3^rd October 2025.

Rachel Cohen.

Spurs manager Martin Ho spoke to the press about his team’s progress so far, and reflected on the role and positions of several key players including Tinka Tandberg, Bethany England, Ashleigh Neville, Eveliina Summanen and Drew Spence. He also discussed how he had shored up Spurs’ defence and his use of substitutes.

Progress

Asked how he would rank the start of the season Ho said ‘it’s early days, but the table looks nice at the moment.’ Impulsively Ho initially ranked the start as ‘11’ (out of ten), before rolling back to a more conservative ‘probably five in terms of, I know there’s still a lot more to come from us. We’ve had maybe some ups and downs, some dips in performance, but I think we’ve had some really solid performances too.’

Tinka Tandberg’s Impact

Asked about Cathinka (Tinka) Tandberg’s whose lob against Everton has been nominated as Spurs Goal of the month and who has been nominated as WSL Player of the month, Ho said ‘she’s had a big impact personally, professionally. Very infectious player around the group, good, really good individual, adds a lot of quality to us as a team. Gives us different dimensions as a player in terms of how we want to play and how we want to attack and defend.’ He described her debut goal as ‘wonderful, instinctive, very creative,’ noting that it required her to be ‘very aware in terms of the surroundings.’

Summanen and Spence in Midfield

The Eveliina Summanen Drew Spence midfield partnership has become a feature under Ho (as it was under Robert Vilahamn before him). The manger noted their ‘good relationship’ and pinpointed both having experience in the league and international experience. But also that ‘their skill sets and characteristics both complement one another. They’re both good with the ball, but they have different ways of playing with the ball. He also described their different off-the-ball skillsets: Eveliina as ‘really intelligent in terms of breaking up play and identifying those moments.’ And Drew as ‘really combative one-v-one and gets up close and makes sure people know she’s there.’ 

Summanen has been given the captain’s armband in games where Bethany England is not on the pitch (with vice-Captain Molly Bartrip out injured). Ho described the Finn’s leadership as rooted in what ‘her own actions, her performances, the way she conducts herself, the way she carries herself.’ He, however, reiterated what he has previously said about potentially needing different types of leader, and said ‘I want to make sure that everyone leads by example on the pitch.’

Bethany England playing deeper

Talking about leadership, the manager was asked about captain and club top-scorer, England who has been played deeper since Tandberg’s arrival. Ho stated that ‘link up play through the centre of the pitch is vital for us’ and that ‘Beth’s link up play in the middle of the pitch has been really good for us.’

‘Beth has a wonderful back to goal ratio in terms of how she handles the ball and a success rate with it. And I feel she links really well between the lines. She can use her experience of when to move and when not to move behind the back line, but doing that from deeper positions.’ He elaborated that ‘It’s not much different, it’s more probably five or ten yards lower than what she would usually play.’ He also noted that ‘there’s times in games where she went back into the number 9 at times, which depends on the profile and how we’re looking to attack from a central position that dictates that.’

Ho also discussed how this is representative of a more general approach to how he uses players and moves them into different positions. ‘It’s something we’ve spoken about, me and Beth, and we spoke about as a collective, as staff, in terms of how we get in the best positions, more importantly, but not just that, and how will players evolve as they go through their careers and they maybe lose certain attributes as they go through and how can we enhance their knowledge, understanding their finishing qualities and making sure that we can get her in the best positions to affect the game, but the way that it complements the game.’

Ashleigh Neville’s return

Ashleigh Neville has been one of Spurs’ standout players before and since promotion to the WSL but had not featured in any of Ho’s games in charge (in preseason or the league) due to injury. She came on for just over twenty minutes last Sunday. Ho said he was ‘delighted to see her back on the pitch’.

In praising Neville’s contribution to the away win at the King Power, Ho described the long-time Spurs player as ‘competitive. She wears a heart on her sleeve. She’s very aggressive off the ball. And she has the ability to carry the ball through the pitch when we have it. So yeah, Ash has added big value in that game against Leicester the other day. Probably her experience in the league probably helped us in a lot of moments. She slowed the game down. She took kind of the sting out of the game at times when she needed to.’ 

Defensive organisation

Despite a large deficit in the game against City, Spurs’ defence has been solid with only one conceded across the other four league and cup matches. Ho discussed what he’s done to create what has been a step-change in defence as compared to the very leaky 2024-5 iteration of Spurs. He began by noting that ‘before I came in, it was, I think we were conceding a lot of goals and we were conceding goals that were probably were stoppable, if you want to say, in the bluntest way.’

He characterised his approach as ‘making sure that we’re organised and more importantly, you’ve got to enjoy defending. You’ve got to enjoy stopping people scoring on your goal and obviously get a real kick out of going the other way.’

One part of being more organised was, he said, that everyone understood their individual responsibilities. ‘There’s an expectation on the team and individuals within that team that there’s certain accountability we have to hold in terms of the effort, the commitment and determination to want to defend.’ He also described ‘giving them a framework and organisation and  some real clear guidelines of what we need to look like off the ball. And if we don’t look like that off the ball, we’ll be on the back end of a thumping.’

Ho characterised the 5-1 defeat to Manchester City as setting off the alarm bells. ‘And I think the players alluded to that, there was a bit of kind of, okay, that’s the level now. And I think they’ve realised that very quickly. And sometimes you need that to wake you up. And I think that was the game that maybe woke us up a little bit.’

Use of Substitutes

In most games so far the manager has made use of all five available substitutes. He said that he took into consideration both who might be better starting a game but also how players coming into the game might impact it. Asked whether he believed any in his current squad were especially effective off the bench he acknowledged that ‘when I was at Manchester United, we had certain players like that who actually had really good records of coming off the side and winning those games and coming off the side and getting us back into games. And no player at all wants that kind of label, if you want to call it, or tag of being an impact player. But I think in some moments, some players have that.’ He did not want to identify any members of the current squad that he labelled that way, but it seems likely that we will continue to see maximum substitutions in most games.