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Igor Tudor has agreed to take charge of Tottenham for the remainder of the season, so what can supporters expect to see from his side?

Following his appointment as interim head coach, Tudor’s first game in charge will be a significant one as Spurs host north London rivals Arsenal in the Premier League on 22 February.

That will allow the 47-year-old less than a week to attempt to implement his style of play once the players return to training on Monday – and they could be in for a shock.

“His style is intense,” George Boxall, a football journalist based in Marseille, where Tudor managed between 2022 and 2023, tells BBC Sport.

“The players do a hell of a lot of running. There’s lots of intensity, lots of pressing.

Tudor has been out of work since being sacked by Juventus in October 2025 and is set for his first spell in England, after previously taking charge of clubs in Italy, France, Turkey, Croatia and Greece.

He is tasked, first and foremost, with easing Tottenham’s relegation fears, after a 2-1 loss to Newcastle in Thomas Frank’s final match on Tuesday left them five points above the bottom three.

Having earned a reputation as a no-nonsense defender during a playing career in which he won 55 caps for Croatia and made more than 150 appearances for Italian giants Juventus, there is one certain non-negotiable for Tudor as a manager.

“He asks his players to run a lot. In a previous interview he said ‘If you don’t run, you don’t play’,” says L’Equipe journalist Pierre-Etienne Minonzio.

“In his one season in Marseille it was always the same way of playing – 3-5-2 – and it was great to watch.

“It was not easy because Marseille’s best player was Dimitri Payet, a very gifted player but not well-known for running, and he didn’t play.

“It was a joke in L’Equipe – if Igor Tudor had Lionel Messi in his squad, Messi would not play!”

Tudor’s sole season in France saw Marseille finish third behind Paris St-Germain and Lens, despite surpassing the club’s points total from the previous campaign when they finished second.

“He did pretty well in Ligue 1. What I liked is that he doesn’t try to be liked. He is very direct, says what he thinks and doesn’t try to be attractive. There is no seduction,” says Minonzio.

Tudor won back-to-back Serie A titles with Juventus in 2001-02 and 2002-03, also starting in the 2003 Champions League final, which his side lost to AC Milan.

Having begun his management career with former club Hajduk Split, Tudor had spells with Galatasaray, Udinese, Marseille and Lazio before he replaced Thiago Motta at former club Juventus in March 2025.

Initially appointed as interim head coach, Tudor was given the job full-time after leading Juventus to a fourth-placed finish in Serie A and Champions League qualification.

“Tudor is an aggressive manager and that is also what he demands from his clubs,” says Italian football journalist Daniele Verri.

“A lot of pressing. When he conquers the ball, he goes vertical. Big strong defenders. He likes to play on the wings. But the main characteristic is being aggressive.

But, according to Verri, Damien Commoli’s arrival as Juventus’ general manager that summer led to growing tension.

Tudor was sacked after just seven months following an eight-game winless run, leaving The Old Lady eighth in Serie A and 25th in the Champions League’s league phase.

He departed with eight wins in 17 league games for a win rate of 47.1%.

“Commoli and Tudor never really got on. Tudor wanted more say during the transfer market, he wanted Kolo Muani to stay and that didn’t happen,” says Verri.

“He kept changing the starting 11 and that brought uncertainty. Tension grew. Tudor criticised what Juventus did in the market during press conferences, and openly criticised the players after the Lazio defeat before he was sacked.

“After a relatively good start, he lost control of the team and they stopped performing. The fans were obviously not happy, they are used to winning.

Analysis by BBC Sport senior football correspondent Sami Mokbel

First of all, they wanted an interim head coach until the end of the season. And that immediately narrows the field down.

Within that, the Spurs hierarchy were looking for someone with top level managerial experience who plays attacking football.

After reviewing their options, it is understood Spurs felt Tudor fit the bill for a few key reasons.

He has experience of working at some top European clubs – and managing big name players.

Tudor’s reputation is for aggressive football with an attacking intent. This element was particularly important to Spurs after criticism of their style of play under Frank.

Tottenham are also said to have admired his work improving teams on a short-term basis.

For example, his Lazio team were unbeaten in the league for his first two months after he joined.

At Juventus, he lost only one of his first nine games. In his first full season, he was unbeaten for his first eight matches. His downfall came quickly, however, following that run after losing three away games in a week – to Real Madrid, Lazio and Como.

Tudor will be an interim manager and it is thought that they will be looking to secure a different, long-term option in the summer.

NBA legend Chris Paul has announced his retirement after being released by the Toronto Raptors.

The 40-year-old, widely regarded as one of the sport’s greatest point guards, was a 12-time NBA All-Star and 2006 Rookie of the Year.

