I was wrong about Poch

[Shadydan]

Well you know, it's late n all...
My point was supposed to be I'm not sure we actually had any strong mentality, we just had a player who got us out of jail. Thus when he left, so did that ability, more so than any mentality.

To be fair we didn't only lose Bale we also lost Parker, Dempsey and Gallas as well, all those players you could say had a winning or fighting mentality, I don't think their departures get highlighted enough to be honest.

 

[Ionman34]

I posted this on a thread here back in late April or early May. As a couple of other people have said here, the signs of our current resurgence were there for those who wished to see them...


As a Pochettino supporter whose faith has been shaken in recent weeks, like that of a number of other people here, I’m trying to maintain my confidence by telling myself that, whatever the mistakes he’s been making in the micro and however many of them there have been, the macro errors of Daniel Levy – and I’m not a kneejerk anti-Levyite either - over the past three seasons have rendered his position a very difficult one indeed. One cannot look at the immediate picture without looking at the big picture. One cannot condemn Pochettino for the Burnley and Villa results without searching for the far-off, as opposed to the immediate, causes.


We have THREE players who make a difference. One is world class, the second international class (but has completely lost his form of late), the third a very promising youngster who may or may not be a one-season wonder. Every team in the top five has more than three players who make a difference. Even Everton, I’d suggest, have three players who make a difference (Coleman, Baines and Lukaku).


We have ONE functioning striker.


We have NO pace. Correction: we have a small amount of pace but unfortunately it’s possessed by Walker and Townsend, two of the most irredeemably brainless players on the planet. (Before anyone mentions Lennon, he hadn’t produced it for us in years and wasn’t going to make a difference for us in the future. That he’s been doing well for Everton perhaps says nothing more than that he needed a new challenge and found the right place. But Lennon will not be leading Everton back to lost glories next season.)


We have – TWO? ONE? HOWEVER MANY YOU’RE HAVING YOURSELF, REALLY - leaders. The sight of a 21-year-old captaining the team wasn’t necessary to tell us that.


We are the ONLY team in the top six to have consistently run a budget surplus in recent years, meaning we are trying to punch way above our weight vis a vis the top five clubs.


The one chance we had of rectifying the situation and gaming it in our favour, we blew by pissing away £80 MILLION the summer before last.


We have until very recently had NO system of talent identification/scouting worthy of the name. As an aside, that to me is the biggest indictment of Levy: given that we couldn’t outmuscle Chelsea, Man City et al financially, identifying and purchasing young players before they became big names – and therefore unaffordable – was simply a no-brainer. Yet the foundations for such a system have only lately been put in place.


All of these factors have contributed to our current standing. We are where we are. We are where our income, wage bill and other metrics say we should be. Pochettino cannot be blamed for ANY of these factors. (As someone tweeted with heavy irony on Sunday night, “How Van Gaal has managed to turn around this £400m team is phenomenal.” Quite.)


Similarly, we currently sit in the table where the talent – or lack of same – in the squad says we should sit. Okay, this is an opinion rather than a cold fact, but between fifth and seventh is about as good as we are, and I can’t imagine too many people arguing with that contention. Even when we were winning matches either side of Christmas we were doing so laboriously and narrowly: all those 2-1 victories, many of them late on. That couldn’t continue and it didn’t. We have now regressed to the mean, a regression made more pronounced by the loss of form of Eriksen and Chadli.


My own contention is that Pochettino has thus far done as well as he was entitled to do. Up to a month ago I was of the belief he’d done better than that. Not so right now, but Rome wasn’t built – and Tottenham Hotspur will not be rebuilt – in a day. I’m not throwing the toys out of the pram just yet. Far from. We had results like the Villa one even when we were doing well under Redknapp: home defeats to Wigan and, also one Easter Monday, Norwich City.


Some other observations in passing.


“Koeman has done a better job at Southampton than Pochettino has at Spurs”? On the evidence of the first eight months of the season, yes. On the other hand, Pochettino has clearly done a better job at Spurs in that timeframe than Martinez has at Everton. Eight months is NOT a sufficient yardstick for stone-set opinions.


“We didn’t beat anything in reaching Wembley”? Big deal. If we’d won every tie 5-0 and still lost the final, this would also have been used as a stick to beat the manager with.


“He’s not good with substitutions”? For the love of Jaysus, we have utter dross on the bench! If next season we have a couple of speedy wingers who can stretch a game and he isn’t making use of them, then I’ll begin to worry. But not yet.


“If Lloris didn’t have such a good season we’d be in trouble”? This isn’t an argument. Lloris has done what he’s capable of and paid to do. It’s what the good players do.


