Ange Postecoglou 'hurting immensely' as Tottenham's form guarantees worst Premier League start for 16 seasons | OneFootball

Tottenham will enter 2025 in the bottom half of the Premier League table

Ange Postecoglou says he is hurting "immensely" as a result of Tottenham's dismal form after they finished 2024 with a frustrating 2-2 home draw with Wolves.

Substitute Jorgen Strand Larsen scored an 87th-minute equaliser to leave Spurs with just one League win in December, and guaranteed to be lower in the table at the turn of the year than in any season since 2008-09.

Postecoglou says both himself and his players are hurting and believes the team deserved more for their efforts against Vitor Pereira's side.

"Of course I am [hurting too]," the head coach added. "It hurts me because I'm responsible, ultimately. I'm the person in charge. So of course it hurts.

"When I see how hard they are trying, it hurts even more because you want them to get a reward and I think today they deserved a reward for their efforts even though they were dipping into their reserves of energy, which I don't even know where they got from. I wanted them to get a reward for their efforts.

"So of course it hurts. It hurts immensely. At the same time it's my responsibility for where we're at right now and it's my responsibility to try to get us out of it."

James Maddison was a second half substitute in the 2-2 draw against Wolves.

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Spurs climbed to 11th in the table but are 11 points behind fourth-placed Chelsea and nine shy of Manchester City in fifth, with Postecoglou still confident they can make a success of their league campaign.

"I think so," he said. "Because it's still fairly tight. I just feel that at some point we'll get a relatively healthy squad and when we do that we'll be able to perform at a high level consistently and we've already shown this year we can beat anyone.

"There's a chance there you can go on a run. But at the moment that's secondary to the first bit, we have to try to get some support for the players - both mentally and physically and in terms of numbers to give them the opportunity to play at their best."

Wolves took an early lead through Hee-chan Hwang's fine strike but Rodrigo Bentancur levelled the game with a header and Brennan Johnson struck in first-half stoppage-time, shortly after Jose Sa saved Heung-min Son's penalty.

"The players are very disappointed but it's not through the want of trying," Postecoglou said. "I can see how hard they're trying and if we were at our sharpest today, we would have got that third goal and maybe a fourth.

"I mean we were inches away at times from getting the goal we needed and I just think it's just we're just lacking a little bit of that dynamic movement that we need because, you know, you look at those players, Dom [Solanke] and I don't know where Deki [Dejan Kulusevski] gets the energy from and even Brennan and even Sonny and a lot of these guys, they're finding some form of energy to still be out there trying, but you know we're certainly not as sharp as we can be."

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Postecoglou confirmed that Destiny Udogie suffered a hamstring injury in the first half, while Bentancur will miss next weekend's visit of Newcastle after being shown a fifth booking of the season in stoppage-time.

"That comes down to the players being so desperate to turn things around," Postecoglou said of Bentancur's yellow card. "It was an unfortunate moment, didn't really need to happen and I'd much rather he didn't make that tackle and was available for the next game. The players are obviously hurting, they want to turn this around and it's not for the want of trying.

"I think the whole group probably needs a couple of days just to get away from everything and recover, because it's been fairly intense for a real small core group of players, particularly over the last four or five weeks and I think it'll do them good to have a couple of days to themselves with their families and give them a chance to recover mentally as much as physically.

"I'll just keep going. We've got work to do and try to get some help for these players and our role is to try and give them everything we can, the support we can to perform at their best."