One of only seven players to enjoy an NBA career spanning 21 seasons, Paul also helped the United States claim Olympic gold medals in Beijing in 2008 and then four years later in London.

“This is it! After 21 years I’m stepping away from basketball,” he posted on Instagram.

“Mostly I’m filled with so much joy and gratitude! While this chapter of being an ‘NBA player’ is done, the game of basketball will forever be ingrained in the DNA of my life.

“I’ve been in the NBA for more than half of my life, spanning three decades. It’s crazy even saying that.”

Paul, who was nicknamed the ‘Point of God’, averaged 16.8 points, 9.2 assists, 4.4 rebounds and two steals a game during a 1,370-game career that started at the New Orleans Hornets in 2005 and effectively ended after a second spell at the Los Angeles Clippers.

He also featured for the Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City Thunder, the Phoenix Suns and the Golden State Warriors, but never played on an NBA championship-winning team.

He came closest to a gold ring in 2021, when Phoenix reached the NBA finals, only to lose to the Milwaukee Bucks.

Paul, who retires second in NBA history for both assists (12,552) and steals (2,728),

There were two key talking points at the first of two pre-season tests in Bahrain – whether the new cars were still “Formula 1”, and the performance of the new Red Bull engine.

Four-time champion Max Verstappen said the revised cars and engines had turned the highest level of motorsport into an exercise in “management”.

“As a pure driver, I enjoy driving flat out,” Verstappen said. “And at the moment, you cannot drive like that. A lot of what you do as a driver, in terms of inputs, has a massive effect on the energy side of things. For me, that’s just not Formula 1.”

The reigning world champion Lando Norris did not agree, saying the new cars were “a lot of fun” and pointing out that Verstappen was welcome to race somewhere else if he didn’t like it.

Mercedes’ George Russell – who has a tense relationship with Verstappen and a friendly, wind-up one with Norris – was somewhere in the middle.

If you watched the hour’s worth of coverage shown on television at the end of each day, you might have been wondering what all the fuss was about.

The cars are clearly different in some ways from previous years, but they still look and sound recognisably like F1 cars on a superficial level.

In the cockpits, though, they are very different, as a consequence of the biggest regulation change in the sport’s history.

The cars, engines and tyres are all built to new rules this year and they are running for the first time on carbon-neutral sustainable fuel.

The engines are at the heart of the drivers’ concerns, whether enjoying the cars or not.

The cars are energy starved – the electrical part of the engine now produces about half its total power, while the batteries are about the same size as last year.

The various ways of recovering the energy so it can be deployed to maximum lap-time effect are changing the traditional sense of what being a racing driver is about.

The demand for energy recovery is forcing teams to run the electrical motors against the engines along the straights and in the corners.

That means the engines have to rev high in the corners, so drivers are using lower gears. As Russell pointed out, drivers have to take the corners in ways that maximise energy use over a lap, rather than simply go as fast as they can at all times. As a consequence, they will not always be on the limit of grip.

Veteran Fernando Alonso, a two-time world champion who is regarded by his peers with the highest possible levels of respect, said the team’s chef could drive his car around Turn 12, so far below the limit was he in the attempt to save electrical energy.

“Here in Bahrain, Turn 12 has historically been a very challenging corner,” Alonso said, referring to an uphill right-hand sweep towards the end of the lap.

“You used to choose your downforce level to go Turn 12 just flat. So you remove downforce until you are in Turn 12 just flat with new tyres and then in the race. So it was a driver skill, decisive factor to go fast in a lap time.

“Now in Turn 12 we are, like, 50km/h slower because we don’t want to waste energy there and we want to have it all on the straights.

“So to do Turn 12 at 200km/h instead of 260, you can drive the car, the chef can drive the car at that speed.

“So I understand Max’s comments. But at the same time this is Formula 1 and it has been always like that.

“Now it is the energy, last year or two years ago, when he won all the races, it was downforce. He could go in the corners at 280km/h and we could go in the corners at 250km/h because we didn’t have the downforce.”

Alonso urged caution before jumping to too many conclusions at this early stage of the new rules.

Judging competitiveness in testing is always difficult because there are so many variables and teams do not reveal the specification in which they run their cars. Indeed, in many cases teams may try to deliberately fool people.

But that did not stop Red Bull’s rivals noticing something striking about their new engine – it seemed able to deploy more energy for longer on a more consistent basis than other teams.

Although Verstappen set only the seventh fastest absolute lap time of the test, Russell said Red Bull’s underlying pace was “pretty scary”.

He said that, on current evidence, Red Bull were “going to be ahead” at the first race, adding: “We hope we can catch up.”

Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache rejected this analysis, saying “clearly the top three teams – Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren – are in front of us”.

Race simulations are usually the best way of judging relative pace, and there Verstappen was consistently gaining about 0.6secs a lap on Norris on the straights when they were running concurrently. Fuel loads and engine modes are not known, of course.

