Mikey10
Pedro Mendes
Sorry to keep banging on about it, but we need a leader on the pitch. We don’t have one at present, so we need to buy one. My knowledge of European football isn’t strong enough to suggest who but there must be someone out there.
-
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Mauricio Pochettino - Sacked
- Thread starter DubaiSpur
- Start date
Sorry to keep banging on about it, but we need a leader on the pitch. We don’t have one at present, so we need to buy one. My knowledge of European football isn’t strong enough to suggest who but there must be someone out there.
Agree that he's irreplaceable. Strongly think we need something like:
- a pacey guy up top like a Mane, Jesus, Salah etc
- more depth in CM so we could have the option of oign 4-3-3 if we want to
Bedfordspurs
Chris Waddle
What’s stopping him getting fit?
Modric THFC
Jimmy McCormick
Great article about not forgetting where Tottenham have come from under Poch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/sports/soccer/tottenham-hotspur-mauricio-pochettino.html
Pochettino Has Mastered the Process. A Prize, Any Prize, Still Eludes Him.
Rory Smith
As the minutes ticked by and the goal did not arrive, Mauricio Pochettino fidgeted and fretted on the touchline. He crouched down on his haunches. He ran his fingers through his hair. He paced back and forth to his coaching staff, airing his exasperation at his players, the referee, the universe.
When the whistle blew on Saturday, and Tottenham Hotspur’s 2-1 defeat to Manchester United in the F.A. Cup semifinals was confirmed, he was — by his own estimation — “disappointed, frustrated.” He did not look much like a man who considered the F.A. Cup a distraction, a sideline, an irrelevance. He looked, instead, like a man who cared.
That is not the impression he has always given, of course. It would be unfair to say Pochettino, throughout his four years as Spurs’ head coach, has belittled England’s two domestic cups, but he has certainly made clear they are not his priority.
He has earned a reputation for naming weakened teams for cup games. He has spoken frequently of how the momentary elation of winning a trophy is a distant second to a place in the Premier League’s top four. Indeed, only a couple of days before this semifinal, he suggested that winning the F.A. Cup — what would have been Spurs’ first trophy in 10 years — would “not change our lives.”
This defeat — Spurs’ eighth consecutive F.A. Cup semifinal loss — seemed to prompt something of a change of heart. Pochettino’s Spurs lost at the same stage of the same competition last year. The team missed out on the League Cup in 2015, beaten by Chelsea in the final. And, of course, there were the two seasons in which Spurs provided the most consistent challenge for the Premier League title, 2016 and 2017, only to be beaten to the line first by Leicester City and then by Chelsea.
“We are close, we are close, we are close,” Pochettino said. “Nearly close enough to touch.” Every time, though, his team has fallen short. And now, he said, he knows that painstaking, hard-won progress in the league, and improving performances in the Champions League, are no longer “enough.” “The only way to reach this last level, not just to compete, but to win” is to break that seal, to pick up that first trophy, he said.
The view that Spurs needs something tangible not just to prove its progress under Pochettino but to cement it has become something close to received wisdom. Inside the club, players admit — as both Jan Vertonghen and Harry Kane have said — it is time to “win something.”
That belief is, if anything, even stronger on the outside. Alan Shearer, the former England striker, wrote earlier this season that Spurs could not pass up the chance to open its new stadium later this year “with a trophy held aloft.” Only then can Spurs claim a place among the game’s true elite. Until then, it is merely a pretender. Pochettino, finally, has joined the chorus.
And yet it is worth remembering exactly where Tottenham was, what it was, when he first arrived at the club, four years ago.
The last game before Pochettino arrived was in May 2014, a meaningless, meandering home win against Aston Villa. Spurs was sixth at the start of that day, sandwiched between Everton and Manchester United, with European qualification secured but a place in the Champions League impossibly distant.
In Pochettino’s place on the bench at White Hart Lane was his predecessor, Tim Sherwood. For most of the game, at least. Midway through the second half, with his team up, 3-0, Sherwood decided it was time, in his words, for “some banter.”
