'It took a world-class player, with a world-class finish to beat us': Portsmouth caretaker boss' pride after battling Blues suffer narrow Spurs defeat

The Blues travelled to Spurs in the FA Cup reeling from a wretched League One run and having dismissed head coach Danny Cowley on Monday evening.

Certainly few of the 8,880 travelling faithful will have possessed high expectations, yet it took until the 50th minute for Harry Kane to break the deadlock.

Pompey had the best goal-scoring opportunity of the first half through Reeco Hackett, while the hosts didn’t even test goalkeeper Josh Griffiths.

Antonio Conte’s men then finally achieved the breakthrough to claim a 1-0 triumph in a dominant second-half showing.

But the Blues players came out with plenty of credit according to their caretaker boss.

Bassey told The News: ‘I’m really proud of them. They gave monumental effort, every one of them, and, ultimately, we were undone by a world-class player, with a world-class finish.

‘I was expecting that performance. We’ve worked hard on our shape this week, we have done a lot of good work and just come up short.

‘But our one-v-one defending was really good, we defended the combination play really well, probably up until the goal, which has undone us.

‘We have a good group here, the challenge for us now is to take that onto League One because we shouldn’t be where we are. We have to move that performance into League One week in, week out.

‘Every game is different, we had a plan against Spurs, and it nearly worked. We probably lacked that one golden chance at our end, maybe Harry Kane plays for us we may have gone through, although I’m not sure that’s going to happen!’

Pompey are next in action at Bolton on Tuesday evening in the Papa John’s Trophy quarter-finals.

And Bassey wants them to maintain the level of performance demonstrated against Spurs.

He added: ‘We have no time to lick our wounds. We go to Bolton on Monday to play Tuesday night and we are up and down the country this week.

‘We won’t be getting many bodies back into that group, so that group is going to have to go again, but I was really proud.

‘They emptied the tank and, ultimately, that’s our challenge – to empty the tank every week.’