No,people aren't saying that,they recognise the need to prioritise. What they don't get is why openly say these cups aren't as important? Even more laughable as he didn't pick a particularly weakened team. All he had to say was we aim to win every competition we're in, whilst rotating the squad - not hard is it?
If it’s so not hard, perhaps there’s a reason he’s doing it the way he’s doing it?
And before I go on, let me say that I would also love to win any trophy. When we beat Chelsea in 2008 it was an amazing day.
I just think it’s a massive simplification of what he’s trying to achieve. Oh he said he’d prefer the PL and CL so obviously the players aren’t going to try...it’s a very basic reductive analysis of the situation and not really taking into account a bunch of other factors.
Firstly, what Poch says in the media and what he tells the players behind closed doors are two different things, sometimes massively so. The media efforts are about reducing pressure, controlling the narrative, and reinforcing the messages he wants to reinforce.
There are a couple of things - maybe he has seen the ‘but they won’t be anything until they’ve won something’ narrative creep up a little bit too much for his liking and he wants to make the point that we are on a broader journey to transform the club, the mentality of the squad, where they should be expected to compete, and what they should consider their goals to be.
Maybe in the middle of a massive month with games against top teams and direct rivals, you need to take the pressure off and increase the freedom in a game that is of less importance. He’s taken us to a FA Cup semi final and a League Cup final, so it’s not as if he is throwing the cups. But beating your chest and saying ‘WE MUST WIN!!’ doesn’t always lead to better performance. Sometimes a better motivational tactic is to reduce pressure and increase freedom. Or maybe it could be a million other reasons that he is taking a very obvious decision to spin this line when he doesn’t need to.
But the point about what he says in private is also a massive one. Just read his book. The standards he expects do not drop because of what he says in public. He’s also playing a load of first team players because he expects them to perform. His comment after the match that maybe some players wouldn’t play on Saturday because their standards dropped on Wednesday was telling. He is big on players having to find the hunger and the motivation within themselves because he knows external motivation is fleeting. If any players took the opportunity to try any less against West Ham they aren’t the right players for him.
And again, I just cannot see how this argument that media comments linked to our underperformance when we stormed into a 2-0 lead. It makes no logical sense. The players were obviously motivated enough to perform, but let complacency creep in when they were ahead. But complacency is not the same as thinking the competition is less important from the start - it is a response to a situation that developed in the match. And Foyth switched off for their second - but he was saying before the game he expected Foyth to step up to prove he could play in the league. But clearly he wasn’t give the rest of the team a free pass to try less and leave him exposed because the LC means less. He still expects them to uphold the standards he has set.
Again, read his book and understand what he expects every day. Standards are high. But what he says in public and private are going to be very different things because they have different objectives and audiences.
