Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino has claimed another club would have lost patience with Moussa Sissoko long before his transformation from laughing stock to leading man.
Sissoko is due to start for the ninth time in a month in tonight’s League Cup semi-final against Chelsea after making himself an indispensable part of Pochettino’s squad.
The Frenchman initially struggled following a £30million move from Newcastle in 2016 and he would surely not have been afforded the same patience elsewhere, including at Stamford Bridge.
Chelsea’s own big-money French midfielder, Tiemoue Bakayoko, a £40m signing from Monaco, was loaned out in the summer after one disappointing season in England.
Pochettino knows cash-strapped Spurs cannot afford to be so picky and says he was given the job five years ago to improve players like Sissoko. “I love to work with players and help them to improve,” Pochettino said.
“To be honest that is why [chairman] Daniel Levy offered me the contract. At Espanyol and Southampton, we worked so hard to improve players.
“Maybe at another club, after one year if it doesn’t work it is easy to move on the players without giving them the opportunity to adapt.
“Sometimes you need patience to give your best. There is too much pressure [on players] sometimes. Tottenham is a very good club to come to because if you struggle for six months, you still have the opportunity to show your quality. At other clubs you don’t have that.”
Unlike his contemporaries, Pochettino has been improving players as much out of necessity as choice — with Spurs unable to compete with their top-six rivals in the transfer market — and he could not resist a comparison with Manchester City, who have signed two new goalkeepers for a combined £50m since Pep Guardiola’s appointment in 2016.
“I don’t like to talk about another team but one example, who was the keeper of City when Guardiola arrived?” asked Pochettino. “Joe Hart. [But Pep says], ‘I need a keeper to play with their feet. Who is the best? Claudio Bravo.’
“After one year — it’s Ederson. With money, that is how you build a team. If you arrive at Southampton and you have a keeper and want to play from the back, you need to improve a player to play from the back. You cannot go to the market and buy the best keeper. That is the difference. Chelsea, Arsenal, City, Liverpool, [Manchester] United — and us — are all building to win. But when the people put us in the same level with expectation, it’s unfair.”
With Mousa Dembele not fit enough for a place in tonight’s squad despite returning to training, and Victor Wanyama and Eric Dier still sidelined, Sissoko will again be pivotal to Spurs’s hopes of taking a step towards a first piece of silverware under Pochettino.
Tottenham inflicted a first defeat on Sarri in English football with a 3-1 win at Wembley in November and the result has proved a turning point of sorts in both clubs’ seasons. Spurs have since established themselves as contenders for the Premier League title, while Chelsea have fallen away as cracks have begun to appear in Sarri’s system.
Pochettino deployed Dele Alli on Chelsea’s metronome Jorginho in November, a tactic he is likely to replicate tonight.
