Club Statement 19 Nov 19 - Pochettino leaves

['O Zio]

Honestly it seems like he struggled to deal with the disappointment of the final and dealt with it poorly the following season. There were clearly several players who were no longer buying into his methods/it had got stale as well, added to that a handful of wantaways who had their heads turned.

He showed on BT sport that he's got over whatever was up with him Therefore, I reckon in a couple of years time once most of the squad that had gone stale has been refreshed, bringing him back wouldn't be the worst idea in the world.

 

[spursfan77]

Honestly it seems like he struggled to deal with the disappointment of the final and dealt with it poorly the following season. There were clearly several players who were no longer buying into his methods/it had got stale as well, added to that a handful of wantaways who had their heads turned.

He showed on BT sport that he's got over whatever was up with him Therefore, I reckon in a couple of years time once most of the squad that had gone stale has been refreshed, bringing him back wouldn't be the worst idea in the world.

I didn’t think he looked like he’d got over it at all. Completely the opposite actually.

 

['O Zio]

I didn’t think he looked like he’d got over it at all. Completely the opposite actually.

Got over the sulking I mean. By all accounts he was grumpy and sulking, barely talking to anyone etc. when we came back at the start of the season, almost waiting to get sacked. But now he's talking about wanting to finish what he started etc.

 

[JUSTINSIGNAL]

Yes , the team couldn't keep up that intensity , but while it was here it was a very satisfying to see . Obviously our central plank
was this intensity as Toby said, 'Without our energy we are just ordinary' . I agree that we've not been the most technically gifted team .
Our energy was everything imo . For me , this is a big prob for Jose . We don't have the skill level in depth which you need if you are no longer able to steamroller teams . Jose has always been able to buy technique . Fashioning a slick top of the pile team out of Poch's energy based side is a tall order for him.

I wouldn't underestimate how teams gradually learned to deal with us . The speed with which the opposition would spring their carefully worked out pressing traps when our defenders had the ball or Lloris was about to roll it out . Also even in our pomp there was the occasional defeat to a crafty ,Lo-blocking physical opponent who let our attackers fruitlessly wear themselves out and then snatched a breakaway goal to beat us .

I agree with a lot of this. Our work rate, intensity and pressing under peak Poch masked alot our deficiencies. It really felt that once the players started believing their hype a little bit and we dropped that intensity we ultimately got found out.

Our team was not one that could rely on talent alone - it still isn't. Once that coherency and work rate dropped, the mistakes started creeping in. Those same mistakes are still there.

 

[spursfan77]

I agree with a lot of this. Our work rate, intensity and pressing under peak Poch masked alot our deficiencies. It really felt that once the players started believing their hype a little bit and we dropped that intensity we ultimately got found out.

Our team was not one that could rely on talent alone - it still isn't. Once that coherency and work rate dropped, the mistakes started creeping in. Those same mistakes are still there.

I actually think this has started to happen at Liverpool. The last few weeks of games they didn’t look the same and their intensity dropped. Sounds like they aren’t going to make moves in the transfer market this summer on top of no signings last. I wonder if they are going to make the same mistakes as we did in 2018.

 

[bubble07]

Did they ever leave? He's the one

Ill admit they did leave. It wasnt the bad perfermances on the pitch but those terrible press conferences he kept giving. I had enough

 

[KikoSpurs]

I actually think this has started to happen at Liverpool. The last few weeks of games they didn’t look the same and their intensity dropped. Sounds like they aren’t going to make moves in the transfer market this summer on top of no signings last. I wonder if they are going to make the same mistakes as we did in 2018.

I was discussing on twitter about this a few days ago. I see Liverpool just like us under Pochettino. And the same patterns and mistakes are starting to appear.

If they don't start to revamp their squad soon they will drop like us.

 

[RichieS]

Got over the sulking I mean. By all accounts he was grumpy and sulking, barely talking to anyone etc. when we came back at the start of the season, almost waiting to get sacked. But now he's talking about wanting to finish what he started etc.

