EXCLUSIVE

Ben Davies would prefer to help Tottenham win the FA Cup than qualify for next season’s Champions League.

Spurs face Leicester in Sunday’s third-round tie at White Hart Lane as they aim to win the world’s oldest knockout competition for the first time since 1991.

And for Davies — one of the few Spurs players to have a domestic winners’ medal after he lifted the Capital One Cup with Swansea in 2013 — nothing can beat the joy of claiming a trophy.

“When you finish your career, while it might be nice to finish fourth and play in the Champions League, you’d much rather be an FA Cup winner,” the Welshman told Standard Sport.

“It’s a big tournament. The Premier League and the FA Cup are the two trophies everyone really wants to win. It’s a status, it’s a symbol.”

Tottenham have not won a trophy since 2008, when they lifted the Carling Cup — the only tournament they have won this century.

Mauricio Pochettino’s squad have been impressive this season, climbing to fourth in the table after losing only two of their 20 matches. Yet their inexperience is still apparent in certain games — at Arsenal and Everton, for example, they drew when they should have won — and goalkeeper Hugo Lloris fears their immaturity could cost them.

Even though Swansea’s form dipped after they triumphed at Wembley three years ago, Davies believes Spurs would not suffer similarly were they to win the FA Cup. Indeed, he believes it could be the making of them.

“At Swansea, perhaps we took our foot off the pedal a bit when we won the Capital One Cup,” said the 22-year-old. “We’d already reached our 40-point target in the League and then, looking back, we probably slipped off a little bit over the rest of the season.

“But at a club like Spurs, with the squad we’ve got, if we could win a trophy, it could really kick us on and give us the belief that it is possible. The FA Cup is a competition that, especially at Spurs, we have to go in to win it. Everybody here has a good mentality at the moment that we want to win games and we believe we can win them.”

Ben Davies, with Hugo Lloris (left, and Erik Lamela) was speaking as Spurs announced EZTrader as their new Official Binary Options Trading Partner until the end of the 2017-18 season. Visit www.eztrader.com