Ruthless. It’s a vital component to sporting success. All winners have it, Spurs don’t. And in terms of football, a team’s ruthless streak is more often than not an extension of the manager’s own. In sporting parlance being ruthless isn’t a propensity for unbridled aggression rather than an unrelenting determination to press home an advantage.
Indeed we can point to examples of it since the inception of the Premier League. .Manchester United, ruthlessness was indeed an extension of Alex Ferguson. Bristling, impatient, never taking their foot of the accelerator, never giving suckers an even break.
Chelsea under Mourinho were similarly ruthlessly determined, though not always pretty to watch. Under Arsene Wenger, Arsenal added a steely ruthlessness to their free-flowing, brilliant football. All three men shared this ruthless streak when it came to pursuing trophies. They didn’t do the ‘nice’ thing, they did the ‘right’ thing. The thing that would enhance their own and the team’s prospects of success. Guardiola is made of the same stuff.
It explains why none of them, and a few other managers besides them, would never have left Hugo Lloris on the bench when the club has waited twenty-eight years to win another FA Cup final? But Pochettino you see is nice, he’s decent. His Spurs team are also nice, decent, attractive to watch, easy on the eye.
But when it comes to being a winner, Pochettino falls short because he doesn’t do ruthlessness and neither does his team. If he did, Lloris would have been in goal against United, Alderweireld would have played in the centre of defence and Son would have been withdrawn long before the hour mark.
Tottenham at their usual best will come up empty-handed
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When Spurs went a goal up against Juventus in the Champions League they didn’t have it in them to go for the throat. Juventus’s equaliser sucked belief from the team, the second goal killed it all together. It was a similar story against Manchester United in the FA Cup semi-final.
One nil up and in the ascendency, Spurs believed they had already won the game with well over an hour still remaining. When Sanchez stopped diving all over Wembley for long enough to equalise, Tottenham’s day was done. The second goal merely confirmed the inevitable.
There are no winners in this Tottenham team, no leaders, no fighters and even more conspicuous, no ruthlessness. Their skill, flair and athleticism has won many admirers, and fair dues has to be paid to Pochettino for bringing the team as far as he has, but for all the skill as his disposal it has proven not to be enough to bring home a trophy…any trophy.
Pochettino is nice, he does the nice thing
He has constantly looked down his nose at the Carabao Cup, a trophy that Alex Ferguson was more than happy to win in 2010 when nothing else was on offer. A trophy win of any kind breeds a winning mentality and Pochettino needs to find that from wherever he can get it.
This season they will finish fourth, in my view for the last time, yet further away from a league title than the two previous seasons, while another FA Cup has slipped from their grasp and so too may a few of their star names who will surely start to think that the top of the hill has been reached, and may return the admiring glances that will come their way during the summer. Pochettino may or may not stay for another season. If he does he will move into a nice shiny stadium, but his character won’t change and he will not be given the money to move the team forward anyway.
Next: The Blues new look takes shape
Levy’s false economy of not paying top players top dollar will continue to undermine the club’s progress. Chelsea meanwhile will throw a few billion at their problems and Arsenal’s new manager won’t be shy in spending all of Wenger’s years of savings. Tottenham will arrive at their new, state-of-the-art stadium, but they will also arrive at a crossroads.
Success costs millions of pounds and it has been denied Tottenham supporters for far too long, but all the skill in the world without a ruthless streak wins nothing. The time is fast approaching for Joe Lewis, the club’s billionaire owner, to ask himself just what he wants from his shiny new toy and how much he’s prepared to spend to get it.