Postecoglou happy with Spurs players after Newcastle friendly defeat

Tottenham boss Ange Postecoglou was happy with his players after their friendly defeat in Melbourne to Newcastle.

After Alexander Isak had canceled out James Maddison's opener for Spurs, the match went to penalties, which Newcastle won 5-4 as Mark Gillespie saved from Bryan Gil.

Postecoglou said: "I thought it was ok. I thought the first half was really good. It was a decent game. I thought we played really well actually. It was important because as I said to the lads before the game, it's 80,000 people here and it wasn't that long ago I was on the other side of the fence. I used to get hugely disappointed if I felt overseas clubs came here and went through the motions.

"I felt in the first half it was a decent game and both teams were at it. I thought we played really well. Second half obviously we both made some changes. Some young boys got experience and the game sort of tailed off, which is kind of expected. Considering the boys literally 48 hours ago were playing on the other side of the world, and we lost in a surprise penalty shoot-out, so year disappointed."

He added: "The boys are straight on a plane tonight. I thought it was a tremendous effort from them when you consider the travel we needed to do to get here, straight after a pretty important Premier League game for us. So to play tonight and they're going back. A lot of them have got a couple of days off before the Euros or the Copa America and the rest will get their break, so the boys will be straight out tonight."