Not far from the dugout sat a couple of fans who had, Sherwood said, been “telling me what to do every week.” Turning away from the field, Sherwood suddenly pointed to one of them, Danny Grimsdale. Sherwood asked Grimsdale if he wanted to put his money where his mouth was, to come and sit on the bench and see if he could do Sherwood’s job as well as he thought.
Grimsdale demurred at first but soon changed his mind. He trotted over the advertising boards, skipped up to Sherwood, slipped on the manager’s vest — an item of clothing that had become something of a trademark — and duly took his place on the bench. Sherwood laughed. Grimsdale laughed. White Hart Lane laughed.
That is the club that Pochettino found: one of considerable promise, talented players and weighty history, for sure, but one where there tended to be quite a bit of laughter, and not all of it shared with the regulars in the first few rows. Spurs’ taste for self-destruction was such a cliché that an adjective — sexy — had been coined to encapsulate it.
Spurs was the sort of team that might miss out on Champions League qualification because of a lasagna — or so legend had it — in 2006, and then do so again in 2012 because Chelsea, among its fiercest rivals, won the title to swipe its place.
It was a team that appointed Sherwood as coach, despite deep-seated reservations, and then watched as he went rogue, criticizing his players, his board, and eventually offering his place on the bench to a fan. It was a team that churned through managers and players with little rhyme or reason, a club forever in flux.
Pochettino has changed all of that. His transformation of Tottenham is, when examined not in the heat of a moment and the bitterness of defeat but at one remove, one of the most remarkable achievements in recent English soccer history.
Spurs did not used to reach two semifinals — and one league cup final — in the space of three years. It did not used to beat Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League. It did not even used to qualify, with the exception of the occasional season under Harry Redknapp, for the Champions League.
It did not used to mount title challenges of any sort, successful or not. It did not used to provide the backbone of the England team, or be seen as a paragon of virtue when it came to youth development. Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain did not used to look toward its manager with envious eyes; they did not used to talk glowingly of Tim Sherwood in the marble halls of the Bernabéu.
Pochettino’s detractors would point out that none of those are the ultimate aim for a manager, for a team: José Mourinho, Pochettino’s longtime friend and temporary tormentor at Wembley on Saturday, would have no truck with the idea that managerial achievement can be weighed in any other way than silver and gold.
But they are all concrete achievements. Pochettino has fundamentally changed Tottenham’s identity. He has revolutionized how the club is seen, its place in the firmament. And that, by his own estimation, is what he was employed to do.
A few years ago, during his first full season in England, at Southampton, Pochettino was asked whether it is a manager’s aim to win trophies, or to leave some sort of enduring impact on a club, on the sport. “It is better to leave your mark, without doubt,” he said. “That is my personal value.”
He has done that, beyond any reasonable doubt. He has turned Tottenham into a bastion of stability, of progress, of promise. He is right to talk of how “the process is more important than winning a trophy.” What he has done is a greater triumph — and a bigger test of his abilities — than winning the League Cup, or perhaps even its older brother, the F.A. Cup.
Tottenham has not yet shaken off its tag as a perennial loser, the team whose history — as Giorgio Chiellini put it — is “always to be missing something to arrive at the end.” But there is another way of looking at that: Pochettino has put the club in a position to fail at the last again. It is not so long ago that it failed a long way before that.
It is easy to forget just how far Tottenham has come under his guidance, but it is worth remembering. In four years, he has changed where Spurs is, and what it is. Pochettino has made the laughter stop.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/sports/soccer/tottenham-hotspur-mauricio-pochettino.html
Pochettino Has Mastered the Process. A Prize, Any Prize, Still Eludes Him.
Rory Smith
As the minutes ticked by and the goal did not arrive, Mauricio Pochettino fidgeted and fretted on the touchline. He crouched down on his haunches. He ran his fingers through his hair. He paced back and forth to his coaching staff, airing his exasperation at his players, the referee, the universe.
