London, Nov 23 (IANS) Tottenham Hotspur striker Harry Kane has blamed the club's early exit from the Champions League on their poor run of form at home.
Tottenham have been using the Wembley Stadium for their home matches in the Champions League as their White Hart Lane Stadium undergoing renovation. It has not been a happy hunting ground for them as they lost to AS Monaco and Bayer Leverkusen in front of their home fans.
The 1-2 away defeat to Monaco on Tuesday evening has sent them crashing out of the group stages of the Champions League and Kane rued that fact that Tottenham should have done better at home.
"I think losing two of our home games in this competition, it's got to be a fortress at home (and) although we are playing at Wembley this year, it's no excuse.
"When teams come over to us, we have to make it difficult and use that to our advantage and we didn't," Kane was quoted as saying by the Independent on Wednesday.
"It's always difficult away from home in the Champions League and Monaco knew what they had to do."
During Tuesday night's game, Djibril Sidibe capitalised on some poor marking to hand Monaco the lead after 48 minutes. Tottenham earned a penalty four minutes later and Kane stepped up to restore parity for the visitors.
But Tottenham's joy did not last long as Monaco were back in front just a minute later when another piece of poor defending saw Thomas Lemar fire home at the far corner after being allowed plenty of time and space inside the penalty area.
Things could have been much worse for the English Premier League (EPL) club but for the heroics of Tottenham's French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris.
"It's disappointing, I don't think we were good enough anyway, but we got ourselves back in the game at 1-1 but it was a schoolboy error to concede straight after.
"It took the stuffing out of us and obviously we didn't have enough to get back in the game," Kane lamented.
"I don't think on the day we were good enough, we found it difficult to play from the back, they pressed us high but we are gutted. We wanted to go far in this competition. We will look back and say the home games is where we should have been better."
--IANS
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