Tottenham Hotspur head coach Ange Postecoglou has challenged James Maddison to rediscover his best form and earn a recall to the England squad.
Maddison has struggled to replicate the performance levels he showed at the beginning of last season and has found himself out of the starting XI in Spurs’ consecutive victories over Manchester City and Aston Villa last week.
The 27-year-old midfielder, who scored a free-kick in the win over Villa, returned to the Spurs lineup in Thursday’s 3-2 defeat at Galatasaray.
Asked whether he hopes incoming England boss Thomas Tuchel will consider selecting Maddison after interim coach Lee Carsley decided against calling him up for the upcoming internationals, Postecoglou told a news conference: “I don’t think you pick national teams on the back of a free-kick, to be fair. I think you need more than that. So that’s the first thing.
“Look, secondly, it’s with all these things I’ve always said, team selection, squad selection, it’s more in the players’ hands than the managers’, they’re the ones that need to put up the compelling evidence for people to make decisions.
“When I select a team on the weekend or when the England manager selects his squad, he’s doing it on the back of the evidence he has before him. So if you miss out, well then you’ve got to say: ‘OK, well I’ve got to give you more compelling evidence next time to get back in there.’
“I’ve never come across a manager who doesn’t select what he thinks is the best team for what he wants and the purpose of his sort of brief. So, whether it’s Madders or anyone else, they’ve just got to keep putting up the evidence that means they get selected for the next national team.”
Postecoglou is looking to deliver Spurs’ first major trophy since their Carabao Cup success in 2008, but he stressed that he is aiming for “sustained success” rather than simply lifting one piece of silverware during his tenure.
“I’ve always said that I just don’t see just a trophy as kind of the panacea for sustained success because there’s plenty of evidence that that is not the case — not here, just sport in general. I think winning the league’s a bit different, but even then, to sustain that is not easy,” Postecoglou said.
“So I think sustained success, which is what I talk about a lot, is a lot deeper than just winning a trophy. But I get the fact that when you’re at a club of this size and people think, well that’s the missing piece, but what I’ve been trying to rail against since I’ve been here is that there’s never just the missing piece, it’s always more than that.
Postecoglou said earlier this term that his teams “always win things in my second season,” but the Spurs boss stressed on Friday that ending the club’s trophy-less run would not necessarily prove the catalyst for a period of long-term success.
“I could be going: ‘Look, let’s just win a trophy this year and everything will be fine’ and then we win a trophy, finish 10th and then five games into the next year, I get sacked [if we have bad results],” Postecoglou said.
“Not that it’s about me, I’m just saying, but then the club has to change direction again. So have you really done anything? I don’t think so. So that’s where I’m trying to just stay really clear on, for us as a club, we kind of know what we want to achieve in terms of sustained success. Does that include trophies? Absolutely. But it’s not going to be one simple thing that all of a sudden opens a floodgate. So I don’t believe that.”
Spurs, who sit seventh in the Premier League table, host Ipswich Town at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday.
Information from ESPN’s Joey Lynch contributed to this report.
