Getting drawn against Bayern in the Champions League is a bit of a nightmare for him.
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No Lewandowski though turns it into a 50/50 tie IMO. Bayern are the stronger team, but PSG have Mbappe and Neymar. They both need to turn up in these two legs.
Weve had , hes a magic you know and a serial winner you know, but none of them actually know how to win with us.
If he can't win a cup with a team full of superstars and billions in spending money then he's finished.
It's over for Poch but truth is it never even really began.
Mauricio Pochettino haunted by Tottenham years as Paris Saint-Germain threaten to implode
What a marvellous gift is Lille’s leading goalscorer to headline writers. His name is Jonathan David, he’s a 21-year-old Canadian with prospects, and though injwww.thetimes.co.uk
If you'd be so kind and paste the article here / justpasteit etc, it would be awesome.
But regarding the headline of this piece.. it really irritates me. What is meant under "haunter by Tottenham years" ?!? It's like he would have been some victim of things that happened here and now is haunted by those things. When in fact he was in charge. It is not some external factor - it is internal and down to him. He failed to get us over the line and now he is struggling to get PSG over the line. So clearly it is down to his ability and influence, not some ghosts from past that are impacting him.
If he plays against them like we did for the first 20 minutes last season PSG will be alright....but if its the next 70, then he is fucked. They'll rip his diamond to shreds like Munich did to us that night.
Veratti getting covid came at just the wrong time. He is key to the PSG midfield's stability.
IMO he was their MOTM vs Barca, a brilliant performance.
Very tuff game tonight, Bayern have to be favourites???? I'm pulling this out of the air as I don't watch a lot of other European games as I used to in this COVID world of ours.
Here you go mate:Could you post the article please,Guido 🇺🇦 ?
This is the Pochettino philosophy
It all starts with an idea.
Marquinhos intercepts the pass, and plays back to Keylor Navas. Under pressure from Lionel Messi, Navas passes to Idrissa Gueye, who plays back to Marquinhos, who passes forward to Marco Verratti. He plays out to Layvin Kurzawa, who returns the ball to Verratti, who passes to Leandro Paredes, who finds Gueye, who passes to Moise Kean, who comes back to Marquinhos. He spreads the ball left to Kurzawa, who crosses to Verratti, who flicks it onto Kylian Mbappe, who makes it 1-1 in the Nou Camp. Thirteen passes, 38 seconds, from one end of the pitch to the other, with eight players involved.
The fundamental idea of Mauricio Pochettino’s management is the positional game. Whether he is coaching the stars of Paris Saint Germain and Tottenham Hotspur, or the more humble academy graduates of Southampton or Espanyol, the idea is the same: to dominate the game by controlling the space, pursuing numerical superiority through your positions on the pitch.
Mbappe’s equaliser at the Nou Camp, the first goal of his hat-trick, was the perfect example of how Pochettino wants his teams to build up through the goalkeeper, dominate and attack.
It was a special goal but not a unique one. Remember when Spurs beat Everton 4-0 at Wembley in January 2018, and the glorious fourth that day. Hugo Lloris to Jan Vertonghen to Victor Wanyama to Ben Davies to Christian Eriksen, out on the left-wing. Eriksen back to Davies to Mousa Dembele to Vertonghen to Davinson Sanchez to Serge Aurier, forward to Harry Kane. He holds the ball up, feeds Aurier on the right, who finds Son Heung-min, who clips it forward to Dele Alli, who backheels the ball to Christian Eriksen, who sweeps the ball in. Fourteen passes, 35 seconds, from end to the other, with all 11 players involved.
That was one of Pochettino’s favourite Tottenham goals, the perfect example of the positional game in action, Spurs moving around and through Everton.
Another Pochettino favourite came from November 2015, just over one year into his tenure. Spurs were 2-1 up on Aston Villa in added time. Kyle Walker won the ball, found Erik Lamela, who exchanged passes with Eric Dier, and went back to Toby Alderweireld, who returned the ball to Lloris. He played out to Ben Davies who drove forward, played a one-two with Josh Onomah, found Eriksen, who played in Lamela, who played a first-time pass to Kane, who nailed his finish. Eleven passes, 33 seconds, nine players.
In all three of these goals, and plenty of others scored in Pochettino’s 12-year managerial career, the same characteristics are there. The precise way they play out from the back, never hoofing the ball long. The way the centre-backs split and drop. The way the full-backs provide width. The way possession is used as a means to dominate, but never the end in itself. The way the attacking players adopt the correct positions to give their team-mates options approaching the final third.
