Yahoo Finance Oliver Skipp proving Tottenham stay was right decision but ready to make ‘more improvements’ under Conte
Oliver Skipp hopes his performances prove he was right to stay at Tottenham in the summer, but insists there is still huge room for improvement in his game.
For the second time in four days, Skipp was Spurs’ standout player as their resurgence under Antonio Conte continued with a 3-0 win over Norwich.
After Thursday’s win against Brentford, Conte said he could turn the 21-year-old into a “top midfielder”.
Skipp spent last season on loan at Sunday’s opponents, playing all but one league game as the Canaries won the Championship at a canter.
Norwich tried to re-sign him for a further season in the summer and, in the opening months of the campaign, it was easy to wonder if Skipp might have benefitted from an extra year of development at a smaller Premier League club.
But he told Standard Sport: “I hope [my form] proves that it was the right decision to stay. I feel I am ready to play for Spurs.
“You are never quite sure at the start of the season but it was a big confidence boost to start the first game of the season and it was something I was looking to build on.
"I always wanted to fight for my place here and I am very grateful for the year I had last year at Norwich, but there are still a lot of improvements to be made.
“It is always nice to hear [praise from the manager] but I have to go out and prove it, otherwise it is just words,” he added.
“I feel that there has definitely been a lot of improvement [in my game] but I need to keep making those improvements. I know that it is a lot of hard work before that happens.”
Skipp barely misplaced a pass against the Canaries and earned the appreciation of the crowd with perfectly-timed slide tackles in each half.
“That’s the sort of thing that gets the crowd on side,” he added. “I am very competitive, so those sort of tackles are not something I really think about much.
“But you can see we are progressing with our play against the ball. Maybe not as much as we did on Thursday but there were definitely parts of the game where we were aggressive in their parts of the pitch. Every game is slightly different but by making adjustments Conte has built up a lot of players.”
Gareth Southgate is a known admirer of Skipp, a regular for the England Under-21 side, but the youngster says it is too early to be focussed on a senior international call-up.
“I am not getting carried away,” he said. “I have played 10 or 15 [league] games this season, 20 in all competitions. There are a lot of things I need to be doing to be in that mix and I am just looking forward to keep pushing and pushing and seeing where it takes me.”
We are not getting carried away after a couple of good performances.
Oliver Skipp
A rocket from Lucas Moura and second-half goals from Davinson Sanchez and Heung-min Son earned Spurs their biggest league win of the season, to keep them within two points of fourth-place West Ham with a game in hand.
“It was always going to take a little bit of time to get used to [Conte’s] idea of football, [with him] coming in halfway through a season,” Skipp said. “We are getting there, slowly and surely we starting to put a few things together hopefully.
“We have just got to keep pushing. We are not getting carried away after a couple of good performances.
“There are lots of other games in this period which we need to make sure we get right. We are not looking that far ahead. We have just got to keep looking to the next game, even if it is a cliche. That is all we can do. We cannot concentrate on other teams.”
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