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It’s 11 p.m. here in Australia on the 27th. Today has been quite relaxed. We trained in the morning and most of us had a nice, long siesta in the afternoon, almost four hours’ long.
We are low on energy.
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29 July. We’ve just got back to the hotel after the game against Atlético. We lost to a Godín goal, although we had the clearer chances. Janssen played again, as did Lamela and Eriksen.
Let’s go home.
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We got back from Australia on Saturday the 30th in the afternoon and found it hard to recover. Everyone had today (Sunday) off to enjoy family time. Back to work tomorrow.
2.
AUGUST
After one last pre-season fixture against Inter in Oslo, the curtain was raised on the Premier League. First up was Everton at Goodison Park before home games against a physical Crystal Palace side and a Liverpool team vying for Champions League qualification. The transfer window approached its conclusion with one more player expected to be added to the squad in the final hours.
Monday 1 August. Today was a great day. The players who had travelled to Australia joined up with the internationals who’d stayed in London. Hugo Lloris and Ben Davies, who reported back later because their countries performed so well at Euro 2016, also arrived. There was plenty to sort out. It was a meeting-filled day.
The least pleasurable aspect of it was sending some of the players back to the Under-21s. I sat down with Jesús and John McDermott and we spoke to each of the youngsters one by one to evaluate pre-season and explain the plan going forward. I’m sure some of them felt disappointed, although they seemed motivated to keep battling to break into the first team. Well-channelled frustration can be used to fuel ambition.
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Today, Tuesday, we performed various types of physical tests on the players who still needed to be examined. As the cardiologist was around, the coaching staff also took advantage and we got our tickers checked out. It turns out that all of us must take greater care of our health. It was a simple equation: stress plus a lack of exercise equals problems.
I turned 44 in March. I came back from Australia overweight and it wasn’t just me. We had some mammoth breakfasts over there! Given that the jet lag made it hard to get to sleep, we woke up very early. At 3 a.m. we were up and all we could do was wait for them to open the restaurant. We were already there by seven, with a breakfast of champions on the cards. Each morning, we ate enough to last us for two days: omelettes, toast, butter, jam, croissants, juice, fruit, sometimes even ham and cheese, coffee . . . It was crazy. So logically we all came back with some excess baggage.
We’re all going to go on diets and do some exercise, not purely for aesthetic reasons. We’ll ease ourselves into it: walks, some jogging and watching what we eat. We’ll try to help one another.
With a week to go until the Premier League kicks off, our recruitment isn’t yet done and dusted, which means pressure levels are only going to increase.
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I don’t like preparing for talks with too much detail. I think of a list of tactical topics and ask for some videos, but I don’t always use them. I don’t usually tell my coaching staff what’s going to happen in the talk either, or which route I’m going to take. Before going into the meeting room, I go over the content that I’ve prepared, I ask the people around me for their impressions, a whirlwind of ideas brews. Sometimes things might happen that make you change tack.
That’s just exactly what took place during the first pre-season talk. We’d trained well during the week with the whole squad and it was time to speak to everyone as a group. Miki stood up with his computer, as always. I usually stand up next to him by the big screen, but today I sat down to wait for the players to arrive.
Kyle Walker came into the room late. Not good. Something clicked in my head at that moment. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to make a speech. But they also need to watch something.’ I spoke for half an hour, or so it seemed to me.
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As we all know, we have our conscious and also unconscious minds. You educate a group, put yourself in your charges’ heads at certain moments, help them progress with their way of thinking or of doing things. That is relatively easy when there is no competitive stress. But when the competition starts, if you are not with a high level of activation and preparation, the other bit, the unconscious mind, takes over. It is what I call the ‘automatic pilot’, a way of behaving and thinking that we have been incorporating from birth and that undoubtedly takes us away from the principal objective and the things we should be doing.
When our title hopes were extinguished after putting in such a colossal effort throughout last season, finishing second turned into an insignificant prize. We lost sight of the fact that it would still be marvellous for our fans, like winning a trophy because it would mean finishing above Arsenal. The group lost its focus and started to get influenced by factors that, until that time, we had left in a room with a triple lock on the door. Up until that game against Chelsea, that insufferable 2–2 stalemate, holidays didn’t exist, nobody was focused on personal challenges at Euro 2016, transfers or improved contracts. It all remained locked away until that draw effectively meant the league slipped away from us and that door was flung wide open. Suddenly we were distracted and we forgot just how important it was to win our last two games against Southampton and Newcastle.
Our performance against Newcastle explained everything.
Football is a team sport and if it starts to revolve around individuals, or if your game doesn’t cohere and becomes disjointed, a relegated team can put five past you. Newcastle seemed to be geared up for a party, and we joined them in the celebrations.
