Ipswich Town 1-4 Spurs | Ange's verdict | OneFootball

Ange Postecoglou felt our quality in the final third made the difference as we ran out 4-1 winners against Ipswich Town at Portman Road in the Premier League on Saturday.

All four goals were clinical both in craft and finishing as we survived the home team’s early onslaught to take a grip on proceedings with a textbook Heung-Min Son to Brennan Johnson double by the half-hour.

First up, Sonny raced onto Archie Gray’s pass, lost defenders Ben Godfrey and Jacob Greaves with his trademark step over and fired in a low cross for Brennan to convert - 1-0 on 18 minutes. It wasn’t long before the skipper picked up Rodrigo Bentancur’s pinpoint pass, drove into the box and rolled into Brennan to fire home for 2-0, 26 minutes on the clock.

Omari Hutchinson pulled a goal back for Town by half-time and they then had a goal disallowed for offside on the hour. James Maddison, off the bench, then stepped up with quick feet in the box to set up Djed Spence’s first Premier League goal for 3-1 (77 minutes) before Deki Kulusevski’s fine strike to secure our third successive league win, cutting in off the right before curling home off the post from 20 yards on 84 minutes.

Speaking to the Review Show after our first visit to Portman Road in 23 years, Ange told us: “All four of our goals were quality and we had good chances to extend that, but I thought as long as we got a handle on the other parts of the game where we had to fight and scrap, win our duels, I always felt when we got the game under control that we had the quality in our front third to really hurt them, and that’s how it transpired.”

Ange on the performance…

“They are fighting for their lives, and you saw that right from the start, the crowd got behind them and we knew it was going to be a challenge for us, but we showed some real resilience and fought hard when we needed to fight hard. In the first half we didn't quite handle the second ball scenario as well as we wanted to, conceded a poor goal, but in the second half I thought we were really good with that. We were always a threat going forward, I thought Sonny was outstanding in that first half and it’s just so good to get Brennan back and scoring the goals we know he can.”

Ange on Deki - scoring a beauty on 84 minutes, defending our box on 95...

“He’s been unbelievable through this period. People forget he started the season on fire, he was unbelievable, but he's had to put in so many kilometres over the last two and a half months, him and Pedro, a couple of others, but no complaints, no excuses, he’s just kept grinding away. You can see when he's got the energy and gets a chance to recover game by game that the quality is there. He scored a cracking goal, worked hard for the team, I'm so pleased for him.”

Ange on ‘light at the end of the tunnel’...

“We’re taking advantage of the circumstances now where we've had a couple of spare midweeks, which have been really, really important for us. We're getting some players back which, again, is really, really important for us. Those kind of things are certainly encouraging and, as I said, we're not really happy where we are in the league and we want to improve that - and there's still a lot a lot of games to go, it's not like we've three, four games to go, so we can still make an impact. We've still got some significant players to come back... Solanke, Richarlison, van de Ven, Romero. Ben (Davies) was out today, so we’re going to get stronger and hopefully the boys will get encouragement from that.”

Ange on having players back and therefore being able to bring on the likes of James Maddison, Pape Sarr, Wilson Odobert from the bench...

“And being able to rest up... I mean Madders I'm sure appreciated - and Pedro definitely would have appreciated - just not starting a game, but you can put them on, you can put Wilson on, you can put Biss on, Pape I could have used, Dane made a contribution, and, as I said, we’ve still got four or five top footballers out of today's squad. We're going to need that because we know this sort of luxury of midweeks off is going to diminish now, but hopefully we' we're better equipped to handle it than we were earlier in the year.”

Finally, did everyone come through okay?

“Yes, I think so, and like I said, we managed to keep a few on ice, so that gives us a chance to put some energy into the team (against City) on Wednesday night."