An interesting Article today in Telegraph Sport - Sam Wallace, regarding Poch and his responsibility at Spurs, suggesting Levy or someone from the board needs to step and remove some of the burden from his shoulders. I agree.
In times of stress, Mauricio Pochettino says that he often reaches for a bottle of Argentinian Malbec, a source of comfort for the memories the taste evokes rather than the more basic function that uncorking red wine has had for many of his managerial counterparts over the years.
“It takes me back to my country,” he writes
in his recent book Brave New World chronicling his time at Tottenham Hotspur while also looking back on his career, “to recognisable places, the redolence of the countryside where I lived until I was eight in that house with an orchard and horses”. It is a typically lyrical passage from a young manager who cross-examines his own emotions and often acts on instinct when deciding whether players need to be dropped, berated or reassured.
It is an approach that has worked for Pochettino, a tough Argentinian defender who did his military service and then came to Europe to forge a career in what was then its second tier of clubs rather than its first. But he is also a modern manager who listens to his players’ problems and tries to understand them and who talks openly about the strange isolation of the job that it took one of his great heroes, Sir Alex Ferguson, a lifetime to confess to.
“Managers live in a perpetual state of solitude, even when surrounded be people at all hours,” Pochettino ruminates in Brave New World. “Everybody seems to know better.”
He will be accused of losing the plot at San Siro after defeat to Inter Milan but generally there is no manager more likely than Pochettino to come back after a sharp exchange in a press conference to apologise privately – in fact he makes a habit of it. Nevertheless, the three defeats for Spurs this month,
piled on top of the botched stadium move, and the inertia of the transfer window combined with the constant reproach of the trophy-deficit have made life even more difficult.
Spurs slumped to a third straight defeat on Tuesday night Credit: Getty images
The self Pochettino revealed when Brave New World was published last year was one who frets over life’s big questions, such as how he will pass on his values to his two sons growing up in very different circumstances to those he experienced. He wonders why his brothers did not have the success in the game he enjoyed. He recalls the emotional toll of watching his staff try to revive the 26-year-old defender Dani Jarque who died in the Espanyol team hotel after going to bed complaining of a headache. He is open about his deep initial reluctance to take the Southampton job having left Espanyol exhausted.
Pochettino has experienced more life as a manager than many much older than his 46 years but
at Spurs the challenge is different again: he is left to explain every decision, every triumph and every set-back. It is hard enough keeping the club as Premier League title contenders and Champions League regulars on the current budget, but the success has left him as the single public face of the club and the pressure on him these days is even greater.
There is no chief executive at the club, and while there is Daniel Levy, he exists less as a chairman who says things publically and more as a negotiating strategy or a foreboding life-force for all those contractors working frantically on the club’s new stadium. Joe Lewis, the billionaire who controls the club, seems less likely to take an interest in public relations than Emperor Palpatine, so it falls to Pochettino to explain the announcements that emanate from the club’s unknowable core.
Spurs’ non-combatant summer transfer window was not just about the failure to buy but also the failure to sell – to trade out those players who knew they had a price on their heads and in doing so reassert the manager’s pre-eminence in the minds of those who stayed. At different times the likes of Moussa Dembele, Toby Alderweireld, Danny Rose, and Victor Wanyama were all feasibly available and while not all might have been sold, every club needs departures like a hard frost that reinvigorates the life cycle of the team.
“It’s a difficult era for managing footballers. These days you have to spell it all out for them if you want them to be comfortable, as if everything were plotted on a map. Managers are more like architects or highway engineers. You spend the day mapping out and reminding them of the journey because footballers’ concentration spans are shorter and shorter.”
That was Pochettino two years ago on the challenge of young footballers and one can only presume it gets no easier when you are trying to reinforce the same message to a group of players which has not benefited from change. On top of that are the demands of being the diplomatic face of a club building a new stadium, arguably the single most significant financial event of its 136-year history, and one that naturally must pose many conflicting choices internally.
It was a position that Arsene Wenger found himself in for years at Arsenal and Pochettino has taken the same sensible decision that seeding division within a club is a futile direction for any manager to take. So he battles on nonetheless, with the occasional glance at his assistant Jesus Perez when the right English word eludes him, into a season where he is not sure where his team will play let alone whether he will be able to add to their number.
Pochettino joked last week that management these days was a lot more about what happens on the pitch, and his career is testament to that, a very rich story of achievement for a player and coach who tenaciously learned and mastered European football culture. He is an extremely capable coach but when you read the pages of his life he declares his vulnerabilities too, and Levy and Lewis would do well to heed the warning signs this week that they may be asking him to do more than he can reasonably bear.
