He chooses washing powder for the laundry and dropped a player for eating lasagne, but why does Pochettino keep lemons on his desk?
MAURICIO POCHETTINO’S great regret is that his impressive Tottenham team never faced Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United. Pochettino, the manager of Tottenham, is a Ferguson disciple. He recently read his latest book and described a lunch with the former Manchester United manager last year as a ‘dream come true’.
‘I will always remember every detail from those hours of conversation,’ he writes in his new diary Brave New World.
The admiration is mutual, which adds another layer of interest to any meeting between the clubs. Ferguson would have quite liked to see Pochettino replace Louis van Gaal as manager of United in the summer of 2016, not long after the two men had that lunch. Senior figures at Old Trafford and some players agreed.
In the end, Jose Mourinho’s track record of winning trophies ensured he got the vote and the job. And who can say that Pochettino would have left Tottenham anyway?
But tomorrow the Argentine takes his team to Old Trafford at an interesting stage of his career. Some believe that in finishing second in the Premier League behind Chelsea last season, he hit a glass ceiling.
In his fascinating book, Pochettino jokes that Crystal Palace pay players more than Tottenham. As the north London club wait to move into their new stadium, the wage strucWilliams ture remains a very real issue.
Yet Spurs continue to surge forwards under the South American’s expert command. Four goals against Liverpool last Sunday laid down yet another marker and it is not stretching things to say Pochettino will arrive in the North West with a side who play the way United teams used to play.
Expansive, energetic and athletic, a blip against West Ham in the cup in midweek should not interrupt their swagger. While Mourinho moves United forwards in his own inimitably pragmatic style, Pochettino’s football has smoother edges. If he were to win for the first time at Old Trafford tomorrow, it would feel telling. In more ways than one.
NOBODY really knows — least of all people at Tottenham — why Pochettino has written a book at this stage of his career. Charting the period from the end of the 2015-16 campaign to the end of last season, it is candid and revealing. Maybe, at times, it gives too much away.
The book, written in conjunction with Spanish football journalist Guillem Balague, reveals Pochettino to be a man of great depth, an obsessive with many idiosyncrasies. If he was not quite so successful, we may even consider him eccentric.
For example, Pochettino chooses the exact laundry detergent used to wash the first-team kit. He thinks the smell is important.
On his desk is a tray of lemons because he has read that they absorb negative energy.
Every day he lets his car engine run for 10 minutes before getting in, while occasionally he makes his players listen to a Robbie song called Love My Life. When some of them sing along to it, he doesn’t know whether they are taking the mickey out of him or not. He doesn’t care.
But above all this book, this window into Pochettino’s heart, mind and soul, shows him to be desperate in his intention to take Tottenham to the top of the English game.
Pochettino has a deep admiration not only for Ferguson but for current adversaries Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and Arsene Wenger.
It makes his recent verbal jousting with Manchester City manager Guardiola intriguing. The men were neighbours once in Barcelona and faced off in derbies while Pochettino was coach of Espanyol. They like each other and have mutual friends such as City coach Mikel Arteta.
Meanwhile, Pochettino and Mourinho occasionally text and call each other over the course of a season. ‘We have always had a good relationship,’ Pochettino writes in the book, beneath a picture of the pair.
BUT Pochettino’s diaries of last season show him to be a manager fed up with finishing anywhere but first. In different ways and to differing degrees, he feels he owes something to these men — these rivals — but believes it is now time to beat them. ‘We have to perform really well to be at their level,’ he writes. ‘But we can do it. Finishing fifth (at Spurs) used to be fine. Now we are trying to create the standards present at the big clubs.’
Pochettino states Tottenham are no longer a selling club. That said, he lost Kyle Walker to City in the summer and believes Mourinho wanted his central midfieldercum-defender Eric Dier the previous year.
Details of the Spurs boss watching Mourinho and Dier talking in the tunnel after United beat Spurs at Old Trafford last December have made headlines through the serialisation of the book in last weekend’s Mail on Sunday.
We can expect the issue to resurface when both managers give pre-match press briefings today. Pochettino has already called out Guardiola regarding him labelling Spurs ‘the Harry Kane team’ and now a shot has been fired across Mourinho’s bows, too.
Maybe this represents a shift in approach from the Argentine. He explains in his diary that he understands the importance of what he says in public, but has not previously wished to tweak the