In fairness I'm still grumpy and sulking about the team's total non-performance in that game.

I was discussing on twitter about this a few days ago. I see Liverpool just like us under Pochettino. And the same patterns and mistakes are starting to appear.

If they don't start to revamp their squad soon they will drop like us.

I freely admit to being envious that they were able to call on the resource necessary to take the final step at exactly the time they needed to. It's textbook Tottenham that we should be (probably) the best team in the country for 18 months and be hamstrung by off the field issues.

As Blackadder once said: "The path of my life is strewn with cow pats from the devil's own satanic herd!"

 

[dtxspurs]

I agree with a lot of this. Our work rate, intensity and pressing under peak Poch masked alot our deficiencies. It really felt that once the players started believing their hype a little bit and we dropped that intensity we ultimately got found out.

Our team was not one that could rely on talent alone - it still isn't. Once that coherency and work rate dropped, the mistakes started creeping in. Those same mistakes are still there.

I think it was more our talent that fell off than the workrate of those players and Poch's coaching. We went from Walker to Trippier, Rose to Davies, Dembele & Wanyama to Winks/Sissoko. Massive dropoffs in quality there.

 

[Wsussexspur]

Peak Pochettino: how a golden age of recruitment transformed Tottenham | Richard Jolly

Spurs’ former scout David Webb tells the story of how four supremely shrewd acquisitions helped take Tottenham to the Champions League final

www.theguardian.com

didnt really know where to put this.

 

[Typical Spurs]

I was discussing on twitter about this a few days ago. I see Liverpool just like us under Pochettino. And the same patterns and mistakes are starting to appear.

If they don't start to revamp their squad soon they will drop like us.

The most important difference being they've won a champions league and pretty much the premier league until Covid-19 hit.

 

[Gbspurs]

The most important difference being they've won a champions league and pretty much the premier league until Covid-19 hit.

Yep definitely, looking back it's really sad how we didn't win anything. The first XI was so good but sadly the squad was lacking.

 

[spursfan77]

Yep definitely, looking back it's really sad how we didn't win anything. The first XI was so good but sadly the squad was lacking.

Or did the first XI let us and themselves down at vital moments?

 

[ghjk_91]

Quite an in depth interview with Pochettino. He seems almost to agree with the decision to sack him; admitting he needed a break.

Pochettino reveals his final conversation with Tottenham chief Levy

Former Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino says he has no regrets about his time at the club and insisted he will always remain friends with chairman Daniel Levy.

www.standard.co.uk

 

[punkisback]

I was discussing on twitter about this a few days ago. I see Liverpool just like us under Pochettino. And the same patterns and mistakes are starting to appear.

If they don't start to revamp their squad soon they will drop like us.

They have two world class wide players though and a hardworking false 9 that creates so many chances and goals. I can't see Salah or Mane dropping in standards for quite a few seasons and they have ready made replacements in CM who are all extremely fit and athletic. I think their squad especially the defence is younger than when we the back 4 in their prime.

 

[spursfan77]

Quite an in depth interview with Pochettino. He seems almost to agree with the decision to sack him; admitting he needed a break.

Pochettino reveals his final conversation with Tottenham chief Levy

Former Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino says he has no regrets about his time at the club and insisted he will always remain friends with chairman Daniel Levy.

www.standard.co.uk

Yeah some good bits in the press today. All he says seems fair. A bit ambiguous at times but that’s to be expected with him. Says he’s happy to take a club anywhere in the league so maybe he will go to Newcastle. He’s still, like me, not over the final. I think that much is clear.