The striking thing about these goals, and Pochettino’s teams at their best, is how well structured they are in possession. They are not quite as rigid as Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, but that is the closest comparison from any other style of play in the game. And the advantage of being this organised in possession is that it allows Pochettino’s teams to do the one thing they are most famous for: press.
It takes a good organisation and structure in possession to be able to win the ball back quickly. Pochettino likes to tell his players to press hard for the first three seconds after they lose the ball before retreating. And to do that effectively, they need to be in the right positions. You defend the way you attack, as Pochettino says, rather than the other way round.
This vision of the game informs everything Pochettino does on the training pitch. All of the double sessions, Gacon endurance tests, walking on hot coals and so on are geared towards getting his team to play like this. No matter which team he is coaching, he drills the players to see the game like he does, to take up the positions he demands, and to dominate the game through their positions on the pitch.
Just ask Rickie Lambert, one of the stars of Pochettino’s Saints.
“The biggest difference between Poch and all the other managers I played under was the way he looked at football”, Lambert tells The Athletic. “He sets you up in a specific position, and so much detail goes into it.
“For example, say a ball comes from a throw-in and the other team scores a goal. Poch won’t say anything about the goal, he’ll go back to the throw-in and say someone wasn’t stood in the right position, or we let someone out too easily. He’d say that’s where we need to improve. It was brilliant the way he changed my way of thinking.”
Or Jos Hooiveld, who quickly learned about the game Pochettino wanted to play. “He was really clear about his ideas,” he tells The Athletic. “He came with respect, but it was his idea and his vision. He just had to make sure everyone believed in his vision by showing them it could work. We picked it up fairly early on because he was very detailed.”
Pochettino has such belief in the positional game that he always wants his teams to play this way, no matter who they are up against. That has been true throughout his career, whatever level of players he is coaching. Southampton learned that in their second match under Pochettino.
“He set up us in all these positions so we could press the other team,” Lambert remembers. “He didn’t care who it was, whether it was home or away, we were always going to press. We played Man United and I think we went 1-0 up but they came back and won 2-1. Alex Ferguson later said that we were the best team they played at Old Trafford all season.”
Between the theory and the realisation on the pitch lies mountains of work. And what underpins all of that work is the second aspect of Pochettino’s approach to management: his relationship with his squad. Because all that tactical theory would be irrelevant if Pochettino could not convince the players to believe in him.
Pochettino’s job, and one that he relishes, is to make his players feel part of something. Those bonds of loyalty are what make the football come to life on the pitch.
In some jobs, this is easier than others. At Espanyol, Pochettino took over a struggling team, and while he arrived with the credit that comes from being a legendary player there, he still had to convince his former team-mates that they were good enough to fight their way out of the relegation zone. At Southampton, Pochettino arrived with no experience of English football but he found a team on an upward trajectory. They had earned consecutive promotions, they were pushed by the ambitious Nicola Cortese and the players believed they could achieve anything.
But Pochettino still needed to win his new players over, even across the language barrier. Danny Fox remembers one day, a couple of weeks after Pochettino arrived, being called into his office by assistant Jesus Perez, who interpreted between the two men.
“I remember Mauricio asking me to tell him everything about myself,” Fox tells The Athletic. “I reeled off a few things. He asked, ‘Why didn’t you say that you were a Premier League footballer?’. I replied that’s just not the way I am, I would never say that. He told me I am a Premier League footballer, and that I should say that. It was little things like that. I was in his office for close to two hours. This was a fella who can’t speak English, but talking through his assistant there was no awkwardness. It was just people who enjoyed talking about football.”
That meeting is very typical of Pochettino. Of course, all managers speak to their own players but Pochettino is a man who wants to share everything with his players, clearing space in his diary, often making sure he has no scheduled meetings after training, so that he can speak with whoever he wants, for as long as they need. Everything should naturally flow.
Lambert tells a similar story about getting called into Pochettino’s office to be told that he had been called up for Roy Hodgson’s England squad for the first time. “It was a lovely moment for me, my family and Poch,” Lambert says. “I could tell how much it meant to him. He called me into his office and gave me a big hug.”
At Tottenham the initial task was harder because of the mess that Pochettino inherited after the 2013-14 season, when neither Andre Villas-Boas nor Tim Sherwood could organise or motivate a disaffected squad.
In an attempt to bring the players together, Pochettino instituted handshakes at Spurs every morning before training. After he had planned the day’s activities, Pochettino would sit on a sofa in the canteen, waiting for the players to arrive for breakfast. They would shake hands with him and with each other. (When Dele Alli did not shake hands with Pochettino before a canteen meeting early on in his time at the club, he was warned not to make the same mistake again.)
