Pochettino – from average player to super coach
MAURICIO POCHETTINO (pix) is ready to admit it. “I wasn’t a crack,” he says. “Never a superstar”.
A rugged yet cultured central defender, best known in England for bringing down Michael Owen and allowing a freshlymohawked David Beckham to win a group game at World Cup 2002, Pochettino may be right.
But don’t feel too sorry for him because this is a man who seems only too aware that what he is achieving in the dugout may already have surpassed his playing career.
Indeed, one wonders if this could have been his calling all along.
“My wife always points out to me just what I’ve achieved here in only four years,” he told Argentina’s La Nación yesterday.
“In such a short time here they have a certain affection for me, even though I’m from abroad, and the people that love me see it as a larger recognition than what I have received in Argentina, in Spain or in places where I have been for much longer.”
Indeed there seems to be a little bitterness from Pochettino, however keen he is to diminish his own playing career, about people not appreciating quite how good a job he has done since becoming a coach.
In the same interview he is asked if he would consider taking over at Newell’s Old Boys, the club where he won two Argentine championship titles, to steer them away from relegation in his homeland’s cash-strapped, crisis-ridden top flight.
The response was as polite and diplomatic as you’d expect from the softly-spoken 44-yearold but it is proof, if he needed much more of it, that what Pochettino is achieving in north London really appears to be passing them by in Buenos Aires.
He should rest assured, however, that Real Madrid and some of Europe’s other leading lights have taken note of the improvements he has made to Espanyol, Southampton and now Tottenham, whose surge up the Premier League table shows little sign of slowing.
The win over West Bromwich Albion, the margin of which was four goals but felt for large portions of Saturday afternoon as if it could reach double figures, is now the norm for this Spurs side.
The break from the norm was deposing cross-town rivals Chelsea earlier this month, ending their winning streak and confirming themselves as genuine title challengers for the second season in a row.
Gone, it seems, are the years when the “big four” was a closed shop.
The Premier League’s elite was blown open by Leicester City last season and, as that leading group looks to reestablish itself as “the top six”, it is Spurs and Liverpool, rising underachievers of the last decade, who are sitting pretty above Manchester United, Man City and Arsenal in pursuit of Antonio Conte’s men.
“In Europe they underestimate English football a bit,” Pochettino says. But is it also true that in England they underestimate him?
Because for all mind-games and the touchline histrionics among his rivals, it is Pochettino who is quietly doing something special, racking up wins as the cameras look elsewhere.
“I wasn’t a crack,” Pochettino said, but he appears to be realising that he is one now. – The Independent