“Will do it again”: Postecoglou furious responds why he dropped one senior Spurs star

Postecoglou’s starting lineup on Sunday included a few unexpected choices, such as starting Rodrigo Bentancur and Giovani Lo Celso in the middle of the park with Dejan Kulusevski as the eight or ten and giving Bryan Gil his first Spurs start since January.

But the most striking one of all was probably his decision to leave Dier out of the starting eleven, even with Cristian Romero suspended and Micky van de Ven out with an injury.

As a result, Emerson and Ben Davies partnered at center back as Tottenham lined up with four natural full-backs across their back four.

As a result, the home side did look defensively suspect while defending crosses at times but Postecoglou insisted that he thought his backline coped reasonably well with Villa’s threat.

Postecoglou dropped Eric Dier for better balance

The Australian said to Football. London that he was “just looking for some balance in there” when asked why he had excluded Dier.

“I thought we could handle it fairly well, obviously, with Watkins and Diaby in there, both very good players and direct in their play.

“I thought we did the most part, but it was disappointing that they were able to score the second goal.

“I simply felt that we played through what we knew was going to be an aggressive line they had today in an attempt to try and be dominant in the game, and I thought we did that well.”

Even though Emerson was playing out of position, I thought he did a good job of defending in one-on-one situations and positioning himself generally.

Postecoglou, I believe, will be forced to deal with Erling Haaland’s physical presence by bringing Dier back into the lineup for the match against Man City.