 

[Wsussexspur]

Mauricio Pochettino: 'I'm so happy José is at Tottenham, replacing me'

The former Tottenham manager formally severed ties with the club this week and, he tells David Hytner, now dreams of ‘the perfect club, the perfect project’

www.theguardian.com

 

[thecook]

Sounds like any legal agreements re him talking about leaving have now expired

 

[tototoner]

Great article on The Athletic

Pochettino opens up on Spurs, his exit and future – and here’s what we make of it

The former Tottenham manager dissects his time at the club - and our Jack Pitt-Brooke analyses his comments

theathletic.com

 

[tototoner]

Mauricio Pochettino had not spoken in depth about his time at Tottenham Hotspur until this week. But now, six months on from his sacking, he is free to look back at those five and a half years. And as he spoke to the media this week, he gave the most honest and thoughtful appraisal of his work at Spurs, and how it ended. He was not afraid to tackle the thornier questions: not winning a trophy, the devastation of Madrid and the painful ending. And yet he did so with nothing but love for the club and for Daniel Levy.

In doing so, Pochettino gives us a chance to reappraise his Tottenham career. It somehow already feels like a long time ago, with Jose Mourinho now in charge and, of course, all football stopped since March. But it was also one of the most successful and important spells by a manager in the Premier League this century, as Pochettino transformed the club and their style of play, turning Spurs, for a spell, into the best team in the country, and all on a Europa League-level budget.

They were exciting, original, unified and consistent. They were built on young English players, they played a new brand of pressing football, and they got tantalisingly close to greatness.

When Pochettino was unveiled in August 2014, he made a promise that the journey was as important as the outcome. “For me, it is about exciting football, pressing high, playing with flair,” he said. “This is our philosophy that we want to get down. Always, the result is important but just as important is the ride you take to get to the result.”

Here is what he said this week, along with my interpretation of what it all means.

TROPHIES

“At Espanyol, I wanted to win trophies. At Southampton, I wanted to win trophies. The same at Tottenham. The difference is the reality. Look at (Claudio) Ranieri. He won his first title at Leicester when he was nearly at the end of his career. The people can say he wasn’t a successful coach… people can measure successful people in different ways. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, this guy won a lot of titles and this guy didn’t win’ but the problem is that we are not a coaching staff that started at Bayern Munich.
“If you start your career at Bayern Munich, it’s completely different to if you start your career at Nuremberg, with all respect to Nuremberg. You win a title with Nuremberg, it’s going to be more difficult than at Bayern Munich. If we talk like this, then 90 per cent of coaches in the world are losers. In Spain, there is only Barcelona and Real Madrid. In France, PSG dominate the league. Coaches are not thinking only about winning titles. It’s many things that are around.”

Jack explains: Any analysis of Pochettino’s time at Tottenham will come back to this question of trophies. Can he be said to be one of the best managers in the game if he has an empty cabinet?
When he was at Spurs, Pochettino would argue when asked that trophies could not be the only measure of success. Even at that 2014 unveiling, he said his personal target was “to win every game and if you do that right to the end of the season, it is possible you win some trophies”. Trophies, then, were more of a by-product of success, rather than a target in themselves.

That has always been Pochettino’s line and he has been true to it. This week, again, he made a very persuasive case. It is unarguable that in modern football, only a small number of clubs are capable of winning things. Even Spurs, the biggest club he has managed, finished fifth and sixth in the two seasons before he took over. Since 1991, they had just won two League Cups, in 1999 and 2008. And who is better remembered as a Spurs manager now: Pochettino or the men who won those trophies, George Graham and Juande Ramos?

So to judge Pochettino’s brilliant work at Spurs through the prism of trophies alone is to miss the point. And Pochettino knows this. “Coaches are not thinking only about winning titles”, as he puts it himself. You have to take far more into account. Pochettino took over a club who were looking for an identity and gave them one. A club who were spending their money on a new stadium and could not invest heavily in players. And through this expensive transition, Pochettino provided not only stability but also excellence: third-, second- and third-placed finishes. Two genuine title challenges.

