Brave New World

by Guillem Balague

  We started the 2013–14 campaign with a victory away against West Brom, with a penalty right at the end, and by the fifth week we went to Anfield with five points. Liverpool were the unbeaten leaders. We began well but Gerrard had the best chance in the first half. I was happy with our pressure, the running, the movement, and felt we were in with a chance in the second half. Less than ten minutes into it, Dejan Lovren scored his first goal for the club after heading Lallana’s corner. We left Anfield with the three points and, in fact, we managed to lose only once in the first 11 games of the season. We were flying.

  I recently read something written by Jody Rivers, a youth coach and Southampton fan, in which he recalled a moment that perfectly encapsulated what that team were about. We went a goal down to Manchester City and Jody wrote that most Premier League managers would’ve asked their side to sit back and stay organised so as to stem the opposition’s momentum. But within a minute of the goal, ‘Luke Shaw was played in behind the City backline and from the byline crossed to the back post. Arriving? Calum Chambers. The right-back. Full-back to full-back. Chambers headed wide but Pochettino jumped and applauded the move. The bravery of young players.’ We ended up drawing that game.

  Les Reed often told me that we took the Premier League by surprise. That we taught the small boys not to be scared of the big ones, Leicester City being the ultimate consequence of that attitude. Managers and coaches kept asking Les how we trained for the high–pressure game, wanting details of our work. We started getting visitors from all over the place. Les, and others, felt that the Premier League had moved too far from its usual fast and aggressive style, there being too much emphasis on passing, on keeping the ball. And that we brought back the necessary aggression, pressing high and all over the park, a tactic that had not been seen before, or at least not for a long time.

  A number of our players began to believe that the sky was the limit. Rickie Lambert, Jay Rodriguez, Calum Chambers, Luke Shaw, James Ward-Prowse and Adam Lallana (the last of whom played in central midfield, a position usually reserved for more physical players in England) have all since won international caps. All except James subsequently signed for other clubs for big transfer fees. José Fonte, Morgan Schneiderlin and Steven Davis, meanwhile, became established Premier League regulars.

  Whereas at Espanyol I felt like a father figure to the lads, at Southampton I was more like a big brother. What’s more, it was our best year as a family. In the summer of 2013, Karina and the kids moved to Southampton. Sebas had finished secondary school and began university there, while Mauri joined the club’s academy and went to a local school. We lived in a beautiful house, one of those modern, prefab-type German houses. It was in the middle of a forest, so we had deer – ‘Bambis’, in my wife’s words – frolicking in our garden all day. It was the stuff of dreams. As Karina told me recently, ‘It was the first time in almost twenty years that I enjoyed a whole year, including all the football.’

  People were lovely and treated us wonderfully. As for Nicola . . . he was a character. He has a strong personality and knows his mind. But the same goes for me, and we didn’t agree on everything. We clashed on a few occasions – including once when he promised a player a particular shirt number when it’d already been given to someone else.

  One day he told me I wasn’t as bold a thinker as I fancied myself to be. He wanted us to make the players wear head cameras in order to find out what they were thinking and seeing while they played, because he felt that some (and Lallana especially) were making very poor decisions. Since you should always treat your chairman with respect, I side-stepped the issue and said that what Lallana really needed was for us to make sure he had more passing options. ‘You’re not very brave,’ Nicola kept insisting. So I clammed up. In fact, I kept quiet for the rest of the hour-and-a-half car journey to a hotel, where we were meeting a player to persuade him to sign for us. I spoke to the footballer completely normally, but then spent the hour and a half on the way back in silence again, gripping the window handle. We never introduced those cameras.

  In May 2013, four months after my appointment, Nicola had a dispute with the club. I made my stance clear: if he went, so would I. In the event, he left midway through my second and last season there, in January 2014, and I’m convinced he wanted me to follow suit. But at that point I couldn’t leave the players in the lurch, not when we were building something.