When the whistle blew on Saturday, and Tottenham Hotspur’s 2-1 defeat to Manchester United in the F.A. Cup semifinals was confirmed, he was — by his own estimation — “disappointed, frustrated.” He did not look much like a man who considered the F.A. Cup a distraction, a sideline, an irrelevance. He looked, instead, like a man who cared.
That is not the impression he has always given, of course. It would be unfair to say Pochettino, throughout his four years as Spurs’ head coach, has belittled England’s two domestic cups, but he has certainly made clear they are not his priority.
He has earned a reputation for naming weakened teams for cup games. He has spoken frequently of how the momentary elation of winning a trophy is a distant second to a place in the Premier League’s top four. Indeed, only a couple of days before this semifinal, he suggested that winning the F.A. Cup — what would have been Spurs’ first trophy in 10 years — would “not change our lives.”
This defeat — Spurs’ eighth consecutive F.A. Cup semifinal loss — seemed to prompt something of a change of heart. Pochettino’s Spurs lost at the same stage of the same competition last year. The team missed out on the League Cup in 2015, beaten by Chelsea in the final. And, of course, there were the two seasons in which Spurs provided the most consistent challenge for the Premier League title, 2016 and 2017, only to be beaten to the line first by Leicester City and then by Chelsea.
“We are close, we are close, we are close,” Pochettino said. “Nearly close enough to touch.” Every time, though, his team has fallen short. And now, he said, he knows that painstaking, hard-won progress in the league, and improving performances in the Champions League, are no longer “enough.” “The only way to reach this last level, not just to compete, but to win” is to break that seal, to pick up that first trophy, he said.
The view that Spurs needs something tangible not just to prove its progress under Pochettino but to cement it has become something close to received wisdom. Inside the club, players admit — as both Jan Vertonghen and Harry Kane have said — it is time to “win something.”
That belief is, if anything, even stronger on the outside. Alan Shearer, the former England striker, wrote earlier this season that Spurs could not pass up the chance to open its new stadium later this year “with a trophy held aloft.” Only then can Spurs claim a place among the game’s true elite. Until then, it is merely a pretender. Pochettino, finally, has joined the chorus.
And yet it is worth remembering exactly where Tottenham was, what it was, when he first arrived at the club, four years ago.
The last game before Pochettino arrived was in May 2014, a meaningless, meandering home win against Aston Villa. Spurs was sixth at the start of that day, sandwiched between Everton and Manchester United, with European qualification secured but a place in the Champions League impossibly distant.
In Pochettino’s place on the bench at White Hart Lane was his predecessor, Tim Sherwood. For most of the game, at least. Midway through the second half, with his team up, 3-0, Sherwood decided it was time, in his words, for “some banter.”
Not far from the dugout sat a couple of fans who had, Sherwood said, been “telling me what to do every week.” Turning away from the field, Sherwood suddenly pointed to one of them, Danny Grimsdale. Sherwood asked Grimsdale if he wanted to put his money where his mouth was, to come and sit on the bench and see if he could do Sherwood’s job as well as he thought.
Grimsdale demurred at first but soon changed his mind. He trotted over the advertising boards, skipped up to Sherwood, slipped on the manager’s vest — an item of clothing that had become something of a trademark — and duly took his place on the bench. Sherwood laughed. Grimsdale laughed. White Hart Lane laughed.
That is the club that Pochettino found: one of considerable promise, talented players and weighty history, for sure, but one where there tended to be quite a bit of laughter, and not all of it shared with the regulars in the first few rows. Spurs’ taste for self-destruction was such a cliché that an adjective — sexy — had been coined to encapsulate it.
Spurs was the sort of team that might miss out on Champions League qualification because of a lasagna — or so legend had it — in 2006, and then do so again in 2012 because Chelsea, among its fiercest rivals, won the title to swipe its place.
It was a team that appointed Sherwood as coach, despite deep-seated reservations, and then watched as he went rogue, criticizing his players, his board, and eventually offering his place on the bench to a fan. It was a team that churned through managers and players with little rhyme or reason, a club forever in flux.