Spurs were the best team in British football for a long spell, even if they never managed to finish first in the table. And he delivered the club’s first Champions League final, reached in the most spectacularly dramatic circumstances.

This is what managerial achievement looks like: transforming the prospects of a club. Not just winning one cup.

STADIUM MOVES

“After a five-year project, working very hard, and spending less money than other opponents, being focused in building the best stadium in the world, was a very difficult task.
“Not only are you trying to prepare the team to perform, you need to be focused on playing at Wembley, Milton Keynes, playing with 10,000 people less at White Hart Lane. All these situations that are very unstable. It’s the complete opposite to the teams we were competing with, the best clubs in the world, who have the capacity and the focus to only have to prepare to perform and win games.

“But I think it was fantastic, the years that we spent at Wembley, playing cup games in different stadiums. One season, we played in three different stadiums. And then, the first day in the new stadium last season, and to play the Champions League quarter-final and semi-final there was a dream that not even the most optimistic of fans dreamed. How we planned the project at Tottenham; to finish the stadium, to prepare the team to compete and try to achieve the top four. We achieved everything before (time).”

Jack explains: Pochettino had Tottenham playing like an elite club but the circumstances were always different from their rivals. None of England’s other big clubs had to go through what Spurs did during his tenure — a long, drawn-out process of leaving one home and moving into a new one.
Their last game at the old White Hart Lane was on May 14, 2017. The first one at the new White Hart Lane was April 3, 2019, almost two years later. They spent that time at Wembley (apart from one Carabao Cup tie in Milton Keynes in September 2018) and while the club and fans made the most of a difficult situation at first, fatigue set in during that 2018-19 season as the opening of the new ground kept getting pushed back.

And, of course, the main cost of building a £1.2 billion stadium is the money itself. Spurs had never been lavish in the transfer market but they spent remarkably little compared to their rivals during this transitional phase, effectively relying on the team they had in 2015-16 to get them through the next four years. No other top club would do this and when Tottenham famously went through the calendar year of 2018 without signing a single player, it showed just how difficult it was for a club to pay for their own stadium (not something that everyone has to do) and compete with their richest rivals for players at the same time.

The Pochettino era at Spurs, then, can hardly be compared to the same timespan at Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City or Manchester United. And yet, making the most of the cards they were dealt, they achieved more than anyone could have expected.

THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL

“I think it was very difficult to accept the way the game went. When you prepare for three weeks and in the way we did… I think we were convinced and I was convinced that the final was going to go our way. That was completely in our minds.
“But no one is prepared after 30 seconds of the final to concede like that. The goal changed the whole game; all the emotions. It is difficult to prepare a team for that happening. But at the same time, we were better than them (on the night). We were much better than Liverpool. We were unlucky that we didn’t score.

Maybe we deserved a better result but in the end, finals are about winning, about the title. It’s not about to deserve or not to deserve. There is not a day after. It is finished. Who wins has won. And if you deserve to win, or play better, or dominate the game or create more chances… it doesn’t matter.
“I was so disappointed. It was difficult to stop crying, to stop feeling bad. It was a massive achievement to get there. And you can use the example of Liverpool after they lost to Real Madrid (in the final) the season before — that was a massive motivation and inspiration to be back in the future. I knew that after five years and with the way we were working, and all the things that happened, it was going to be difficult… (it) changed a little bit in our minds the possibility to stay open to design another plan, or a strategy to build again, a different chapter… a different project should be difficult for us to maintain, to keep improving.”

Jack explains: There was plenty of talk at Tottenham last season about a “new chapter” or a “new project” — the promising future that would come at the end of the season after the Champions League final. And yet everyone can see with hindsight that game was not the start of something but the end of something. It was the end of five years of heroic hard work by Pochettino, his staff and the players. And that is why the perfect outcome would have been to win the trophy and walk off. To “close the five-year chapter and go home”, as Pochettino put it in a portentous press-conference comment at the semi-final in Amsterdam.