  Just before Nicola quit, Tottenham – who knew all about the issues at Southampton – contacted me. I didn’t return their call. My staff and I had negotiated a five-year contract at Southampton, but it was never signed. February and March brought a lot of upheaval and uncertainty reigned over who was running the club, what direction they wanted to take it in, what the financial situation and many of the players’ futures were. We waited until the end of the season before talking to Tottenham. There was a buy-out clause in my running contract that Daniel was willing to trigger; my first contract at Spurs also contained one, but it was removed when I inked a new deal.

  Should we stay or should we go? Our departure from Southampton was a saga. A lot of tears were shed . . . After the last match of the season, we spent two weeks going back and forth on what to do. But the instability at the club swayed us and we decided to leave. We also knew that several of our top players had moves lined up; painful as it may have been for them, they couldn’t let their bond with us hold them back. It’d only lasted a year and a half, but it was the end of an era: we’d been recruited by Nicola, who was no longer there, and things had changed irredeemably.

  Although we’d all seen the writing on the wall, everything happened while the players were away on holiday, so there were no long goodbyes. I still remember my conversation with Victor Wanyama, though. I called him; in fact, I called practically the whole squad. Victor, who had only been at the club for a year, sounded upset because he felt we were on to a good thing. ‘But that’s football,’ he said, and I had to bite my lip. ‘You’ve shown me what I have to do to be a top footballer. I’ll keep at it.’

  ‘Work hard, Victor. You never know: maybe our paths will cross again,’ I replied.

  Over and above a fine eighth-place finish, our biggest achievement was having put the club’s vision into practice.

  Maybe we’ll get a warmer reception at St Mary’s as time moves on.

  *

  We’ve had a good last couple of days in training, including doing an exercise involving coordinated pressing against a 4-3-3. We hadn’t worked on that for quite a while and it was new to the likes of Sissoko. We travelled to Southampton on the new team coach the club has recently bought. We watched Liverpool’s victory on the way. Arsenal, Chelsea and the other teams near the top all won too, so the onus was on us to get three points.

  As ever, the city greeted us with traffic jams, meaning it took us an hour and a half to get to the hotel. Ros stopped by to see us and we spoke about the past and present. We laughed a lot. We were having a drink in a private lounge when a woman walked in with her two-year-old Southampton-supporting son. While the mother asked me why I’d left the club, the kid shouted ‘traitor, traitor’ at me.

  It’s true that I never explained the reasons behind my decision, but it hurts to be called that. I understand we had created a bond with the fans, despite my limited English. We’d brought back excitement, belief. And they were let down by my departure, especially because it took place during the summer, without a proper goodbye. They should know it broke my heart to leave. That we thought about it one hundred times before we took the decision. And that, sometimes, we wonder why we really left.

  Tomorrow’s game is our third against our former club. We got some abuse during the first two. And there wasn’t a single word about us in the matchday programme. Ros told me that they would be putting something about us in it this time.

  *

  Neither their manager nor their captain mentioned Wanyama, nor Alderweireld – another former Saints player – at all in their programme notes. They we
ren’t referenced anywhere, in fact. Nor was I, for that matter.

  Having said that, behind the scenes, the people at the club have nothing but kind, appreciative words when we see one another, and today we encountered a great many friendly faces en route to the stadium.

  The team came out half-asleep, we barely touched the ball in the first minute and a half, and then we conceded. You can’t legislate for going a goal down so early on. It’s galling; your best-laid plans . . . We struggled to settle, but after a quarter of an hour, we started dominating and things fell into place. We ended up winning 4–1 courtesy of an Alli brace and a goal each from Son and Kane, the latter of whom missed a penalty. We’re still fifth and we’ve now racked up 13 wins, seven draws and six defeats in all competitions this season.

  Around the 87th minute, the Tottenham fans started chanting, ‘He’s magic, you know, Mauricio Pochettino’. I was standing on the touchline with my hands in my pockets, as I had been all match. I don’t normally interact with supporters during games, but today I decided to clap that section of the crowd.