That encapsulates one of the challenges of management, finding the right balance between encouraging the players to act a certain way while not forcing them to. So while Pochettino has high expectations in terms of behaviour, he does not want to enforce them.
For that reason, Pochettino has never believed in fining his players for minor disciplinary issues. In his view, the players deserve their salaries, and even then the club cannot especially hurt players by fining them when they are already so rich. The challenge of motivating the squad is to get all the players to buy into the group ethic and the manager’s philosophy because they sincerely believe in it, not because they are scared of getting punished if they do not.
While Pochettino wants a close relationship with his players, there still must be some distance. Pochettino and his staff will never go into the players’ dressing room at the training ground. They believe that space is the players’ sanctuary and the coaching staff have no business there.
Every manager in football can keep the first eleven happy. The challenge is to make sure that the whole squad is engaged in the success of the team, even the ones who are not playing. Pochettino is not very keen on being asked by players why they are not in the team, and some who have confronted him in the past about a lack of opportunities have not got much of a reply. But in Pochettino’s mind, no player has an automatic right to get in the team. As he always says, when a player signs a contract at a club, he signs to train, and to be available to play. The contract itself does not convey a right to play.
At the start of Pochettino’s first season at Spurs, Harry Kane was behind Roberto Soldado and Emmanuel Adebayor in the pecking order. If Danny Welbeck had joined Spurs rather than Woolwich, Kane would have been fourth choice and might even have gone back out on loan. After a poor display away at Partizan Belgrade he did not even make the bench for a league game against West Brom. Kane was dismayed and wanted answers from Pochettino. But that was the moment when he realised he had to improve to get into the team.
One of the successes of Pochettino’s time at Spurs was forging those same bonds of loyalty even with the players who were not always in his first eleven. The key for him and his staff was to keep the other players in good condition, able to help the team and most importantly believing that they would be useful.
Every Christmas, when the games are relentless and the players are tired, Pochettino would rotate more, bringing in players who were not first choices before. And his Spurs team was consistently the best in the country over that busy Christmas period. From their four league games over Christmas, they took 10 points in 2014-15 and 2015-16, a full 12 points in 2016-17, back to 10 in 2017-18 and then nine in 2018-19.
The same was true at Southampton, and explains why even players who lost their places and were even let go by Pochettino speak so warmly about him. “He was so encouraging to everyone in the squad,” Fox remembers. “He treated every single person the same regardless of who they were, whether that was the likes of Rickie, Adam (Lallana), Morgan (Schneiderlin), or players like myself who had only played a few games, or were on the bench a lot. We were all treated the same.”
“The toughest job is keeping everyone happy, especially when you’ve got a lot of good players like we did at Southampton. Everyone seemed to be happy whether they were in the squad or not. Everyone liked and had the respect for Mauricio and his staff. He treated us all like human beings.”
Motivation alone is not enough. Not to win games as consistently as Pochettino’s teams have done. For that, you need the other crucial aspect of his coaching: trying to improve every single player. Whether in terms of technique, fitness, psychology, every aspect of the game is there to be worked on.
Underneath all the hugs and meetings and handshakes lies a vast network of numbers, measurements and science, all to make sure that every one of his players is progressing in the right way. While some aspects of Pochettino’s methods have stayed the same since Espanyol, others have evolved with the progress of sports science.
To have a training process that pushes players to the limit but not beyond, you need a functioning monitoring regime first. So players have saliva tests every morning before breakfast, with Pochettino’s staff keen to measure their muscle damage, fatigue and hormone response. This way they can measure the players’ readiness to train and to see if any of their players are more likely to pick up an injury. Prevention of injuries is hugely important and nothing is left to chance.
This allows Pochettino and his staff to push the players as hard as they can, to get them ready to play that physically demanding, high-pressing football. Because if you are one of Pochettino’s players, you have to work exceptionally hard.
It all starts in pre-season.
Pochettino’s favourite way to get his players fit in pre-season is the Gacon test. This was invented by Georges Gacon, a French fitness coach who worked with middle-distance runners before moving into football. The test gets the players to run for 45 seconds then rest for 15 seconds, with the distance they cover increasing 6.25 metres each time from an initial 150 metres. Gacon invented the test to push players’ maximum aerobic capacity (VO2 max).
Gacon worked at PSG in the late 1990s, trying to improve the players’ physical condition, where he introduced the test. When Pochettino signed for PSG in 2001, Gacon had left but his test was still a big part of how PSG trained, and it has been part of Pochettino’s approach ever since. “I am honored that he is a fan of my 45+15 test”, Gacon told The Athletic via email.
