da gbg bet： The Pochettino era in north London is over and the final summation makes for mightily impressive reading. In five full seasons the Argentine guided his team to an average third place in the Premier League. He has overseen the emergence and stratospheric development of Dele Alli and Harry Kane. Last May he took Tottenham to a Champions League final, an achievement made all the more remarkable by an enforced tenancy at Wembley and by virtue of no signings being made the previous summer.
da luck： Spurs may not have won a trophy during Pochettino’s tenure but in terms of pride, profile and memories made this was their most successful period since the early 1960s.
Sadly and inevitably, however, as so often is the case in football, the final chapter to their fairy tale did not end well. In the manager’s last 24 league games in charge they accrued just 24 points while a failure to win away from home extends to almost the entirety of 2019. In September they exited the EFL Cup to League Two’s Colchester. A week later they were hammered 7-2 at home to Bayern Munich in the Champions League.
So much of this sustained decline has been put down to staleness within the squad as the cycle of Pochettino’s project gradually petered to a full-stop and there is probably a lot in this. Give or take a new face or two this is the same core of players who ran Leicester so close in 2016 and it is unreasonable to expect a group to intensely invest daily in repetition over such a prolonged period without a drop-off occurring at some juncture.
In recognising this, the coverage of Pochettino’s departure has been unusually fair with the 47-year-old’s popularity within the media and a general feeling that he over-achieved at Spurs also factors. This is a welcome development.
Yet of course there has to be a bad guy, someone to blame, and that is especially true when a coach of a top six club is sacked out of the blue. Simply put there is just too much content demanded for there not to be.
Enter stage left, looking a bit like a Bond villain, Daniel Levy. In the mostly positive narrative that has surrounded the club in recent times the Tottenham chairman has long been cast as the kill-joy. After all it is he who has a turbulent relationship with the Spurs fan-base due to his parsimonious ways.
It is he who insists upon a prohibitive wage cap that has – directly or otherwise – led to player unrest.
It is he who has overseen a transfer policy that has Tottenham competing with the elite while spending considerably less than they do.
Even when focusing solely on the past 18 months Levy’s governing of the stadium move resulted in a series of costly postponements, while pre-empting this his prioritising of funds meant that in a summer when Spurs were on the precipice of doing something very special their manager was financially handcuffed.
Is it any wonder the squad grew stale in such circumstances?
Just as pertinently it was Levy who became embroiled in an ensuing power struggle with Pochettino, a situation that is never conducive to title-challenging football. Where once the pair sang from the same hymn sheet now they scribbled different tomes in separate libraries.
There will be no defending of Daniel Levy in this article, none at all, except to say that once again we have borne witness to the most tiresome trope in football. A club underperforms and the man in charge pays the price with his job. That man is then hauled over the coals or failing that the club’s hierarchy are condemned. Meanwhile the players – the individuals who have most facilitated the club’s downfall – get off scot-free.
Does Christian Eriksen deserve to get off scot-free? Back in June, Spurs’ creator-in-chief agitated for a move saying: “I feel that I am at a stage of my career where I would like to try something new”. When no transfer was forthcoming the Dane found himself in limbo and consequently this season he has looked a shadow of his former self.
Does Toby Alderweireld deserve no rebuke after allowing a contract stand-off to dominate a crucial window’s worth of business for the club? What about his fellow want-away defender Jan Vertonghen whose form has been consistently poor this term?
Broadening our glare this season has seen a notable fall-off in distance covered per game and sprints committed to. Is this the result of Pochettino suddenly amending his long-held philosophy and advocating a lower block? Or is it much more likely that the players have not been displaying the same levels of hunger, intensity and fight?
More so, it was suggested this week that the coach ‘lost the dressing room’ when the players began to sense that he longer had the same passion for the job at hand. This smacks of deflection and of players closing ranks and excusing themselves.
Not that they have to, of course, because in the modern era footballers are immune from blame when things go awry.
It’s the manager or the board.
It is chronic under-investment or that most generic of get-out clauses ‘morale’.
It’s never them is it.