But the quickest race simulation of the week was done by Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli, who had the edge on pace over Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari when running at the same time on Friday.

Hamilton was matching the pace set by team-mate Charles Leclerc the day before, which was a chunk quicker than Norris was managing at the same time.

The complication here is that there may well be an element of politicking involved, because in the background there is a rumbling row about the engine rules, with Mercedes at its centre.

Their rivals believe Mercedes have found a loophole in the rules defining the engines’ compression ratios. The claim is that this allows them to comply with the rule that dictates the compression ratio is measured at ambient temperature, but then run the engine on track at a higher ratio by clever exploitation of thermal expansion.

Ferrari, Honda, Red Bull and Audi are said to be pushing for a ruling from the FIA before the first race that would stop this.

So when Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff described Red Bull as the “benchmark” on the first day of the test, there were those who wondered whether he was doing so in an attempt to persuade the powers that be that a rule change before the first race was not necessary.

But perhaps Mercedes’ rivals were playing this game, too. Verstappen described Wolff’s remarks as “a diversion tactic”. Leclerc said he believed Mercedes were “hiding a lot more”.

On the competitive picture, according to Leclerc, Red Bull and Mercedes were at the front, with Ferrari a little behind, “but it doesn’t seem to be too much of a gap for now”. World champions McLaren, he said, were “a little bit more difficult to understand”.

Behind the top four, there appears to be a gap of in the region of 1.5 to two seconds before a midfield group comprising Haas, Alpine and Audi, followed by Racing Bulls and Williams. At the back are Cadillac and Aston Martin, who are the one team being completely transparent about their performance.

There is so much attention and expectation on Aston Martin, with Alonso at the wheel, design legend Adrian Newey at the helm since March, and Honda their new works engine partner.

But the year has started badly. The car is way off the pace – around four seconds, Alonso’s team-mate Lance Stroll said on Thursday.

Break that down over the lap using GPS data available to all teams, and it seems about 1.5secs of it is from the engine and the rest from the car, which performs worse the slower the corner gets.

How, one might wonder, is this possible?

The answer seems to be a combination of the car design process being behind, partly because of Newey’s late arrival, partly because the team are building their own gearbox for the first time ever, and Honda being behind because… well, there is no clear answer to that one.

Honda officially pulled out of F1 at the end of 2021, and dismantled much of its engine department before changing its mind in 2023. But it still had people working on upgrading its existing engine in the meantime, and its lead time for the new regulations has not been very different from Red Bull’s, and yet the Japanese company seem to be nowhere in comparison.

Alonso was not happy about Aston Martin’s performance on Thursday, throwing his gloves down at one stage after getting out of the car. And who can blame him?

This could be his final season in F1. He is 45 in July and out of contract at the end of the year. Spending it at the back was not what he was expecting.

“Definitely we are not in the position we wanted to be,” Alonso said, pointing out they had been late to start testing, that reliability was still not good, and that was costing them time to hone the car.

The former F1 driver Pedro de la Rosa, who has been with the team as long as Alonso and has now been appointed team representative to take some of the load off Newey, said: “Looking back is always easy. If we had possibly started earlier, if Adrian would have been here not 2 March, but a few months earlier, if Honda wouldn’t have gone and then come back – it’s ifs and buts.

“Bottom line is we are slow. We’re not where we want to be. Let’s get a plan together. Let’s look ahead, not back [at] what went wrong.

“It was many reasons. The important thing is that we we know what they are. That’s what gives us the confidence that slowly, gradually, the difference will shrink.”

Fastest lap times, Bahrain test one

1 Kimi Antonelli (Ita) Mercedes one minute 33.669 seconds

2 George Russell (GB) Mercedes 1:33.918

3 Lewis Hamilton (GB) Ferrari 1:34.209

4 Charles Leclerc (Mon) Ferrari 1:34.273

5 Oscar Piastri (Aus) McLaren 1:34.549

6 Lando Norris (GB) McLaren 1:34.669

7 Max Verstappen (Ned) Red Bull 1:34.798

8 Oliver Bearman (GB) Haas 1:35.349

9 Esteban Ocon (Fra) 1:35.578

10 Franco Colapinto (Arg) Alpine 1:35.806

11 Nico Hulkenberg (Ger) Audi 1:36.291

12 Isack Hadjar (Fra) Red Bull 1:35.610

13 Gabriel Bortoleto (Brz) Audi 1:36.670

14 Pierre Gasly (Fra) Alpine 1:36.765

15 Alex Albon (Thi) Williams 1:36.793

16 Liam Lawson (NZ) Racing Bulls 1:36.808

17 Valtteri Bottas (Fin) Cadillac 1:36.824

18 Carlos Sainz (Spa) Williams 1:37.186

19 Arvid Lindblad (GB) Racing Bulls 1:37.470

20 Lance Stroll (Can) Aston Martin 1:38.165

21 Fernando Alonso (Spa) Aston Martin 1:38.248

Anthony Elanga’s eyes light up.

