'I Am Not Stupid' — De Zerbi's Pre-Everton Press Conference

Roberto De Zerbi faced the media before the biggest game of Tottenham's modern era — final-day survival against Everton at home — and he didn't sidestep a single question.

The headline subject was the captain: Cristian Romero in Argentina rather than at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday, and the anger that's followed. De Zerbi tackled it head-on — "I'm not stupid," he said, more than once — defended his player, and contrasted it with Ben Davies choosing to stay in with the squad.

There was team news on Dominic Solanke and James Maddison, an update on Djed Spence's fitness and his England World Cup call-up, the goalkeeper question he flatly refused to answer, and a strikingly honest line on his own nerves: "I burn."

We've left the press conference unedited so you can hear the manager in full and make your own mind up.

Chapters:

00:00 — Team news: Solanke and Maddison available
01:02 — Maddison and handling final-day pressure
02:56 — The captain question: Romero in Argentina
05:35 — Djed Spence: fitness, his England call-up and his season
07:19 — How De Zerbi will set Spurs up
08:37 — Leadership, and Ben Davies staying with the team
09:46 — Blocking out the other results
10:32 — "I burn": nerves and the biggest game since 1977
12:28 — Kulusevski and the goalkeeper question
13:17 — "I understand the anger": Romero, one more time
16:05 — Playing at home in front of 60,000
16:34 — From European glory to a survival fight
17:13 — Van de Ven, and the options on the right
Welcome to the OSoSpurs podcast — higher-quality, more nuanced Tottenham content, every day. .
Two quick flags
The auto-transcript mangled almost every name (Kuričević/Kudasiewski = Kulusevski, "Columwani" = Kolo Muani, etc.) — I've corrected them all to the proper spellings in the description and chapters, so just sense-check they match how you'd say them on screen.
One chapter, 16:05, lands mid-answer rather than on a clean question, because the stadium/atmosphere point comes inside De Zerbi's long closing answer. It's still a genuine topic shift so it works, but if you want every chapter to start on an interviewer's question, drop that line and let 13:17 run through to 16:34.AskOpus 4.7Claude is AI and can make

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