It’s almost blasphemy in English football circles to speak ill of Wembley, but Mauricio Pochettino will have to be sick of seeing that place.
In 2017, Pochettino’s Tottenham were forced to leave the comfortable confines of White Hart Lane, where they had just spent an entire season unbeaten, to the uncharted expanses of Wembley while their new stadium was being built. The Spurs ended up spending 18 months on Brent and their progress faltered.
Pochettino also missed three highlights at Wembley with Spurs, making Chelsea’s defeat to Liverpool on Sunday in the Carabao Cup their fourth consecutive defeat at the National Stadium in an independent match, and the most painful and damaging of all.
Forty-eight hours later, Pochettino was still dealing with the fallout from Gary Neville’s immediately memorable word about his Chelsea side in the match commentary.
Neville, for those who don’t know, described the festival as “[Jurgen] Klopp’s sons opposed to blue works of billion-pound bottles” after a header from Virgil van Dijk in the 118th minute secured a 1-0 win for a young, exhausted man. Liverpool in full extra time.
Speaking ahead of tonight’s unmissable FA Cup game five against Leeds United, Pochettino called Neville’s comment “unfair”, but the damage has already been done.
The ‘billion-pound jobs’ label now threatens to take over Chelsea and Pochettino, and may even go so far as to delineate and immortalise this new era at Stamford Bridge.
Jamie Carragher, Neville’s colleague and coaching partner, predicted on Monday Night Football that Chelsea would be known as the billion-pound bottler until they win something.
More pertinently for Pochettino, his Tottenham side have been referred to as “Harry Kane’s team” through Pep Guardiola, who has been delayed and may never shake off his “Spursy” label during his five-and-a-half years in charge.
Pochettino’s failure to win anything at Tottenham has not been forgotten and, rightly or wrongly, many Chelsea enthusiasts feel that he is not really a winner and that he has transported his Spursy all over London.
For me, Pochettino remains at the bottom of the list of culprits for Chelsea’s disappointing season.
Chelsea’s capitulation in extra time on Sunday and Pochettino’s unconvincing explanations of his functionality (adding the admission that his team were game consequences before Van Dijk’s attack) reinforced that view among his critics.
For me, at least, Pochettino remains at the bottom of the list of others to blame for Chelsea’s disappointing season and disappointment on Sunday.
He is guilty of gutting a Champions League-winning team, nor is he guilty of allowing more than £1 billion to be spent on an organisation of callous substitutes.
He is not the mastermind of a flawed business style that will likely force Chelsea to keep promoting academy players in order to stay within the Premier League’s rules of profits and sustainability.
Pochettino is innocent, but he presides over a disaster that is his fault.
One wonders, however, whether the ubiquity of Neville’s phrase could hurt Pochettino, and the framing of Sunday’s defeat did in fact heighten the sense that the head coach is likely to be the biggest victim of Chelsea’s dysfunction.
It is significant that after the game, Pochettino wondered wistfully if he had run out of chances to win titles in the UK.
When he left Spurs in 2019, Pochettino rightly belonged to an elite group of coaches, linked to jobs at Real Madrid and Manchester United. His next step will surely be at a European heavyweight and, of course, he embarked on Paris Saint-Germain. chaotic and with new money, no doubt, but with a leading trio formed by Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé.
There is still time for Pochettino to triumph at Chelsea and make the defeat to Liverpool a valuable lesson, just like at Spurs, where he also lost the League Cup final in his first season, but made a huge impact.
But if his time at Chelsea ends unsuccessfully, he will most likely leave his post with a tarnished reputation and his position among Europe’s elite coaches threatened.
As Pochettino himself has suggested, his players have time to forget about Sunday’s defeat and, with it, Neville’s bottlers label, but it may not be so easy for him.
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