Defoe wants Euro progress for Spurs before surgery

Tottenham Hotspur striker Jermain Defoe wants to undergo surgery having helped the north London club qualify for the Champions League group stages for the first time.

Defoe will have groin surgery on Tuesday and is set to be out for between two and four weeks, missing England’s European Championship qualifiers against Bulgaria and Switzerland and possibly Spurs’ English Premier League games against West Brom and Wolves.

The injury has plagued the 27-year-old striker since the World Cup.

Now Spurs manager Harry Redknapp reckons the player will only be good for 60 minutes at most when Tottenham face Young Boys of Berne in the Champions League playoff round at White Hart Lane here on Wednesday.

Defore has labelled the match against the Swiss side “one of the biggest games of my career” with Spurs trying to overturn a 3-2 first leg deficit.

“Everyone’s looking forward to it,” Defoe said.

“We worked so hard to get here and we want to make the most of it and win the game, and get through to the group stage.

“Everyone wants to play in the Champions League,” he added.

“On Tuesday nights, you don’t want to be at home watching Eastenders (a BBC television ‘soap opera’).

“You want to be at the Lane playing against the great players in the world and at the fantastic stadiums.

“For a lot of the boys, it’s the first time playing in the Champions League and it’s great, especially when you put the hard work in and you feel like you deserve to be there on that stage.”

Redknapp hoped Defoe would undergo surgery last Thursday but the German surgeon Spurs wanted to perform the operation was unavailable until next week.

Now Redknapp must decide how long he dare risk Defoe against Young Boys.

“It’s getting less each time — the pain’s getting worse,” Redknapp said.

The 63-year-old manager added he may have got his tactics wrong in the first leg but insisted an attacking approach was the right way forward at home.

“Maybe we set up too attacking looking back on it.

“But we’ve got to swarm all over them if we can from the start.

“I wouldn’t sit here saying we’ve got to be patient. I think we’ve got to get after them.”