“I remember going to Austria and Spain for pre-season, it was so tough,” Fox remembers. “He had us doing Gacon runs, he would be telling us it was easy, we would run for a bit, then wait, then go again. But it seemed to keep going and going. He’d be saying it was easy, ‘Keep going!’. But, oh my god!”
But the hard work does not stop when the season starts. Rickie Lambert remembers how demanding the physical training was on Mondays, when the players used to do 12 horseshoe runs of the training pitch.
“Training was so intense after games on Mondays,” Lambert says. “I used to think, ‘What the fuck is this?’. For the fit lads it was just a jog for them, but for the big lumps like me it was a tough ask.”
So Lambert went to Pochettino to complain. “When myself and Jos (Hooivelt) went to see Poch he had a big smile on his face. Poch was nodding his head and saying ‘I understand, Rickie’. I was probably foolish to think he was listening to what I was saying. I’ve gone back to the lads to give them the good news, and I’m buzzing with myself.”
Lambert was in for a shock. “We played on Saturday, had training on Monday and instead of doing 12 horseshoe runs, we do 24. That was the point where it was like: you either go with him or you don’t. That was the moment where we decided to go with it. Not one of us said anything about it after. Poch really pushed us when he started to know us more. Initially I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is crazy’. But we all improved, and that was the fittest I had ever been in my career.”
Playing for Pochettino means having to work harder than you have ever worked before, and you do it all not only under the watchful eyes of his loyal staff, but in front of the cameras too. Pochettino likes to record every session, even in the gym, just so he knows who has been working and who has not.
You also get fewer days off than you would for other managers. For Pochettino, the point is to respect the game, the principles of elite sport and the players themselves. That respect is conveyed by trying to make all the players better, even the ones that are not in the first team. During international breaks it might be easier to give the non-selected players time off, but if you play for Pochettino you will still be working hard. Some players might not enjoy it but when Lucas Moura hit a second-half hat-trick at Ajax at the end of a tiring 2018-19 season in which he had never played for Brazil but still pushed to his limits with Tottenham, you could see that it was worth it.
At the heart of the Pochettino approach is the double session. In the middle of a week when there is not a midweek game, the players will have to train twice. After their morning session and then a three-hour rest break, the players will be back in for a second session. This session will take place in the gym, but it is not a traditional weight-lifting session. It is about functional movement, and the patterns of movements that players need in a game.
The theory is that in playing football there are four actions: running, jumping, competing for the ball and kicking (or throwing) the ball. These power sessions focus on each of those four actions, with varying resistance and repetitions, trying to build up the players’ power and endurance over time.
At Tottenham, Pochettino was able to work in a high-quality gym, thought to be the best power gym for footballers in the world. But at Southampton he had to work in a Portakabin, for what they called “Spanish Gym”.
“Wednesday was the gym day,” says Fox. “It was 11-v-11, everyone had to be at it, it was all go. The way Mauricio is on the sidelines, he wants everyone to press and win the ball back as high as possible. Then we’d go home and come back for the gym. It was something I have never done before, and I’ve never done since I left Southampton.”
There was a VertiMax machine, with elasticated bands attached to a plate, players running out and coming back. There was a Keiser power rack, which Pochettino’s staff would push back down just as the players were squatting it back up. “We used to do weight training, running, and it was really difficult,” Lambert says. “They loved Luke Shaw because he was 17 at the time and he broke all sorts of records. Poch created an environment where lads would be in competition with each other, trying to get fitter and stronger.”
“The first few times I remember thinking, ‘What the hell is going on here?’,” Fox says. “I remember lads going outside to be sick. But it was all part of Mauricio’s plan to get everyone as fit as possible.”
But there is more to Pochettino’s training than just double sessions and power. He also likes doing cognitive training with the players, covering walls with electric lights that players have to reach, to test their reaction times.
And not all of the double sessions are decided by Pochettino himself. At Tottenham, the group of attacking players (usually Kane, Son, Dele and Eriksen) would organise a second double session during clear weeks, as well as the power session everyone did. The strikers, led by Kane, would spend 45 minutes working with three academy goalkeepers (never the professionals), practising different attacking movements and patterns and finishes. They would go back through old clips of their recent attacking performances, rival strikers, rival goalkeepers, seeing which keepers come off their line and which stay on it, testing out which finish might work under different conditions. Anything to get an edge.
“I’m not going to lie, I didn’t like him at first because he pushed me to my limit,” Lambert says. “He did actually break me at one point. It wasn’t nice at the time but once you accept it, and go along with him, that’s when you see the true benefits. Physically and mentally, he pushes your game to a whole new level.”
