s not OK.
“As soon as we got the first goal, you feel like you’re going to win and we went very close. I thought we were going to win. I was just watching the clock all the time. But the big problem is not the second half - it’s the first half.”
Conte fears Spurs' slow starts could allow Chelsea, Manchester United or Liverpool to pip them to a top-four spot in the long run. He said: “I spoke with my players, because now it’s becoming usual, this type of situation. OK we were good to come back, but we have to try to improve.
“It’s important to be stable in every moment of the game, from the start until the end. You know very well the difficulty of this league. At this moment, United, Chelsea and Liverpool stay out of a place in the Champions League. For this reason, we have to continue to improve, to work very hard and put in our mind to go to another level.”