As Pochettino explains here, that is why he was so devastated by the defeat in Madrid — because this match was the climax of his time at Spurs and he only had one shot at it. That is why the comparison to Liverpool the year before is so instructive. When Jurgen Klopp lost the 2018 Champions League final in Kiev, he had been in the job less than three years, he had only signed Virgil van Dijk five months earlier and Alisson was yet to arrive. That Liverpool team and project was still in its thrilling upswing, as they have proved in the Premier League and in Europe since. But Pochettino knew he did not have those advantages of time and money and momentum. Klopp would get another shot but Pochettino only got one.
It was clear Pochettino had squeezed almost everything out of his players over the years, that not much fresh blood had come in, and that the 2019-20 season was always going to be very difficult. Recapturing the hunger and energy and passion that drove Tottenham upwards in the past was to prove impossible. There could be no “strategy to build again”.



THE FINAL WEEKS

“My commitment with the club, with Daniel (Levy) and, of course, with the players, the fans, was massive. I said to Daniel that we finished in the way that no one wanted but the end, because of our commitment, our emotion and our feeling, it needed to happen. If not, our relationship will continue forever! And maybe that’s no good for the club or for us. I think when the decision (came), we needed to move on…
“…And always, Daniel is going to be my friend. All the people there, I have very good relationships with them. I am a football person and we understand that sometimes, the chapter finishes. Football moves very quick.”

Jack explains: Pochettino speaks with so much pride and passion about his work at Tottenham and the great team he built. And yet there is no sense of bitterness at all towards Levy for sacking him. He refers to a recent conversation he had with Levy where he joked with him about Louis van Gaal being Spurs’ first choice in 2014 and when Pochettino thanked Levy on behalf of his whole coaching staff for giving them the chance to work at Tottenham for five and a half years. There is no sense of resentment that his time at Spurs was “cut short”.

In fact, Pochettino is not too proud to admit that, by last November, it was time for him and the club to part ways. It “needed to happen” and him and his staff “needed to move on”.

There has been plenty of debate in the last six months about whether it was right to sack Pochettino and replace him with Mourinho, and the two questions tend to be merged together. You either think it was right to do both things, or neither. Hence a new school of thought that Spurs should have stuck with Pochettino, tried to ride out their difficult spell, and gone again next season.

And yet even Pochettino, judging by these comments, accepts that it was time to go. Remember how flat Spurs had looked in his last few weeks in the job. The players looked tired of Pochettino and his methods, as if they had nothing left in the bank. Tottenham won only three points (all from draws) in his last five Premier League games and the nature of some high-profile defeats — 7-2 at home against Bayern Munich, 3-0 away to Brighton — seemed to confirm something was broken and had to change, as Pochettino himself now admits.

WHAT NEXT?

“You dream of the perfect club, the perfect project… It’s difficult to assess. From outside, it’s difficult to measure the capacity of the clubs, the capacity of the players, the squad. You need to share ideas in the moment that some club approaches you and start to talk. To try to find if the project is a good fit or not. It’s so important in this moment, when the reality comes, to try to talk.”

Jack explains: Clearly, Pochettino and his staff want to work again soon. He says that their “tanks are completely full” after a six-month break that they needed. They have had time to reflect and look back at everything that happened at Spurs and before that at Southampton. They have had time to think about what they might want to do next and to start to speak to people. But they are determined to find a club with the right feeling, like the feeling of trust they had when they first met with Levy and Joe Lewis on the Spurs owner’s yacht off the coast of Nice six years ago.

With football still suspended in most countries and the football economy grinding to a halt, it is difficult to know which jobs will come up this year, or where Pochettino and his team will end up. But what is clear, from any assessment of his work at Tottenham, or from the honesty and passion with which he talks about it, is that he is almost a unique force in football. A man who, through his own powerful personality, and the skills of his staff, got his team to play further beyond themselves than anyone would have imagined.
He will surely show up again soon.