Saturday’s late kick-off in the Premier League is as much about Nuno Espirito Santo and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as it is about Tottenham playing Manchester United.
Both managers are under mounting pressure ahead of the game, so much so that the game has been, rather cruelly, dubbed El Sackicko in some quarters. The bookies expect Solskjaer to be the next Premier League manager to lose his job after presiding over a 5-0 drubbing by Liverpool, of all clubs, at Old Trafford, of all places, last Sunday. Solskjaer unsurprisingly remarked that it was his “darkest day” in charge of the club.
His mood is unlikely to have brightened too much in subsequent days either with numerous media reports documenting discontent, distrust and disharmony in his dressing room. i understands that the axe will fall on the Norwegian if further heavy defeats occur against Spurs or Atalanta over the next week. Antonio Conte’s availability, fresh from ending Juventus’ hegemony in Serie A – that he himself started – with Inter last season, doesn’t augur well either.
Nuno hasn’t yet suffered a defeat on the same humiliating scale during his near four-month spell in charge of Spurs – although that first half against Arsenal was shudderingly bad – but results have been inconsistent and performances consistently lifeless. Nuno and Spurs is the Premier League’s equivalent to a Las Vegas wedding: nobody expects this union to last very long, including, it seems Daniel Levy, who offered him a two-year contract with a break clause midway through.
Spurs are sixth in the Premier League table and about where they should be based on the quality of their squad. But pre-season concerns from supporters over Nuno’s suitability for the role seem to have been vindicated very quickly. Only relegation-doomed Norwich City have attempted fewer shots and created fewer chances per game in the division than Spurs, whose goal difference currently stands at -4. Nuno hasn’t yet satiated Levy’s supposed desire to bring “entertaining football” back to N17.
Mauricio Pochettino, who has encountered problems of his own managing the egos at Paris Saint-Germain this season, is likely to be an interested observer this weekend. The Argentine still has a base in London and is close enough to pop back when he wishes to visit his footballer son Maurizio at Watford or else check in to Salt Bae’s infamous Nusr-Et restaurant in Knightsbridge. With PSG in action against last season’s Ligue 1 conquerors Lille on Friday, he may keep abreast of how his former club is getting on.
Pochettino managed Tottenham for almost five-and-a-half years, inheriting a ramshackle bunch and transforming them into Premier League title challengers and Champions League finalists. Ultimately, he paid the price for his own overachievement, losing his job just a few months after coming close to landing club football’s biggest prize. His early heads-up to Levy that Spurs required a rebuild to continue dining at European football’s top table has also proven to be painfully accurate.
Tottenham’s steep decline since the peak of the Pochettino era can be neatly surmised by their diminishing status on the European stage. They have gone from Champions League runners-up, to losing in the Europa League to a team whose manager had just been sent to prison, to qualifying for a third-tier competition ostensibly created to give teams from Gibraltar and the Faroe Islands a crack at continental football.
In Amazon’s fly on the wall All or Nothing documentary, Levy remarked that “time will tell” whether it was the right call to sack Pochettino and replace him with Jose Mourinho. Levy’s reported attempt to reunite with Pochettino in the summer was a clear acknowledgement that time has proven his decision to be a rash one.
In contrast to Spurs, Manchester United have never employed Pochettino in any capacity, although it’s understood they wanted to after firmly bidding adeus to Mr Mourinho. Pochettino was United’s first-choice target to take charge and they were reportedly willing to pay a sizeable compensation package, reportedly in the region of £20m, to prise him away from his Spurs contract. Tottenham ended up paying roughly the same amount to fire Pochettino and his coaching staff a year later.
Instead, United hired their hero of 1999, the match-winner in the Nou Camp. Solskjaer, whose managerial experience had spanned two stints at Molde either side of a Premier League relegation with Cardiff City, initially exceeded expectations, rode his luck in Paris and was handed a three-year contract by Ed Woodward, much to Rio Ferdinand’s delight. By the time Pochettino was sacked, Solskjaer’s feet were firmly planted under the manager’s desk in Carrington.
Solskjaer has done a decent job at United, steering them to third and then second place finishes in the Premier League and a European final. But plenty of fans will argue that recent results and more so, overall performances, indicate that his squad are no longer responding to his methods and that the experiment has run its course. Sections of Tottenham’s support base may feel the same way about their current head coach.
And so as a growing number of supporters at Spurs and United become increasingly dissatisfied with their club’s respective bosses, Pochettino appears to be an emblem of what each might have had instead. With his own future at PSG up in the air, a return to the Premier League to familiar surroundings or less so might be on the cards sooner rather than later.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3BkxBul
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