“If Kane didn’t have such a good season we’d be in trouble”? A much more relevant point. Kane has been the one big and unforeseen break Pochettino has got.


“He’s an average coach” (as someone here said lately)? No: he’s clearly an excellent coach. Mason being capped and Rose being called up by England is proof of that. And two other words on the same subject: Rickie Lambert. What Pochettino is not is a good strategist. Not yet anyway. But he has to be allowed to make mistakes and grow into the job. Frank De Boer would be making mistakes too if he’d got the job. It’s easy to pine for a manager who didn’t get the job and so would never make mistakes.


How many people here reckon they can cope with, say, three six-placed finishes over the next three seasons? I know I’ll manage. I won’t be jumping up and down about it and I’ll certainly be well pissed off if we’re not a better team this time next year – and a better team still the year after that – than we are now. But having lived through relegation in 1977, and having survived the dross of both the late 1980s and the late 1990s (remember the FA Cup defeats to Port Vale and Bradford and Barnsley? The 7-1, or whatever it was, defeat at Newcastle?), I’ll cope.


We are where we are. We’re going to be here for a considerable time to come, regardless of who is manager. I’ll say that again because to me it’s the bottom line. We’re going to be here for a considerable time to come, regardless of who is manager. We are in for between three and five years of retrenchment, consolidation and, hopefully, renewal. Does anyone dispute this? If so, on what basis?


To those who want Pochettino gone: what prospective manager(s) would do better and why? Also, could it not be that Pochettino – appointed not simply to work with the first team, a la Redknapp, but to lead the club as a totality and bring through young players - might be the right man for the position we’re in now and will be in for the foreseeable future, just as Redknapp was the right man for the position we were in five years ago (ie a very good manager with a very good team because he had the common sense to let them at it)?


One thing is for sure. Pochettino doesn’t talk nonsense and NEVER talks about himself. What’s more, he appears to know all the young players at the club and be interested in them. Am I the only one who finds this encouraging?


I wasn’t expecting anything this season from a squad containing Townsend, Paulinho, Chiriches, Soldado et al. In the event I – we – got Harry Kane, a 5-3 versus Chelsea, a day out at Wembley and a series of late, hard earned victories: most unSpurslike and therefore all the more heartening as a result. If you were expecting more, like the guy here who claimed he expected Spurs to finish fourth (I assume he was either trolling or possibly genuinely delusional), then fair enough.


Anyway, that’s my tuppenceworth...

Cracking post, very well written and an enjoyable read. I missed the original so have some positive rep this time around.

 

[Kiedis]

Some quotes about Poch in an interview with Adam Lallana in the Telegraph. I'll just put them here, since this was the first Poch thread I saw:

"[Jurgen Klopp] is getting out of me what Mauricio asked of me at Southampton,” Lallana said. “The manager sets his team out the way Pochettino does – that is where I can see a similarity. He said to me in our first conversation how he’d seen me play at Southampton. Now the role I’m playing now is more like it was there.

“I don’t want to compare managers too much because it’s not fair, but the pressing style is similar to what I was used to. The demand is similar – put in the graft. He understands you will make mistakes and not play so well in a game but if you leave blood and sweat on the pitch for him – that is what he likes most.

“When Mauricio came in at Southampton he said 'this is what I demand from every single player. You cannot carry anyone.’ That’s what the new manager has brought with him here."

"By 24 and the Premier League I was captain and then Pochettino came and that’s where I stepped up. I had a great time under him. I still speak to him weekly. We speak as friends rather than about football. He is a good man and I got really close to him. There is a respect there. He was a big reason why I’m here because of what I learnt from him. I always knew he would do well at Spurs. I’m really happy for him.”

 

[Paq]

Some quotes about Poch in an interview with Adam Lallana in the Telegraph. I'll just put them here, since this was the first Poch thread I saw:

"[Jurgen Klopp] is getting out of me what Mauricio asked of me at Southampton,” Lallana said. “The manager sets his team out the way Pochettino does – that is where I can see a similarity. He said to me in our first conversation how he’d seen me play at Southampton. Now the role I’m playing now is more like it was there.

“I don’t want to compare managers too much because it’s not fair, but the pressing style is similar to what I was used to. The demand is similar – put in the graft. He understands you will make mistakes and not play so well in a game but if you leave blood and sweat on the pitch for him – that is what he likes most.

“When Mauricio came in at Southampton he said 'this is what I demand from every single player. You cannot carry anyone.’ That’s what the new manager has brought with him here."

"By 24 and the Premier League I was captain and then Pochettino came and that’s where I stepped up. I had a great time under him. I still speak to him weekly. We speak as friends rather than about football. He is a good man and I got really close to him. There is a respect there. He was a big reason why I’m here because of what I learnt from him. I always knew he would do well at Spurs. I’m really happy for him.”