At the end of the game and after I’d let off some steam in the press conference, Rafa Benítez came over to console me. By then, I was lucid enough to say, ‘Rafa, you’ve gone down. You’ll be playing in the second tier next season and we’re in the Champions League, without a qualifier. We came third! If you’d said that to me last year when the season started, I’d have said that was our hope. Our dream was to play in the Champions League at Wembley. Rafa, you don’t need to say anything to me!’
But I wasn’t totally truthful. The disappointment can make you feel like killing your players. And also yourself.
I spent the whole summer thinking that I had to remind them about all that when the moment came. Seeing Walker turn up late to the talk was the trigger I needed to tear into the group.
Part of my talk went something like this: ‘Football is a screen that shows you how a group co-exists. Lads, have a look at this video. I got goosebumps watching how in the friendly the other day, Fernando Torres ran after a loose ball in stoppage time, after 93 minutes of slogging it out and travelling for 30 hours the day before, without sleeping well. The guy sprinted to try to score after all that, when his side were winning 1–0. A player who has won everything and with a long trajectory in the game. That is passion. That feeling that you’re a footballer and you enjoy it, that’s what you need. Not that attitude we had at Newcastle where we showed a face that does not define us as a team. We didn’t seem to care and we were distant from what football is and the feeling that brought us together and got us to this point. You should be ashamed.’
And ciao. To hell with it.
*
We had to put that chapter to bed between ourselves and dig out all our feelings. So I said all that and more. I spoke about things that had happened, about respect and life. We all ended up red-faced, but I liked it.
It’s important to be honest with your players. Of course, they won’t all believe what you say. They might speak to a friend, agent or parent whose vision may not be in line with the coach’s. I prefer to open up and although putting your cards on the table isn’t always a good idea, in this case I was certain that they were wounded and if they didn’t get treated in time, it would be very hard to make a full recovery.
Of course, that talk will have no effect
if I don’t reinforce it tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and the day after that. In the following days I usually leave regular signs and reminders, in things I say in training or when we cross paths in the corridors of the training ground, so that they go over what was said a week or a month ago. It’s the same story when it comes to tactics. If we don’t go over everything we’ve worked on throughout the week on the Friday before a game, or even on the Saturday itself, they forget.
It’s a difficult era for managing footballers. These days you have to spell it all out for them if you want them to be comfortable, as if everything were plotted on a map. Managers nowadays are more like architects or highway engineers. You spend the day mapping out and reminding them of the journey because footballers’ concentration spans are shorter and shorter. The electronic gadgets surrounding us are to blame for the players constantly needing new sources of stimulation, so we have to aim for variety and try to keep their minds fresh.
It’s also true that not everything that happened at the end of last season is linked to the players and I’ve had plenty of discussions with the coaching staff about this topic. We had a big influence over what happened from the Chelsea game onwards. We’re directly responsible for it. Some things got away from us and that’s what we’re still evaluating now. The next time we find ourselves in a similar situation, we’ll certainly know how to manage it better.
*
It’s Thursday and we’re in Oslo for our last match before the Premier League season kicks off. We’ve travelled with an almost full squad for the first time, although Clinton N’Jie and Victor Wanyama have had to stay behind because of visa issues. The group is bedding in nicely.
Whenever there is a World Cup or European Championship, it makes for a tricky pre-season. Players report back later than usual and are often burnt out, short of motivation. You’ve got to try to make them feel comfortable. We don’t drop our standards, but we don’t bust any balls either. That’s why all our friendlies were scheduled to give them Saturday evening and Sunday off, and even Monday afternoon on occasion, so that they could enjoy some family time. After we face Inter Milan tomorrow, Friday, they will have their last full weekend free of competitive action for a long time – especially in the internationals’ case.
The training session after yesterday’s talk was highly productive. The lads were really focused, so we changed our minds about today’s session. Instead of doing tactical drills on the pitch, which is very physically and mentally demanding, we played them videos to run through some improvements, variations and footballing concepts that we want to introduce. I reminded them again that we’ve got to dig deeper and that it shouldn’t be necessary for the coaching team to be constantly pushing them; they need to find the winning mentality within themselves.
We have just arrived at the hotel, which has a lovely location overlooking a bay. I’m told that Javier Zanetti, who is now Inter’s vice-president, is waiting to greet us at the stadium.
*
Karina has just phoned me. My father-in-law has passed away. Rest in peace, Manuel Antonio Grippaldi.
He has lost his battle against illness and I’ve heard the news while abroad. I am far away from Karina again and she has to cope all on her own; Sebastiano is here in Oslo with me.
Football detaches you from everyday life and from pain, too. Word always reaches us late, we almost never have time to say goodbye.
*
I’m having trouble sleeping. Grief has taken hold of everything.
Sometimes we get worked up over stupid things and then, in a flash, your life can burn out like a candle. Here today, gone tomorrow. My wife is always planning twenty things at once. She wants to do everything like yesterday and I always say, ‘Whoa, hold your horses. Let’s do one thing at a time, because otherwise we won’t get anything done.’ But when you lose someone close to you, the temptation is to live life to the full.
