Champions League loss still painful: Pochettino
Uncertainty over potential player departures still affecting Spurs
But football is about glory; it is about winning. You can be disappointed sometimes. Mauricio Pochettino
Mauricio Pochettino says he is still “suffering” following Tottenham Hotspur’s defeat in the Champions League final in June and is “fixing” problems that have plagued his squad from the off-season.
The Spurs manager revealed the loss in Madrid to Liverpool was one of the “two big disappointments” of his life in football.
The other was Argentina’s failure at the 2002 World Cup — and the crucial penalty he conceded against England when the former defender was judged to have fouled Michael Owen, who later admitted diving.
Pochettino said: “It was always my dream to play in a World Cup. We played three games and went home — when we were a candidate to win it. For three or four years, we were unbeaten, then we were out in the group stages. I stayed at home and didn’t go out for 10 days.”
Pochettino admitted he felt similarly after the Champions League final.
“It was made even bigger because it was the Champions League,” Pochettino said. “To achieve the final with Tottenham — no one expected that. It was more than a dream.”
After the final, Pochettino took a train to Barcelona, where he has a home, and “again you are like depressed — you expect after a week to move on and say ‘I want to be there again’”.
Despite his impressive achievements in management at Espanyol, Southampton and Spurs, Pochettino is yet to win a major trophy, and that bothers him.
“Football, for me, is about the glory. There is nothing more important than the glory,” he said. “When you win, there is not another thing you can find like it. Of course I am suffering. This is my sixth season here and I am in an unbelievable environment here.
“But football is about glory; it is about winning. You can be disappointed sometimes. The challenge is to get back there and we are going to try make this possible and change the history of this club. Of course this is going to be difficult, but football is not an ordinary business. Difficult times can happen and arrive, and you have to have different tools to fight against this situation.”
The suspicion — and inference — is that Pochettino was not the only one at Spurs deeply affected by last season and while he argued that his comments about the players following the League Cup exit to fourth-tier Colchester United on Wednesday were taken out of context, he explained what he meant by “different agendas in the squad”.
Pochettino insisted that referred to the off-season when several players — including Christian Eriksen and Danny Rose — wanted to leave but said that was now in the past, although he added it would take more than the four weeks it has been since the European transfer window closed for his squad to have the “togetherness” they need.
“The situations [with the players] that I was talking about are in the past,” he said. “But there’s some collateral damage or consequences that we need to fix. We are fixing problems at the moment.”
Pochettino argued that they need to “catch the time we lost” during preseason.
“There are two ways to start preseason: With no distractions, when everyone comes to fight, or when there are so many circumstances which are open and you need to manage pre-season games.
“Then you need to start on the official games, the competition does not wait on your circumstances. They are already demanding that you perform. You performance is affected by your preparation.”
One difference Pochettino said he had noticed with his players was that they were not working hard enough off the ball.
“We know very well we need to increase [our levels] without the ball — our aggressivity, togetherness, the will to chase people and be desperate, to recover the ball as soon as we can.
“That is the key point we need to fix. That is the problem.”
Despite an off-season of disagreement over the club’s transfer policy, Pochettino said his relationship with club chairman Daniel Levy remained strong, having spent Tuesday with him in Milan for the Fifa awards, where he was nominated for Coach of the Year, won by Jurgen Klopp.
“We move on from the summer,” Pochettino said. “We were together in Milan. He came with me, Jesus [Perez, assistant], my wife and Steve Hitchen [chief scout]. It was a very nice time to spend together. There’s no point if you don’t have a good relationship.”