Nuno: Harry Kane situation will be handled internally

Nuno Espirito Santo faced the English football media today after Tottenham Hotspur’s 2-2 draw against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, a friendly match part of The Mind Series charity benefit. Predictably, the first question was about Harry Kane, but Nuno refused to be drawn into discussing specifics about Kane’s absence and his desire to force a transfer to Manchester City, saying that the situation would be handled internally.

“I will not speak with you about [Kane]. I’m sorry. I was expecting a different question from you. Did you watch the game?

“It is not that I don’t want to comment. What I believe is all that all this issue related to Harry I believe we should discuss internally among us and try to avoid any kind of public argument or discussion about it. So, us, we have to focus on what is important. We have to solve the situation but first between us.

“We solve the situation internally with the club, speaking and trying to reach a better solution and a conclusion to this situation.”

That’s pretty much what you’d expect Nuno to say about the situation, but you can read between the lines and get the sense that he’s pretty pissed off about it. Kane left the Bahamas and was supposed to return in time to do some testing on Monday, but instead flew to Florida and will not return until the end of the week, or so he says. Manchester City are “determined” to sign him, even after agreeing to purchase Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish for £100m today, a bid confirmed by numerous outlets.

Nuno also spoke about the ongoing transfer window, and said that adding players to his Tottenham team would be difficult, because he’s pretty happy with the ones he has now. But he said Managing Director of Football Fabio Paratici is hard at work

“Spurs are always, as you can imagine, working very hard on that aspect, because we need, but I truly believe it’s very hard to improve on our squad. We have very talented players, very good players and we need to be balanced of course but Steve [Hitchen] and Fabio [Paratici] don’t have an easy work in terms of improving our squad so we need to be accurate and choose the right players.

“I told you our squad needs to be balanced but it has to be with quality and with something we don’t have, with players we don’t have. We need to be very careful to make the right decisions because there are a lot of talented players here in our squad.”

Finally, Nuno singled out Steven Bergwijn for praise after the match. Stevie has looked very good in preseason and capped off another solid showing with the equalizing goal today.

“I believe Steven is a very talented player. I think he got 84 minutes. It’s very good for him to get 84 minutes that he was doing. He scored a goal and a goal can only give him confidence.

“Aside from that he put in hard work and he positioned himself much better in the second half, but in the first half not too much and allowed the ball to go to the areas we didn’t want. He should do better in the first half and lost too many balls trying to combine, but it’s the moment to make mistakes, find solutions and correct ourselves. I’m really pleased with all the boys because in this moment to already be getting 90 minutes is very good for us. Today we played a fantastic team and it was a very good game for us.”

Tottenham’s final preseason “friendly” is against Arsenal this Sunday at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.