Tottenham: Mauricio Pochettino, Daniel Levy and shaping club through ‘crisis’
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By Guillem Balague
BBC Sport
Last year's Champions League campaign resisted a great deal of cracks in the year of Tottenham ; this year's has served to expose them.
Effectively what we are currently seeing is that the irrefutable decay of a squad that should happen to be recycled, reinvigorated, revitalised, a squad that's been allowed to roam to the crisis it currently finds itself . Why a catastrophe? Because this group, judging by results, is not currently moving ahead - they are standing and at worst moving backwards.
It's a scenario that has happened because different parts of this team have had different perspectives on the strategy and pace required to proceed. It's meant that a lack of decisiveness from the transfer market as well as by now decisions on players are made, it has often been possible to execute the motions.
On the 1 hand you've Mauricio Pochettino a trainer who wishes to continue winning and to make his group like it could be. But, you have Daniel Levy, the chairman along with a guy who hunts the football world inhabited by the clubs in a different manner.
In a nutshell, in Pochettino Spurs have a mentor who assess players on the grounds of what they can do to the group, while having a single eye on the company and will look at. Levy, however, is much more inclined to view them with regards to what they can do to your business.
In scenarios like this, the final choices will lie with the chairman.
This has caused situations where gamers have had their contracts renewed with a view to waive their marketability - promoting them on - rather than on the basis of what they might donate to the team on the area. Or of players who were not necessarily what the team had but were regarded as a great market bargain.
But nothing is black and white as it seems. The connection between the two important guys in the bar has not broken .
"People might say that the relationship with the chairman has got worse, but this isn't the case," explained Pochettino, talking at a summit in Qatar. "What is important is to keep the relationship and admire each other. We both have to understand how to operate our doctrine to become close together.
"In tough situations the supervisor also must compensate for the fight. I've joked a little about our defeats, but we are hurt. It is the time to turn matters around and to be together. Let us put that into our heads and recuperate."
That is the identical message spread out over the bar. It's important that everyone, from the chairman to the lowest-profile worker, backs up the team.
It's a group, when on form, after all, and this can beat anyone.
There's no denying Tottenham's epic Champions League campaign last year - finally dropping in the final to Liverpool - hid their shortcomings.
The stats make for perusal. Spurs have lost 19 of their past 41 games in all competitions. Bayern Munich's brutal efficiency in beating them 7-2 about 1 October and also Brighton's power four days later in a 3-0 victory exposed once and for all of the yawning cracks that Pochettino and his team have been attempting to paper over to the previous eight and a half an hour.
The news conference that followed the Bayern defeat was a calculated reaction from the coach to a game which obviously highlighted that this is undoubtedly a crisis. What is required today is a calm head and concentration on attempting to make certain things don't get even worse. If this means using the experts - the typical
players, a number of whom understand that in normal circumstances they would not be in the club - so be it.
What Pochettino does today and the way he handles to make the minimum fallout from this situation will very probably establish him as a supervisor. It'll be the yardstick by which his accomplishments are quantified when decisions are being created within 10 years' time. A footballing variant of the old question:"What would you do in the war, Daddy?"
Did he blame the club because of a lack of and money players? Can he attempt to down it by reminding everyone he had said all along that will be a rollercoaster journey? If - or more likely, when - he leaves, he will want to do this comfortable in the knowledge he played the very best hand with all the cards he was dealtwith. Any prospective top-flight companies would demand nothing less.
The club has never been requested by pochettino for gamers for cash. What he has done - and he has been saying this for the past two years - is make it clear that he wants to start a new chapter.
The club themselves feel that the refresh has started . Pochettino's coaches recognized problems a very long time ago and they weren't addressed with the speed that has been demanded, but the team believe the next phase of the Spurs job is well under way. Some fringe players are offered or are marketed in January and following summer. New players have arrived recently.
It is not easy to wonder Levy, who thinks he has always done what is in the club's best interests. You only have to walk in the shiny new showpiece arena to realize that in many ways he has more than fulfilled his brief to Tottenham's owners.
