One of the most open players in the Premier League, Tottenham Hotspur fullback Emerson Royal was interviewed this week by Youtube channel Camisa 21.
The Brazilian talked about his entire career, from his time in South America to his years in Spain and finally his experience at the London side.
Emerson was quizzed about working with Antonio Conte, and if the manager is just as agitated in person as he looks on TV.
“Every day he’s like that. The same way you see him on camera he is in training. He points, shows circles, but does not point to burn the player. He points because he’s very detail oriented,” Emreson told Camisa 21.
“And he says to me ‘Emerson, if you do it like this it’ll be better for you, it’ll be better for the team’. And he showed me the same thing 10 times in game or in training. ‘When the ball is here you have to take a step back, better position your body’. And when it arrived, I took that step back that he said and it was what I needed to get out of the play. He’s explosive, he really screams, demands, you gotta be eating well if because if you’re not, you can’t stand it.”
Speaking of food, Emerson talked about what the Tottenham manager will not allow: “He cut some things. For example: butter. Butter is the main thing, which for me is the most important, because I like butter a lot. Bread and butter for me, it can’t be missing. There’s a jam there, we eat it with jam.”
Asked to compare Conte to Nuno Espírito Santo, Emerson said: “Each coach has their own way of working. Nuno was more relaxed, he was a more relaxed coach. It was another kind of work. With Conte, it’s a faster job, it’s a more physical job, it’s a more agitated job. With Nuno I had little time to work with him. But he’s a coach who has my respect too, and he’s a great person.”
Back in November, Emerson said in an interview that Nuno Espírito Santo wouldn’t give him orders in Portuguese, and that made their communication more difficult, as the player still couldn’t speak English at the time. Questioned about it, he claims he was misunderstood when saying that.
“Let me explain this rubbish. When I gave an interview talking about it, it wasn’t that he didn’t translate to annoy me. He used to say this to me: you have to learn English. I’ll go through the training and you’ll get by to understand the training, because that way you’ll learn. So he did it for good. And I spoke in the interview, I spoke relaxed, and people understood that he was messing with me. I wasn’t complaining. That was good. The things I know in English, that’s why. Because I had to learn.”
