Less than a year after the World Cup final, I found myself in the Champions League final against Liverpool. In doing so, I became one of a very select band who had played in a Euros final, a World Cup final and then a Champions League final in succession. The day before the match, in Madrid, I ran into Dejan Lovren, the Reds’ defender and my former teammate at Lyon.
“You got the World Cup, you can let me have the Champions League!” he called out. I did not let him have it. It was snatched from us. The penalty awarded by referee Damir Skomina 24 seconds into the match – when the ball struck Moussa Sissoko’s body and rebounded on to his hand – killed the final and wiped us out. From 2 June 2019, a change in the rules meant that a penalty would no longer follow if the ball struck a player’s hand after touching another part of their body. The final took place on 1 June 2019, and something which wouldn’t have been an offence the following day sealed the fate of the final before it had really begun.
Liverpool contented themselves with putting on a robust defence. As for us, we could only try our luck and dare a little in our play during the last 20 minutes. It was not a great final. I played three finals with Tottenham – two League Cups (2015 and 2021) and one Champions League – in which we didn’t score a single goal. It was so disappointing to have experienced all those emotions and for the adventure to come to an end in such a way. I don’t know if everyone in the club and the team realized how difficult it is to reach a final, and how hard it is to come back from that. I’m not sure we understood that this was perhaps the only chance in our career to win the Champions League; that the club we played for was not one that was programmed to win it; that we could have avoided ever hearing again the complaint that Tottenham never won anything; that our names might have been engraved in the club’s history forevermore. This is what that penalty took from us.
We do all have one engraved memory, though. Four days before the final, Daniel Levy called us all together to announce that, with the support of a sponsor, we would each receive a luxury aviator watch from the club. At first, we were excited to see the elegant boxes. Then we opened them and discovered that he’d had the back of each timepiece engraved with the player’s name and “Champions League Finalist 2019”. “Finalist.” Who does such a thing at a moment like this?
I still haven’t got over it, and I’m not alone. If we’d won, he wouldn’t have asked for the watches back to have “Winner” engraved instead. I have considerable respect and esteem for the man and all he has done for the club as chairman – I got to know him – but there are things he is simply not sensitive to. As magnificent as the watch is, I have never worn it. I would have preferred there to be nothing on it. With an engraving like that, Levy couldn’t have been surprised if we had been 1–0 down after a couple of minutes: so it was written.
At the post-match reception at the hotel, I had the impression that some people from the club and certain players were not sufficiently despondent at having lost. I would have liked people to come up to me and say, “Don’t worry, Hugo. Never again. We’ll give you the means for a comeback.” But when I returned to my room on the night of the final, I think I had the same feeling as Mauricio and Harry: does the club really want to win? Real Madrid would never have celebrated a lost final, and we shouldn’t have either.
Everything was hard after that, for Mauricio and for us. The club had finally invested in recruitment, but we hadn’t gotten over the Champions League final, and the squad still wasn’t sufficiently revived – and that’s not to mention the tensions that would only grow following a decision by the club which would affect the team’s day-to-day lives; a decision made without the consent of either the squad or the manager: to install cameras everywhere for Amazon’s series about Spurs. In light of the sum mentioned – around £10m – we wondered whether those whose season and activities would be affected, all those being asked to mic-up each day, would get a cut. The answer wasn’t slow in coming: no.
So when the film crew placed little microphones on some of the canteen tables, we went and sat at other ones. We had to be careful all the time. The only place where we could speak freely was the training dressing room – we’d got them to agree that it would remain out of bounds. Otherwise, they had mics and cameras everywhere – even at some practice sessions, which was no small matter: it was a constraint and it had consequences.
I found Antonio Conte to be quite a character, driven by victory, which gave him energy, but he found it very hard to control his frustration when we started drawing, let alone losing, because his inner torment had to get out; and if he was tormented, then everyone had to share that torment too, and things could get very complicated very fast. He told me once that in any given week, his happiness lasted an hour, just after winning, and that was it. In training, he oversaw everything, organizing tactical sessions with 10 outfield players against one goalie; but it was hard for the creative players to find their places in his restrictive game-play. The rigidity of the structure and set sequences did us a lot of good at first but, after a few months, teams learned how to play against us and it became tougher to win.
During matches, Conte was as extreme and eruptive as he appeared, garnering respect and fear. Such a strong personality pushed wingers to prefer to play on the side opposite the dugout. I have never forgotten our first defeat under Conte: a 2–1 loss to NS Mura in Slovenia in the Uefa Conference League. Even though I wasn’t playing, I was still entitled to his screams and reproaches, just like everyone else. In squad meetings, we would spend at least 30 minutes a day doing video analysis, not forgetting the interminable preparation camps at our training center.
After the defeat in Maribor, he had screamed: ‘Mura, Mura, who’s Mura?! We lost to Mura!’ I can still hear him. If a player needed a little love, he’d better not knock at Conte’s door. For Conte, trust is earned in training. He has no filter; he’s sincere, honest. He’s a manager who lives only by results, whereas from a player’s perspective, performance is important too. That season, when we lost 3–2 to Manchester United (a Ronaldo hat-trick), a result which didn’t reflect our performance, I told Pierre-Emile Højbjerg and Harry Kane in the dressing room: ‘They may have just beaten us, but I bet you we finish above them.’ And so we did, ending up in fourth place after battering Arsenal 3–0 on the last day, situating ourselves halfway between Conte’s demanding nature and a little self-management because, by dint of being whipped and screamed at, we eventually stuck our fingers in our ears.