Tottenham boss Jose Mourinho in cheeky FaceTime attempt to get Peter Crouch out of retirement: 'We need you!'

Peter Crouch has revealed how Jose Mourinho jokingly tried to tempt him out of retirement in a phone call this week, amid Tottenham’s striker crisis.

Spurs are without both Harry Kane and Heung-Min Son for the foreseeable future, and in his press conference prior to Wednesday night’s Champions League defeat to RB Leipzig, Mourinho had chirped that Crouch, who retired last summer, might be an option.

Crouch, who played for Tottenham between 2009-11, responded on Twitter, intimating he was ready to answer the call with the hashtag ‘TheReturn’.

But he was surprised on Tuesday afternoon when Mourinho took the joke one step further with an unexpected FaceTime.

“My initial thought was that it was my wife Abbey [Clancy], who had gone to the Brits,” Crouch wrote in his Mail column. “But when I answered, it wasn’t Abbey staring back from the other end, it was Mourinho, sitting in his office with a glint in his eye.

“Jose was laughing now – almost as much as I was. ‘Peter! Come on! We need you! We need you!’

“As much as I would love to answer his call, however, I concluded – given the refuelling I’ve done since entering retirement – that it might take me a little longer than normal to recuperate full fitness.”