I’m an avid skin reader. Does it show (rhetorical questions don’t require question marks).

Anyway, Mr Ronay’s fuzzy framing of post Pochettino events at Southampton lost my interest – immediately after the headline had drawn me in.

The never quite was, element made sense, but I was struggling to identify a solitary respect in which the adjective ‘punkish’ could be applied to our man.

I see an ambitious man, a 47-year-old family man, who dyes his hair to stave off the very visible salt n pepper in his beard, and one who, unlike so many football managers, knows how to wear a suit without looking like he’s strayed from a wedding.

This is the lesson of Pochettino’s own strange, vibrant, trophy-less career, a place where the parameters of what can be achieved are pressed thin by larger forces.

Guardian

This sums up the thrust of the piece (once one can eventually find it) pretty well.

Barney’s analysis rather all too cosmetic. The ENIC nonsense about doing things a different way is sort of referenced, the resultant lack of spending and the paucity of decent football in recent times, but like the very subject this Guardianista is walking us through, there’s no climax. No focus upon those larger forces

Per Melvin Udall’s line in ‘As Good As It Gets’, “I’m drowning here, and you‘re describing the water!”, Barney doesn’t even hint at a remedy, there’s just something mumbled about the gaffer getting his coat.

Paul Hawksbee‘s take on Pochettino’s unenviable circumstances during the week was superb, largely because it provided a prognosis. Whereas, Dr Ronay has looked at the patient and muttered under his breath, “I don’t like the look of that.”

It has been a thrilling six-year span at Tottenham. Probably Pochettino should make his own move now when the time seems right: a very modern kind of manager, who has given us a very modern kind of success; but who seems, right now, to have reached a natural end point.

Hang on mate. I don’t know what medical school you went to, but pulling the plug on a patient, because everything has become a bit ‘samey’ smacks of gross negligence.

One thing Hawksbee mentioned was the lack of churn at Tottenham. The cold reality is that by and large, the dressing room is full of players that have heard it all before.

This factor is almost certainly the key one. By the time Eric Dier is randomly tossed the Captain’s armband for some random cup game, it is fanciful to believe that any of his teammates could be bothered to say well done to him. It’ll be going straight back to his mate Hugo, come the final whistle.

If as a Spurs’ player you get left out, or dropped entirely, the effect upon the dynamic of a side that never changes anything, must be suffocating.

Pochettino’s trophy-less diet of gruel has to stop in order for meaningful change to be effected.

Remind me, who’s running this AAA credit rated workhouse, again?