After my recent return to the small screen, I noted that a number of good folk asking why I was banging on about Mauricio Pochettino? Well truth be told, it for a very simple reason, that so many fans still besotted by the Argentine, despite his ability to provide some entertaining football, which ultimately got us nowhere than to be globally humiliated in Champions League final. Every time Mourinho encountered the odd bump in the road, social media was awash with lost souls praying for the ‘magic’ one to return,
We’re coming up for a year since Mauricio was in post, and despite numerous articles linking him with sits vacant at some rather prestigious sides, the 48-year-old appears to still be no closer to securing a new job. A flicker of hope this morning as Poch’s name was linked with Manchester United again, but it turned out to stem from the utterly unreliable Daily Star, and yet that didn’t prevent The Mail and even the Guardian aggregating it, although the latter didn’t link back and the former buried the link half-way down the page.
There is no doubt in my mind that beneath all the berry happy and the glad handing, there was something very wrong at Tottenham when Pochettino was there, and that whatever the problem was, this secret was not kept in-house.
As I posited in the video, it was fine to brand Mauricio a miracle worker when he was here, it was also accurate to call him a Patsy as well, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but what is now going to be really awkward to explain away is how Daniel Levy was incredibly reluctant to let the Argentine sign players of his own choosing, yet allows Mourinho to heavily recalibrate the entire squad. Worse yet, to undertake such a formidable task against the backdrop of a global pandemic that is costing Spurs £3million in match day revenues for every fixture, plus, this is also in the shadow of a debt that has now wobbled itself up to close to a billion pounds.
There are more questions being raised about the relationship between Poch and Levy since he was fired than there were when he was still in office. Speculation probably isn’t helpful, but what we do know, is that Alasdair Gold was briefed that the club was calm, in fact never been so calm, just 24 hours before Levy dropped the axe. There’s an indicator of just how sinister the mood was inside Tottenham at the time.
Whatever the truth was about Pochettino and Levy’s relationship, it could well be the case that it is now preventing Poch from nailing the type of job he undoubtedly wants.