Love that and can imagine quite a few of our current squad feel similarly.

 

[Kilkenny Cat]

Cracking post, very well written and an enjoyable read. I missed the original so have some positive rep this time around.

Thank you! To be fair, I can't even remember what the name of the original thread was, so you're hardly to be blamed for missing it.

 

[Ionman34]

Thank you! To be fair, I can't even remember what the name of the original thread was, so you're hardly to be blamed for missing it.

You are welcome.

As a matter of interest, my Nan was a Kilkenny Cat.

 

[Mouse!]

Some quotes about Poch in an interview with Adam Lallana in the Telegraph. I'll just put them here, since this was the first Poch thread I saw:

"[Jurgen Klopp] is getting out of me what Mauricio asked of me at Southampton,” Lallana said. “The manager sets his team out the way Pochettino does – that is where I can see a similarity. He said to me in our first conversation how he’d seen me play at Southampton. Now the role I’m playing now is more like it was there.

“I don’t want to compare managers too much because it’s not fair, but the pressing style is similar to what I was used to. The demand is similar – put in the graft. He understands you will make mistakes and not play so well in a game but if you leave blood and sweat on the pitch for him – that is what he likes most.

“When Mauricio came in at Southampton he said 'this is what I demand from every single player. You cannot carry anyone.’ That’s what the new manager has brought with him here."

"By 24 and the Premier League I was captain and then Pochettino came and that’s where I stepped up. I had a great time under him. I still speak to him weekly. We speak as friends rather than about football. He is a good man and I got really close to him. There is a respect there. He was a big reason why I’m here because of what I learnt from him. I always knew he would do well at Spurs. I’m really happy for him.”

A refreshing interview - Lallana comes across really well; articulate and genuine.

 

[sloth]

Didn't know much about Poch's credentials or FDBs to be honest, but wanted FDB as he was a bigger name so thought he'd be able to draw players and had a big reputation of bringing through youth which I htink is essential if we want to go on to win things and be great. I liked what I saw of Poch at Soton but like others I thought it was a bit of media hype and was a case that one decent team having a great season.

When he joined, regardless I was happy and ready to support him like all managers. Last year I thought he did really well and had to defend him sometimes as I could see what he was trying to do and he is very likable and respectful. This season what he is doing is brilliant. We genuinely look like a competitive team, not flaky and are playing good football and with a young side. Not all managers are perfect and I think there are some things he could do differently, but on the whole, and I'm 25 I think he is my favourite manager so far alongside Jol. Iin terms of likability and what he is producing on the field. I have supported all our managers and never really wanted any to get the sack and I;m the same with Poch hope we actually have him for the 5 years to see what he can do.

I am keeping my feet firm on the ground but the way he has us performing atm is exciting. I'm still expecting 5th but quietly hoping for more.



Agree with this. While Poch has got us playing well, even recently AVB had us coming back and winning with late goals after we lost last minute to Everton. At the time I remember commentators saying stuff like Spurs are developing a stronger mentality etc, but we pretty much carried that on to the Poch era

Obviously the Eredivisie is of much higher quality than the Scots Prem, but the gap in resources between the top two or three teams and the rest is about the same. Look at Neil Lennon, Alex McCleish, they won silverware but they did it in a shit league at one of the biggest clubs.

I realise that Ajax play attractive football, my only point is that it's very hard to judge the quality of a manager or a player when they come from the Eredivise.

 

[KenTHFC]

Obviously the Eredivisie is of much higher quality than the Scots Prem, but the gap in resources between the top two or three teams and the rest is about the same. Look at Neil Lennon, Alex McCleish, they won silverware but they did it in a shit league at one of the biggest clubs.

I realise that Ajax play attractive football, my only point is that it's very hard to judge the quality of a manager or a player when they come from the Eredivise.

I've heard that FdB has AVB type problems in that he's very boring. There are quite a few Ajax fans I see pop up on Twitter claiming he's just lucky that Ajax are one of two naturally winning teams in the Eredivise. So happy Levy went with Poch now

 

[TwanYid]

I have to say I'm amazed that someone would dig up a three-year-old post and try and use it against me, but as it's @yido_number1 (one of the bigger troll/assholes on this site) I'm not surprised.

Anyway, I've already authored a frontline mea culpa, and this, of course, is it. I don't think I could've been more clear about my having been wrong about Poch. But of course Yi-do doesn't bother to mention that, since it doesn't fit his troll narrative.

Thanks Yi-do! Have a great day, you ____!