Kyle Walker has recalled how one heavy defeat to Liverpool once left him and his team-mates in tears after it resulted in an unwanted managerial sacking. Manchester Man City captain was still at Tottenham Hotspur when he was on the wrong side of a 5-0 loss at White Hart Lane in December 2013.
Luis Suarez scored twice for Brendan Rodgers’ side that day as further goals from Jordan Henderson, Jon Flanagan and Raheem Sterling clinched the most emphatic of victories in North London.
Spurs finished the match with 10 men after Paulinho was sent off just after the hour mark with the score still at 2-0. And the defeat would prove to be the final nail in the coffin for manager Andre Villas-Boas.
While the win left Liverpool second in the Premier League table, Tottenham were down in seventh – eight points behind leaders Arsenal – as they continued to struggle after selling Gareth Bale to Real Madrid.
The defeat was the club’s worst at White Hart Lane in 16 years. And while Spurs had been on a five-game unbeaten run in all competitions prior to losing to the Reds, the pressure had still been building on the Portuguese, having also lost 6-0 away at Man City just three weeks earlier and won just one of their last six home matches.
Villas-Boas was sacked by Tottenham on December 16 – less than 24 hours after the final whistle at White Hart Lane.
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And recalling how the Spurs squad found out about their manager’s dismissal, Walker revealed that Villas-Boas burst into tears when addressing the squad, with the England international then one of a number of players who also started crying.
“He was just so, so nice. He was so nice and sometimes I think that probably killed him,” he admitted on his BBC podcast, ‘You’ll Never Beat Kyle Walker’. “He was too nice.
“I can remember when he left, and I will never forget it, I swear to you, I will never, ever forget it. We were sat in the auditorium and we got wind that he was going.
“(Daniel) Levy sacked him but he was still in the building and we were still ready to train. He came downstairs and started crying in front of us, he started crying in front of us.
“And I remember his assistant was telling him to pull it together. He started crying, I’ve got tears running down my eyes.
“A lot of the lads had tears, Michael Dawson is welling, he’s just like he can’t stop crying. He’s emotionally crying, because that is how much he meant to the lads.
“Now we probably didn’t do him justice on the pitch because that’s why he got the sack, but for 10-12 men to be crying because the manager has gone, he has done something well in the dressing room.
“Football aside, he’s emotionally connected with us as well. As a team, we probably let him down a bit.”