In the summer of 2013, Pochettino wanted to find a way to take his Southampton team to the next level. So he called his old friend Xesco Espar, the former coach of the FC Barcelona handball team. When Pochettino had started coaching at Espanyol he had read Espar’s book, Jugar con el corazon (“Play from your heart”), loved it, and struck up a friendship with Espar.
A few years later, Pochettino went to Espar for advice. He told his old friend that he had an incredible team at Southampton, but that they did not believe in themselves enough. They only wanted to stay in the Premier League, Pochettino wanted to expand their ambitions, to do something with their hearts and minds.
So in pre-season, Pochettino took his players to Espar’s base in Spain to try out his motivational techniques. “At first with footballers, especially from British culture, it’s a bit like you’re not going to do that,” Fox remembers. “But everyone was on board. And then he sent us outside.”
Espar had the Saints players and staff walk over hot coals, a technique he had learned from American motivational speaker Tony Robbins. The players were told to take their shoes off and focus on something that motivates them as they walked across. Danny Fox remembers walking across and shouting “No more Gacon runs!” as he completed his.
Six years later, Pochettino called Espar again. Tottenham had just qualified for the Champions League final, against Liverpool in Madrid. They had done the impossible in getting that far but now Pochettino wanted to focus on their mentality ahead of the final. He wanted to make sure the players would recognise their fears, tackle them and overcome them in the build-up to the final.
He set aside 45 minutes every morning in the build-up to the final to work on his players’ mentality, as well as bringing Espar over, 10 days before the final, to run some more sessions, to develop the players’ emotional state.
As well as walking on coals, Espar also had the players snap an arrow with their necks, to show the courage and strength required for a task like that. And Espar taught the Spurs players something he has discussed with Pochettino many times, about the four pillars that create your emotional state.
The first pillar is your posture, which creates your emotion. The second pillar is movement. The third pillar is where you focus. And the fourth pillar is your inner dialogue. With these four pillars the players could manage their emotional state.
They did exercises to show the importance of each pillar. They shook hands with one another, first with the idea that they were wasting their time, then with the idea that they were a salesman on commission, desperate to impress a customer. They were asked to recreate their celebrations on reaching the Champions League final, embodying that emotion, as difficult as that is.
Equipped with this knowledge, the players could walk over the hot coals knowing that, no matter what happened or whatever setbacks they may face, they could not change their emotional state. “It’s not that you have no pain,” Espar explains to The Athletic. “It is that the universal energy protects you when your emotional certainty is at its top level.”
If there is a final ingredient to the Pochettino management, beyond the intricate style of play, the intense training and gym work, it is this spiritual side. Pochettino is a great believer in “energia universal”. “It is a superior energy that you can connect with, if you are open, if you have opened your mind,” he explained to a few journalists in a room at Spurs’ training centre just before the 2019 Champions League final. “With some strategies, you can connect with this energy, this energy that is so powerful, that makes you feel invincible.”
All Pochettino’s life he has felt a connection with this energy, and all of his career he has felt able to read and channel and embody it. (That is why his office at Spurs contained a bowl of lemons, because they absorb negative energy.)
For Espar, this almost spiritual ability is Pochettino’s greatest strength. “One of the main traits of great leaders is you have to inspire people to be better than what they are,” Espar says of Pochettino. “Because you see the greatness in the players before they even see it. He is able to talk with the players, convey that universal energy, and make them even bigger than what they are now. This is his gift. He believes in other people, and other people, when they talk with him, believe in themselves.”
Mauricio wins the CL, you just have to laugh don’t you. Leaves Spurs and wins the CL in his 1st job is about as Spursy as one can get
Bit quiet in here tonight. Would be more impressive if he won in Zagreb against Andy Dufrense
That second leg is going to be really interesting. Especially depending on how Bayern's injured and sick players recover.
This felt a bit like our home game vs Real. Where the players didn't play "Poch's" football. Bayern basically controlled possession and PSG put away 90% of the chances that they got while Bayern were wasteful.
I wonder if they still do the Gacon endurance runs now that Poch has left?
I don't think some of our players look as fit as they did under Poch so i'd be interested to know what Jose's team does for physical training. To me anyway we don't look a particularly fit team when in our peak Poch years we looked like monsters.
I don't think some of our players look as fit as they did under Poch so i'd be interested to know what Jose's team does for physical training. To me anyway we don't look a particularly fit team when in our peak Poch years we looked like monsters.
Arguably his biggest test since the CL final tonight.
Should be a cracking game
Yep really should.
Qatar against who?