And no matter what the verdict due to his transfer deals, there've been many occasions when departures are agreed by the manager and the club, just for a deal to prove impossible. In fact, in virtually all the cases where a move from the group was consented, no teams showed interest or finally the participant chose not to proceed to all those clubs making offers.
Confusion is created by those scenarios. It's been reported that Danny Rose, Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen hunted for - or had the chance of - a departure. They stay at the club. Christian Eriksen has been given a new contract but he still also wants a fresh challenge and prefers a move to La Liga, however neither Barcelona nor Real Madrid have demonstrated enough interest to take him away.
While off-field plan has been a variable, there have also been on-field errors - by gamers and from the manager, as they'd admit themselves. However, the club also understand that injuries have not helped. Everybody comes in training.
"The group has lost confidence and we must work to regain it," Pochettino admits. "We talk to players, we tell them that we lost due to most of our errors, but we have to forget about them. Nobody will hide, we have to share responsibility."
Part of this obligation is to work out why there's been such a recession in outcomes. There's a school of thought this is a group which runs significantly less than it used to and as an outcome exerts less pressure to the ball than previously. Perhaps, but why?
In his first years that the method used most frequently was 3-4-3 or a 4-4-2 with offensive full-backs and mobile forwards, but it suddenly became apparent to Pochettino along with his staff last year that their squad owned a wealth of defensive players and so they started to play with five in the rear. That stops that pressure up the pitch as the number of players up front is reduced.
The players in the squad are also older and, frankly, a lot of them simply do not have the'legs' they had four or threeyears back. The youthfulness and vigour of this negative when Pochettino first came, or even completely a matter of the past, has diminished. It's also worth noting it is considered easier to play with a high-pressure game on the smaller White Hart Lane surface they had to call home, compared to longer and slightly wider pitches of Wembley and the new arena.
The simple thing for Pochettino to perform would be to clear his desk and wave an emotional goodbye to north London. He considered that throughout the summertime and, had left, would have had nothing to apologise for. He has taken Spurs and its fans to a property they might only have dreamed of and has ever done it by developing a group that has played a few of the most exhilarating football seen any place on the planet.
But that isn't where his head is now.
In Qatar, Pochettino added:"We have to recoup the emotional level... It is very tricky to control emotions, to go from enjoying the Champions League last and a couple of months later maintain the situation we are in. It is in our hands to battle it off, to change dynamics. This is how this game functions. It is not a drama. There are much worse dramas in existence and we must understand that."
A commitment on both sides will almost certainly stop any clean break and Pochettino feels that a loyalty to the club. When Real Madrid approached Levy directly and then came last spring calling for him, the Argentine was.
The situation is that things go from bad to worse, especially if Pochettino decides it is time to leave only to discover he's faced with the job of managing an agreement that will stipulate where he can or cannot go in the future.
He's not in the place where he could - or would want to "do a Mourinho", specifically developing a situation so untenable in a club that showing you the door with a fat cheque and no handcuff clauses on your prospective unexpectedly becomes the only sensible choice.
And when Pochettino does go, which name, knowing what they understand, will be prepared to grasp this nettle?
It'll mean Spurs will have to go for a young, ambitious kind of manager, someone with enthusiasm and vitality, willing and ready to struggle to change the circumstance. Is there anyone out there who would be up to this task? Put yet another way, where could Levy find another Pochettino?
Discontent exists, although I am told that the constant stories being published that players are unhappy aren't all or completely true. The footballers are getting more investigation than ever and encounter unique kinds of instruction, but the main problem, as is usual in these moments of difficulties, is that everybody is looking for a scapegoat. In truth, everybody and each level in the club needs to take some share of their responsibility.
A natural frustration is with what's happening, what has happened, and most of all with what must have happened. The club feel a favorable turnaround in fortunes is inevitable and that Pochettino will probably start maximising his group's possible once more. It's, looking at the bigger picture, the strategy that is reasonable.
Only time will tell if the club last making changes at the perfect rate to stop the rot, if Pochettino gets the ingredients to keep rival on top and when he is in a position to revitalise and re-energise his squad to write the next chapter.
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