Pochettino has changed all of that. His transformation of Tottenham is, when examined not in the heat of a moment and the bitterness of defeat but at one remove, one of the most remarkable achievements in recent English soccer history.
Spurs did not used to reach two semifinals — and one league cup final — in the space of three years. It did not used to beat Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League. It did not even used to qualify, with the exception of the occasional season under Harry Redknapp, for the Champions League.
It did not used to mount title challenges of any sort, successful or not. It did not used to provide the backbone of the England team, or be seen as a paragon of virtue when it came to youth development. Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain did not used to look toward its manager with envious eyes; they did not used to talk glowingly of Tim Sherwood in the marble halls of the Bernabéu.
Pochettino’s detractors would point out that none of those are the ultimate aim for a manager, for a team: José Mourinho, Pochettino’s longtime friend and temporary tormentor at Wembley on Saturday, would have no truck with the idea that managerial achievement can be weighed in any other way than silver and gold.
But they are all concrete achievements. Pochettino has fundamentally changed Tottenham’s identity. He has revolutionized how the club is seen, its place in the firmament. And that, by his own estimation, is what he was employed to do.
A few years ago, during his first full season in England, at Southampton, Pochettino was asked whether it is a manager’s aim to win trophies, or to leave some sort of enduring impact on a club, on the sport. “It is better to leave your mark, without doubt,” he said. “That is my personal value.”
He has done that, beyond any reasonable doubt. He has turned Tottenham into a bastion of stability, of progress, of promise. He is right to talk of how “the process is more important than winning a trophy.” What he has done is a greater triumph — and a bigger test of his abilities — than winning the League Cup, or perhaps even its older brother, the F.A. Cup.
Tottenham has not yet shaken off its tag as a perennial loser, the team whose history — as Giorgio Chiellini put it — is “always to be missing something to arrive at the end.” But there is another way of looking at that: Pochettino has put the club in a position to fail at the last again. It is not so long ago that it failed a long way before that.
It is easy to forget just how far Tottenham has come under his guidance, but it is worth remembering. In four years, he has changed where Spurs is, and what it is. Pochettino has made the laughter stop.
Mikey10
Pedro Mendes
Thanks. That’s made me feel better. Great article indeed.
DeanoAustin
Rafael Van Der Vaart
Fantastic article.
I’ve been critical of Poch and the players tonight but in my mind, if he loses the last four games 8-0, I’d still love to keep him.
It beggars belief that I’ve seen some people saying that they’d want him gone if we don’t get CL football.
In my time supporting this club, we’ve never had it so good.
I’ve been critical of Poch and the players tonight but in my mind, if he loses the last four games 8-0, I’d still love to keep him.
It beggars belief that I’ve seen some people saying that they’d want him gone if we don’t get CL football.
In my time supporting this club, we’ve never had it so good.
thfcsteff
Garth Crooks
Rorschach
Ricky Villa
90291Spur
Paul Walsh
He’s the best manager we’ve had since Burky, who was the best since Sir Bill (and of course Tim Sherwood). So he’s one of our top three.
And while these defeats hurt and annoy, hopefully he and the squad are bought in to the aims of the club, and getting CL this year and a few player upgrades would so nicely.
COYS!!!
Danishfurniturelover
the prettiest spice girl
Legohamster
Ian Walker
Starting to think hes not the man to bring in trophies
Danishfurniturelover
the prettiest spice girl
milo
Jack L. Jones
If you consistently get to the latter stages, you'll get one. There's not much between us and United, most would've said it was 50/50 before kick off. The team that turned up won. I'm not sure there is much Poch could've done about that. Kane was poor but he was a gamble all of us would've taken.
nayenezgani
Jimmy Neighbour
Agree with this, it's bizarre because Poch is usually so careful about ensuring players are 110% fit before putting them back in the side.. Look at Lamela, Alderweireld etc.
