“Guys, keep this losing feeling with you,” Mauricio Pochettino said to his Tottenham Hotspur players sitting dejected and exhausted in the Wembley changing room after defeat to Chelsea in the 2015 EFL Cup final. “Use it and remember it, because if you do and if we get to another final, you won’t want to feel it again.”
He told them to watch Chelsea lift the trophy, wanting them to see what it feels like to stand atop that balcony as winners, to observe the elation on the faces of captain John Terry as he lofted the silver trophy with its blue ribbons above his head, Didier Drogba and Branislav Ivanovic on either side.
The players hadn’t wanted to, it had been a particularly galling defeat after all. Christian Eriksen had hit the crossbar at 0-0, Terry’s strike took a significant deflection off Eric Dier, the second was an own goal when Kyle Walker turned in Diego Costa’s shot.
Goals Harry Kane would describe as “scrappy” and “lucky”. Spurs had the majority of possession but Chelsea made their chances count. “It’s the worst feeling in the world,” Kane added.
Pochettino was typically optimistic. “Many steps in the right direction were taken that day” he wrote in his book, Brave New World.
But these were in his early Spurs days — midway through his first season — when it was all a brave new world and his bold, young side were impressing and surprising with thrilling football, and reaching a cup final was achievement in itself.
Almost a decade later, in his first season at Chelsea, Pochettino is back in the competition’s final but the pressures and perspectives are altogether different.
Pochettino, 51, is at a point and place in his career where managers aren’t afforded an awful lot of time to take steps.
Only Manchester City have won more trophies than Chelsea in the past decade and there is expectation that, even though Liverpool are strong favourites, they win on Sunday. Appetites have only been moistened by Liverpool’s growing list of injuries and Chelsea’s promising result against Treble-winners Manchester City last weekend.
And the personal pressure on Pochettino has been intensified by the fact he has still been unable to lift a trophy in English football when many — me included, having followed his career closely at Southampton and Spurs — predicted he would have a cabinet full of them by now.
Why is that? Like all things in sport, the answers can’t be found in scientific formulas or crystal balls. But are there hints of a propensity for over-thinking the big occasions?
Ahead of that EFL Cup final in 2015 Pochettino decided his players and staff would not stay in a hotel the night before the game, as is customary. Pochettino felt it would create more tension, rather than alleviate it. He wanted his players to turn up with freedom to play.
Four years later and, with more time available to prepare for the Champions League final against Liverpool in Madrid, Pochettino, riding a wave of hype and praise from all corners of the game, took things a step further by having his players take part in mind-over-matter mental coaching at Spurs Lodge, the club’s wellness and recovery facility.
Pochettino is known for his mystical, sage-like approach to life and football, and unafraid to discuss the energy of lemons and the power of auras in a world that tends to rail against the unusual.
I was fortunate enough to sit with the Argentinian, alongside a handful of journalists, ahead of that final when he spoke in depth about it. “It’s a superior energy that you can connect with if you have opened your mind,” he told us. “With some strategies, you can connect with this energy, that is around us, that nearly touches you, but if you are not open to receive this energy, you cannot feel it.
“This energy that is so powerful. That makes you feel invincible. And makes you not set limits. And one thing that is important is that when the competition arrives — we all have fears, it’s not that you are not going to fear anything, you are still going to have fears but you’re going to be free to work through them. People without fears don’t exist.
“The difference is the people who tackle their fears, who cope with them, and achieve. The other people are those that freeze with fear. Successful people have the same fears as other people. It’s just that they take them on.”
To master their fears, the players took part in exercises such as walking across hot coals and breaking a sharp arrow held to their throat.
But fear didn’t seem to be the problem in the Champions League final. It was key decisions, from both Pochettino and referee Damir Skomina, that cost Spurs that evening in the Wanda Metropolitano.
The hugely contentious penalty awarded after only 22 seconds when a cross bounced off Moussa Sissoko’s chest before hitting his hand. Pochettino deciding to drop Lucas Moura, who scored a hat-trick in the semi-finals to get them there, for Kane, who had been out for two months with an ankle injury. Kane was poor.
As were Liverpool, who had only 35 per cent possession and scored two of their three shots on target, Divock Origi sealing the result with three minutes remaining.
In moments of peace, Pochettino has probably let his mind wander to what might have been.
In an intriguing side note, Klopp had lost six consecutive cup finals — three at Liverpool — leading up to that final, before it became his first trophy at the Merseyside club. It remains a possibility that this season’s EFL Cup could be his last.
Maybe it is harsh to judge Pochettino by his two cup final defeats at Spurs, who he transformed into serious contenders. “It wasn’t a happy place when we arrived,” Pochettino later mused. “We had to throw open the windows, bring in some fresh air, change the mentality. We were being asked to turn a load of dirty, wrinkled laundry into a pile of clean, neatly folded and ironed clothes, all through a new philosophy.
“But it takes more than a week or a month to get people to buy into a system based on hard work and endeavour. The squad we inherited contained all sorts. However, unlike Southampton, where we found hungry players who didn’t want to be relegated, the Tottenham dressing room was full of figures who at some point in their careers had been considered stars but had lost their way. And the team didn’t come first.”
Again, some more parallels to his first season at Chelsea. A young squad and another load of dirty laundry. Only this one cost hundreds of millions of pounds, and they are expected quickly to pay returns on their significant investment in silver.
Winning a trophy on Sunday will go some way to satiate the supporters who are beginning to turn on the manager following a disappointing, inconsistent season in the Premier League that has left them mid-table and realistically contemplating next season without European football.
Pochettino has, at least, tasted success in France. A Coupe de France in 2021, a Ligue 1 title a year later. Still, Pochettino’s P45 followed a month after that which reflects the feeling among the owners about his achievements there.
Certainly, in the eyes of the geographical snobs those trophies have not completely shut down the argument that he can win silverware at big clubs.
It was, according to some accounts, a lack of attractive football that cost him the PSG job. Pochettino, like other managers before him, had his work cut out dealing with the egos and politics, his authority weakened by orders not to punish misbehaving stars.
But, ultimately, with Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar in his front three, there was a certain expectation of how exciting the football would be on the way to winning silverware. On Sunday, everyone at Chelsea would take a winner that went off a shin if it truly kick started the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital era, almost two years after it began, and laid some ghosts to rest for the manager.
Pochettino may once have told his young, inexperienced Spurs players to keep that losing feeling with them after that EFL Cup final defeat to Chelsea, but it will be a feeling he must shake if he is to become successful at Stamford Bridge and reach the heights his early career promised.
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