Amos hails team 'drive' as youngsters return to France

Luke Amos says there’s a real hunger among our development squad players to make a statement at this weekend’s European Under-21 Tournament in France.

We return to Ploufragan for our annual assault on the pre-season competition, which sees clubs including Leicester City, Paris Saint-Germain and Standard Liege converge on a renowned French sporting facility to compete in a high-intensity environment.

We’ve struggled to reach the latter stages of the tournament in recent years, but midfielder Luke says the players are determined to change that as preparations for the new season step up a gear.

“Of course we’re disappointed about recent years – we always go there to win but this time there’s even more of a drive,” explained the 20-year-old ahead of our group stage campaign, where we’ll face PSG, EA Guingamp and FC Lorient.

“We’ve spoken about it a lot, about what we need to do to win, and that’s the focus. It’s always good to play against different styles and there will be some older players there, players that have played men’s football, so that will be a good chance to test ourselves and pick up new things as well.

“Especially in a tournament environment, it will be interesting to see how teams like PSG play, whether they play with a lot of risk or if they try a different style. At the end of the day we’re all there to win and some teams, under that pressure, change their tactics so we’ll have to see.

“It’s good timing for us to be going at this stage of pre-season as well. We’ve had two good friendlies so far against senior teams (Ebbsfleet and Cambridge United) so now it’s another good test. There will be a lot of games in a short space of time, we’ve got a good base of fitness and now we’ve got to go out there and show what we can do.”

Our fixture schedule is as follows…

Friday 28 July – PSG v Spurs – 12.20pm local time
Saturday 29 July – Spurs v EA Guingamp – 11.05am local time
Saturday 29 July – Spurs v FC Lorient – 5.15pm local time
Sunday 30 July – Play-off stage fixtures

Travelling squad: De Bie, Freeman, Amos, Bennetts, Duncan, Eyoma, Harrison, Hinds, Lock, Loft, C Maghoma, Pritchard, Roles, S Shashoua, Skipp, Sterling, Tanganga, Tracey.