Mauricio Pochettino: My perspective of Jose Mourinho will never change - he is a top man

Despite their differences, the two managers hold a deep respect for one another which stretches back to their time together in Spain

Jack Pitt-Brooke
Tuesday 30 January 2018 21:43 GMT
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Mauricio Pochettino has called Jose Mourinho the 'reference' for all young managers
Mauricio Pochettino has called Jose Mourinho the 'reference' for all young managers

On the surface, Mauricio Pochettino and Jose Mourinho do not have much in common. One is a romantic Argentinean, who reached the top of the game as a player and is now committed to realising his vision of football – bold, aggressive and entertaining – in his career as a coach. Mourinho, of course, was never a high-end player himself and has had great success over the last 16 years with a very different style of play and coaching: controlled, cautious, rigid and scientific.

And yet Pochettino is closer to Mourinho than he is to any of his other rival managers in the Premier League. He looks up to him as a “reference” and says that he is “a very good guy, a top man”, despite what others might think of him. You might think that Pochettino and Pep Guardiola would get on better: two former top players with similar understandings of the game, and expansive, pressing styles. But they do not.

So when Mourinho takes his Manchester United team to Wembley on Wednesday evening to play Spurs, it will be as warm a meeting between managers as can be found at the top end of the league. And it all dates back to 2010-11, when Mourinho had just arrived at Real Madrid at the peak of powers and Pochettino was still an apprentice coach in his 30s, in charge of Espanyol.

After a game between the sides, Mourinho met Pochettino with a plastic bag of carefully-chosen gifts. There were two Real Madrid shirts for Pochettino’s two young sons, Sebastiano and Maurizio. And for Pochettino, a bottle of red wine from the famous Chateau Cos d’Estournel in Bordeaux. “Very nice wine,” Pochettino says now. “So expensive!”

It was, in Pochettino’s words at his press conference on Tuesday, “a very nice gesture”. It was also classic Mourinho, doing his homework, knowing about his opposite number, his two sons and his love of fine wine. Seven years on Mourinho is still like that: when he took his team to Yeovil Town last week, Yeovil manager Darren Way said that Mourinho knew everything about him, almost down to his children’s names, and that he “oozes class”.

Pochettino and Mourinho have got on well ever since. When Chelsea beat Spurs in the final of the Capital One Cup in March 2015, in Pochettino’s first season at Spurs, Mourinho went out of the way afterwards to compliment his defeated opponent. He congratulated Pochettino on his way and said that he was building a team to win trophies, compliments that he repeated again on Tuesday, saying that Pochettino has the attributes to continue as a top coach for years to come. Pochettino responded that day at Wembley, saying that it was “an honour” to play against one of the best managers in the world and that he was “lucky” to be thought highly of by the Chelsea manager.

Pochettino and Mourinho together at Old Trafford

Even last season, with the public perception of Mourinho starting to change after his disastrous third season at Chelsea, Pochettino insisted that his own view was undimmed. Mourinho’s achievements and his helpfulness towards Pochettino still counted for a lot. “For me always he will always be special, a special coach, a special one,” he said in November 2016. “We cannot forget all the titles he won. He was and is a reference for all the young managers. My perspective of him will never change.”

So perhaps it should have been no surprise at Pochettino’s press conference on Tuesday afternoon when he was just as positive about Mourinho again. “For me he’s a very good guy, a top man,” Pochettino said, a view that is not shared by everyone. “And of course, he’s a great manager, with all that he achieved. He was kind with me, very good.” The fact that Mourinho still finds time for opposition managers even now, eight league titles into his career, counts for a lot. “I think he was always natural with me,” he said. “You know, the higher you are, the more difficult it is. If you are successful, for people like him, it’s not easy, to make everyone happy.”

So even when the two have clashed in a technical area, that relationship, formed years ago in Spain, remains strong. “Every time that we saw in private, it was the same, it’s normal,” he said. “Sometimes we act here, in front of you.”

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