The experienced manager backed Mauricio Pochettino to guide Spurs out of this current tricky period

Brighton & Hove Albion manager Chris Hughton believes Spurs will post a real threat to his team in Saturday’s 5.30pm kick-off in the Premier League.

The Seagulls go into the contest following a brace of 2-2 draws while Tottenham Hotspur have lost their last three matches 2-1.

It has sparked a debate about what is going wrong with Mauricio Pochettino’s side, but Hughton, who has a long association with Spurs as a player and coach, is wary of reading too much into their current form.

He said: ““I think as manager of the club that’s playing against them, I think my responsibility is to warn the team that they are playing a team that don’t lose many games and by their standards are having a more difficult time.

“And that’s the time perhaps when they are at their most dangerous. They’ve got great, great quality and we know that we’ll have to play at a really good level to get something from the game.

“It’s also very, very normal that you have to make sure that our team are aware of all the qualities they’ve got and how they can hurt us if we’re not performing well enough.”

While Hughton will be looking to heap more misery on Spurs and Pochettino, he backed the Argentinean to lead the club out of this current tricky period.

It is the first time the Lilywhites manager has lost three games in a row since taking over the north Londoners in May 2014.

But Hughton, who spent 13 years as a player at White Hart Lane, insisted: “What I see at Tottenham at the moment are the normal things that happen in football and there are different levels.

“The expectations of managing a team in the top six are different to anywhere else. Yes, they win more games than the rest of us, but the expectations are higher.

“When any team in the top six goes through a period, whether that’s a couple of games or they lose a Champions League game, they are going to be in the spotlight a little more than we are here at Brighton.

“What generally happens, because of the quality they’ve got, they come out of that one and in a few weeks time it’s somebody else’s turn, so we never read too much into that. They have got top-quality players and on any given day they can turn it on.”