We flew Manuel Antonio over to Barcelona a month before he died. He had bone cancer, metastases. He deteriorated rapidly in the last few months. It’s a big blow for all four of us, but especially for my Karina.
He had lived in Misiones, Argentina – in Eldorado, to be precise. He was a very active person and was football mad. When people like that are no longer able to stay active, they often will themselves to death. It’s amazing. It’s like . . . they can’t go on any more, as if they’ve nothing left to live for. As recently as six months ago, he still enjoyed playing football, going on bike rides and playing padel, and when he realised he couldn’t keep doing all those things, he checked out. I didn’t discuss all that with him when he came to Barcelona, because he wasn’t his old lucid self. There were times when he was with it, but he was pretty distressed. The treatment helped ease some of his pain and made his final days a bit more bearable.
All of my family, my parents and brothers, live in Argentina, and I can go a month without talking to them, without even exchanging messages. It’s not a rare occurrence: my wife and kids talk to my parents more than I do. Sometimes you imagine things, your mind is drawn to the worst-case scenario, and you say to yourself, ‘Why don’t you just call them today, you fool?’ But you get bogged down by things and you don’t pick up the phone. Then, if something terrible happens one day, you blame yourself. I miss doing everyday stuff with my wife and kids, and distance only heightens that feeling of missing things that I should not miss. There is a defence mechanism for that: on a daily basis, you repress lots of feelings, locking them away in a drawer. Unfortunately, you have to learn to put up walls to protect yourself from the outside world, otherwise you would become a ticking time bomb.
In this profession, or in fact whenever you are consumed by that passion for what you do, you sacrifice plenty of things. All sorts of stuff. It’s not that I envy him, but I find it hard to fathom being like Manuel Pellegrini, who has told me about his need to earmark space and time to read books, play golf and go to the cinema or theatre. Maybe we’ve got it wrong and working 12 hours a day, as we do, doesn’t mean you’re any more passionate than someone who does eight-hour days. When you’re young, you think that passion is about investing all your time in what you do, but perhaps it’s part of growing older and wiser to realise that the key is quality, not quantity.
For the time being, though, football pretty much commands all of my attention. On occasion I snap out of it. When I’m at home, for instance, or when something serious happens. But your mind continues to wander and you find yourself thinking about football even when you’re nowhere near the pitch.
*
We beat Inter 6–1. It can be easy to read too much into pre-season results because there are so many ways of interpreting them. Inter came into the game in poor shape. It was our first match with our internationals and we impressed. Four of the goals came in the second half, after we went into the break 2–1 up. You could clearly see that the team have taken the style of play on board, and several media outlets recognised that we made the right call by leaving the players who took part in the Euros behind in London. Though it flattered us a bit, the result confirmed that we can continue to be competitive whoever plays, thanks to our team structure.
The challenge is to keep it up for the whole season.
*
Back to the UK. After two days off, we held one-on-one meetings at the training ground to tell some of the players who haven’t been up to scratch during pre-season to shape up. Sometimes a good tournament can distract you. Transfer rumours are also unsettling and it can be helpful to sit down with a player to remind him that he has your confidence. The tune-up process has been accelerated because the season kicks off this coming weekend. Training on Tuesday (when we did a double session) and Wednesday was brimming with tactical content, not to mention collective work and individual fundamentals.
Last night we held a team dinner, which is a ritual I have maintained since my first season at Southampton. Usually, before the season starts, I take the players and coaching staff out for dinner. The first ti
me was soon after I joined the Saints, halfway through the season, and I had to pay with my Spanish card because we didn’t have English bank accounts yet. I let the players pick the place this time. In theory, I was supposed to split the bill with Harry Kane, as it was his way of celebrating being the top scorer in the Premier League last season, but I tricked Harry so I could pay the lot. Good food and fine wine – an excellent Nicolás Catena Zapata. A great group night out.
Today, Thursday, we did a recovery session and some video preparation for Saturday’s game against Everton.
Earlier this week, the press broke the story that Paul Mitchell – Spurs’ head of recruitment, who joined from Southampton, where we worked together – is set to leave. As a main spokesman for the club, I will have to respond to this when asked by the media.
We also had the annual meeting with referees, who always have new things to explain. At the beginning of the season, the rules tend to be applied more harshly, but afterwards they get more lenient. Anyway, after they had delivered their talk to the players, I asked the officials to hang around for just a little while longer, because I wanted to share with them some of my feelings about the end of the last campaign. I played some videos to back up my comments. I never put pressure on referees through the media, I never highlight their mistakes and I’ll never lay defeats at their door. But I do like talking things through face-to-face with them and discussing decisions, and even touchline behaviour.
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Some of the internationals are struggling to reach the level of the rest of the group. I’ve got to find a way to warn them that they need to do more. It’s not a physical issue, it’s about mentality.
Brave New World Page 5