Ange Postecoglou has suggested that he felt that Emerson Royal would be better equipped to handle the directness of Aston Villa’s forwards than Eric Dier.

There were a number of surprises in Postecoglou’s starting eleven on Sunday, including his decision to play Giovani Lo Celso and Rodrigo Bentancur in the middle of the park with Dejan Kulusevski as the eight/ten, and his decision to hand Bryan Gil his first Spurs start since January.

However, perhaps the one that was the most eye-catching was his choice to omit Dier from the starting eleven despite the absence of the injured Micky van de Ven and suspended Cristian Romero.

That meant that Tottenham lined up with four natural full-backs across their back four, with Emerson partnering Ben Davies at centre-back.

As a result, the home side did look defensively suspect while defending crosses at times but Postecoglou insisted that he thought his backline coped reasonably well with Villa’s threat.

Postecoglou dropped Eric Dier for better balance:

When asked why he left out Dier, the Australian told Football. London: “Just looking for some balance in there.

“Obviously with Watkins and Diaby in there, both very good players and direct in the way they play, I thought we could handle it fairly well.

“I thought we did for the most part, obviously they got through for the second goal and that was disappointing.

“I just thought the way we set up today was to try to be dominant in the game in terms of playing through what we knew was going to be an aggressive line they had and I thought we did that well.”

I thought Emerson did well defending one vs one and his positioning was generally quite good, even though he was playing out of position.

However, I think Postecoglou will have no choice but to bring Dier back into the team for the clash against Man City to cope with the physical presence of Erling Haaland.