The Newcastle United forward is talking about the inordinate amount of time he spends in his “man cave”.

But you won’t find a game console, stocked fridge or pool table in there.

This is Elanga’s recovery room.

“My partner won’t be too happy about it,” he said. “But she knows and appreciates it a lot.

“It’s that extra 1% I’m always trying to find. That will pay off. I’ve always told myself that.”

So much so, after completing his £55m move from Nottingham Forest last summer, and finding a home in the North East, Elanga set about kitting out his new house with a gym, hyperbaric chamber, red light therapy bed, sauna, plunge pool and, even, a 3G football pitch.

The forward works with a strength and conditioning coach, sports therapist and chef, and had a similar set-up during his time at the City Ground, where he had a hand in 18 goals during an injury-free campaign last season.

Elanga has not hit such heights for Newcastle yet, but his determination to succeed has been a constant and he put in his best performance for the club in the 2-1 win against Tottenham Hotspur on Tuesday night.

It has clearly been a period of huge change for Elanga on and off the field.

As well as joining a new club, the 23-year-old recently became a father for the first time.

It was the proudest moment of his life.

“Bringing Blair into this world and raising her here, it’s probably the best feeling ever,” he said.

“She’s a little Geordie who’s going to be raised in Newcastle. She’s going to have the accent as well, which is nice.

“I just can’t wait for her to be walking around and touching the football, hearing her talk, having her integrate with other kids here in Newcastle. It’s hard to describe. I wouldn’t change that feeling for the world.”

Blair’s arrival has clearly given Elanga added perspective.

It has taken the Swede – like so many before him – a little while to adapt to the intensity, structure and detail of life under Eddie Howe.

Not least during a relentless fixture schedule, where there has been little time to physically train in recent months.

Following one or two groans from the terraces, it got to the point last month where Howe said that Elanga needed to feel “safe” at St James’ Park and “free to express himself”.

The supporters responded by singing Elanga’s name and encouraging him during a brief cameo against PSV Eindhoven just a few days later.

They did so once again after he scored his first goal for the club versus Manchester City earlier this month, and after he was substituted during the victory at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Tuesday night.

No wonder Elanga took his time to come off the field after he saw his number go up.

“I made sure to walk even slower,” he smiled. “If I could have stayed there, I would have.”

It was a night where Howe received the biggest ovation of all from the away end.

The Newcastle head coach previously admitted he was not doing his job “well enough” following a bruising 3-2 defeat against Brentford last week.

It led to a lot of soul searching behind the scenes, and the players knew they had to step up.

“We always want to fight for the gaffer because we know what he has done for each and every single one of us as players,” Elanga said. “I’ve been here for seven months, but I’ve felt like he’s improved me so much.

“There are things people don’t see on the training ground, but he’s helped me so much it’s unbelievable. He was one of the reasons I wanted to come here because I knew he would improve me as a player.

That question has repeatedly been asked of this side throughout a rollercoaster campaign.

Newcastle reached a third EFL Cup semi-final in four years, are favourites to progress past Qarabag into the last 16 of the Champions League and have an FA Cup fourth-round tie against Aston Villa to look forward to on Saturday.

But Howe’s side are 10th in the Premier League for a reason.

They have won just three away games in the top-flight all season, and only relegation-threatened West Ham have dropped more points from winning positions than the Magpies (19).

Newcastle have been desperately searching for a sustained run of form – individually and collectively – and Elanga is the first to admit that he is “not where I want to be just yet”.

But the forward lives by the French saying précis pas pressé, which translates as precise not rushed.

He feels like he “couldn’t ask for a better place” to develop.

“I just want the fans to know I’m committed and the rest will naturally follow,” he said.

“Every time I pull on that shirt, there will always be heart and desire – every touch, every tackle, running back, running forward.

“They expect that from the team as well so hopefully we can continue to build, stay consistent with what we do and remain positive because if you do so, I’m sure we will be fine.”

Elanga has already come full circle at Newcastle as he prepares to return to Villa Park, the scene of his debut on the opening day.

There is a place in the FA Cup fifth round at stake and getting back to Wembley one day is a source of inspiration for Elanga after he watched on from afar as Newcastle ended a 70-year wait for a major domestic trophy by winning the EFL Cup last season.

“I could see they were building something special,” he added. “This group is very unique.

“It’s probably one of the tightest groups I’ve ever worked with. The togetherness is unreal here. It just shows with what they did last season.