So often when asked if injured players will return his response is 'no we need to make sure he's ready before he's in the squad'
Poch has made an exception with Kane and I don't know why, but it's cost us in the last three games he's started.. He looks so far from fit, there's one thing 'playing him back into form' but you can't do that if your body won't let you. It's not helping anyone.
I wonder if Poch is getting pressure from on high to play him, with the goal appeal and all? Or is he just trusting Kane's word?
Either way as you say it's a head scratcher and I think a big, big cause of our recent wobbles.. We'll still score goals without Kane in the side. We've seen it in the past.
I'm not diminishing Kane's impact when fully fit either, but at the moment he's a passenger and we can't afford that.
ricky2tricky4city
Steffen Freund
I know a defeat can be raw for a while BUT an article like this (apart from saving me a lot of typing) can reset realities and perspective of what we are and where we are at.
We are fighting with Emirates Marketing Project, Man Utd, Liverpool and Chelsea basically. They will stand in our way at some point in all competitions we entre.
They are richer than us, and have experience of winning trophies. We were nowhere near winning anything for seasons, now we're close, they stand in our way.
How the f.ck have we got close? It is remarkable. We are no different than Everton, Saudi Sportswashing Machine, Villa, Leeds etc similar clubs to us, they could be us, there is no reason they cant, but, they've had brick owners and brick managers.
How the f.ck are we, a club that wins nothing, building an £800m stadium, it's remarkable. Levy is a magician to be able to deliver this, and on top we have a manager that is ticking off a big list of things that truly tinkled us off as long standing Spurs fans. We are unrecognisable from the day Sherwood left. I fear no-one when we play them now, I know we will give anyone a game.
We got to stick with it, perhaps lower our expectations (as fans), we are a young team mixing with the seasoned elite, sticking together now is crucial, any implosion better not be self inflicted, it's a crucial couple of seasons ahead with the new home.
We still have a lovely team to watch, and that team has given us some memorable (unthinkable) victories this season.
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SteveAWOL
Barry Daines
FWIW, at around the 3m20s mark he gives this answer... for all the body language experts...
BrainOfLevy
Michael Carrick
He’s doing what he says he did in the book, last season when we lost to West Ham. He let the players question the fact that he would stay, and had them worried that he would go. He felt let down with the West Ham performance and I think sometimes he feels the players take for granted what he does for them, that he will always be there for them, and I think he wants them to realise that just because he says he loves the club, and will work hard for them, they can’t take him for granted. They need to deliver for him.
Separate point - but you can tell the whole club is gutted today. The idea that it meant nothing to him should be put to bed. Clearly it did, and it looks like he feels he’s been punched in the gut. Maybe now the time has come to acknowledge that winning a trophy does mean something. I see why he was saying what he was saying, and I agree with the point. But there’s no point trying to hide it anymore - club, players and fans all wanted to win today desperately and we are all hurting because it feels like this result has validated everything that’s been said about us by the ‘but what have they won’ crowd. And they are right to an extent. We didn’t turn up when we could have, but we were able to do it back in February to play the same team off the same park.
It does feel weird today - after every other loss or dropped points you still get the sense that no one is questioning the plan. Today even Poch feels like he’s questioning himself. We really could lose top 4 unless we pick ourselves up quickly.
Separate point - but you can tell the whole club is gutted today. The idea that it meant nothing to him should be put to bed. Clearly it did, and it looks like he feels he’s been punched in the gut. Maybe now the time has come to acknowledge that winning a trophy does mean something. I see why he was saying what he was saying, and I agree with the point. But there’s no point trying to hide it anymore - club, players and fans all wanted to win today desperately and we are all hurting because it feels like this result has validated everything that’s been said about us by the ‘but what have they won’ crowd. And they are right to an extent. We didn’t turn up when we could have, but we were able to do it back in February to play the same team off the same park.
It does feel weird today - after every other loss or dropped points you still get the sense that no one is questioning the plan. Today even Poch feels like he’s questioning himself. We really could lose top 4 unless we pick ourselves up quickly.