When a Team Stops Believing: Inside Tottenham's Freefall (ft. Tim Krul)
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.6 • 4.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens inside a dressing room when a team loses faith in itself? Jake and Damian go beyond the results and the headlines to examine the psychology of collective belief failure — using Tottenham's historic 12-game winless run as the defining case study.
Joined by goalkeeper Tim Krul, who has experienced relegation with both Newcastle and Luton, they explore what fear actually looks like on a pitch, why managers can lose a dressing room in 10 minutes, and what the Kinski substitution really said about Tudor's state of mind.
Damian draws on his work with West Brom during a similar crisis to explain why the answer is almost never about fitness or tactics — and Jake reveals what Norwich City's sporting director said to Philippe Clement that convinced a Premier League-level manager to take on a Championship relegation battle.
Plus: why Kimi Antonelli could be this season's Formula One world champion, lessons from the Gordon Ramsay Netflix documentary on the cost of relentless high performance, and what Paul McCartney's decade after The Beatles teaches us about identity and reinvention.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, welcome to High Performance. I'm here alongside my wonderful co-host, Damien Hughes. |
| 0:06.9 | Hey, Damien. Hey, Jake. So over the next hour or so, we're going to be delving into so many things. |
| 0:12.4 | We're going to talk about what happens when a team stops believing. We're going to be joined by |
| 0:16.1 | goalkeeping legend Tim Kruill, who will take us deep inside the dressing room on that moment that Kinski got |
| 0:21.6 | substituted in the recent Spurs game. But he's also going to tell us what was going on at Newcastle, and Luton at Norwich, when he's had some good and some not-so-good times in his career. I'm going to make a case for why Kimi Antonelli will be a Formula One world champion. Damien's going to tell us about something he's seen on the TV that he thinks you should all be watching and we're going to share some big lessons from |
| 0:42.1 | Gordon Ramsey. All that's to come on today's episode of High Performance. So the topic of |
| 0:48.7 | today's conversation is what happens when teams stop believing. Now, we know the external stuff that tends to happen. |
| 0:56.7 | It tends to be some poor results or it tends to be some bad performances or it tends to be |
| 1:02.0 | some anger from fans or supporters. But what's actually happening? When we say what happens, |
| 1:06.6 | we mean inside the team. And, look, Damien, in many ways ways you're the perfect man to have this conversation |
| 1:11.8 | with you've worked in rugby league you've worked in rugby union you're central at the moment to what |
| 1:16.3 | happens with the england football team under thomas tuckel you have regular meetings with them |
| 1:20.7 | about their focus for the future you've worked in great teams you've worked in poor teams |
| 1:24.9 | you've supported Manchester united in the good and the bad. So when I say what happens when teams stop believing, what is it that you think about |
| 1:32.7 | from your experience? Yeah, it's a brilliant question, Jake. And it reminds me at the moment |
| 1:39.2 | watching what's going on with Spurs that back about 10 10 years ago I did some work with West Brom |
| 1:45.0 | when they were going through the similar troubles in terms of the sack managers |
| 1:51.7 | that replaced managers that had caretaker managers and they were facing the threat of relegation |
| 1:56.8 | and what was and what was likely to follow from that. |
| 2:06.6 | So I was lucky enough to be asked to come and work with a billion set of coaches to do that. |
| 2:09.6 | And there's a few things that go on in the dressing room there, |
| 2:15.1 | that there's a sense of panic that can often start outside of the dressing room, |
... |
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