  We caught up with many of our former charges after the final whistle. Miki and I then travelled back to London with the team on the coach. Jesús went back by car with his family, while Toni and Eva stayed behind to enjoy a day in Southampton.

  We’ve got the day off tomorrow. We return to business the following day, and then it’s New Year’s Eve the day after that.

  7.

  JANUARY

  The Premier League teams got up and running in the FA Cup during a demanding January that also featured five league fixtures, including table-topping Chelsea’s visit to White Hart Lane and a trip to the Etihad to renew acquaintances with Guardiola’s Manchester City. Tottenham began the year in fifth place.

  We started January with an away game, although it was only a short trip, to Watford. Since Walker and Vertonghen were suspended, I decided to draft in Kieran Trippier and Kevin Wimmer, reverting to three centre-backs to give us added security.

  We met up at the training ground on the first morning of the year. We played the lads a video overview of the opposition and the different systems they use (this information proved crucial), explained how to counteract them and did some set-piece prep. After we wished each other a happy new year, of course. Then we headed to Watford, where two ex-Tottenham players, Étienne Capoue and Younès Kaboul, awaited us.

  I made Kaboul captain when my staff and I joined the club, and I was surprised by some comments he made ahead of the match, in which he claimed that he’d been disrespected and I’d frozen him out without any explanation. He was given plenty of reasons in the many conversations I had with him during a period when we were first stamping our authority and were trying to take the team in a different direction.

  We thought Watford would go with two up front, because their strike partnership was one of their biggest strengths, but they only named one in their line-up. Then, at the end of the warm-up, a minute before kick-off, we were informed that the wing-back Juan Camilo Zúñiga wasn’t going to play and the forward Odion Ighalo was going to take his place. We weren’t thrown off, however, because we had prepared for that eventuality.

  Everything went as we expected and we managed to storm into a 3–0 first-half lead, allowing us to rest a few players later on. Alli, Rose and Kane were brought off, as we want them to be in fine shape to face a Chelsea side that’ll have had an extra day’s rest. The 4–1 win with braces apiece by Kane and Alli sealed the full 12 points from our last four matches and our goal difference stands at +20. We remain fifth and have picked up more points over the last twelve months than in any other calendar year in the club’s history.

  Nothing happens by chance. The last ten days have allowed us to recover physically and focus on our tailored training regimes. It’s clear that we’ve got over the bad run, by sticking to our principles and ensuring that the players have got back to their best. It’s working.

  As we were leaving Vicarage Road, I bumped into Kaboul and we greeted each other. He didn’t comment on a lack of respect, so all that can go down as anecdotal.

  *

  The restructuring of the club and the parallel work involved in finalising the renewal of players’ contracts are still taking up too much of our time. After today’s game, the management team headed back to the training ground and stayed there until eight o’clock. I had a glass of wine on the coach. It was my last for a while, as I have to look after myself. Since I retired as a player, I’ve been on a cycle of getting fat, losing weight and putting it back on. I set myself targets, but I forget and start the cycle again. Now I’m putting my health first by changing my lifestyle and creating good habits. In the past I did one of those brutal fasts that consist of drinking only boiled fruit juice and water. The first four or five days are very tough because your body is used to ingesting many calories and suddenly everything starts hurting. The most important aspect isn’t the twelve days of fasting, but the way you get back into your food and the fact that it creates a social problem. You can’t just go out for dinner, coffee or anything else. The last time that I did it was in the summer of 2012 when I was getting ready to go to Ibiza. Once we were there, of course, we completely stuffed our faces. I still maintain that a lifestyle change is better – you suffer less and benefit more in the long term.

  I’m also going to force myself to do an hour of exercise per day. With 24 hours in the day, saving one hour for my health doesn’t seem much. It also helps me think and boosts my energy flow while releasing endorphins and stimulating my creativity.

  My best ideas come to me when I’m in the bath, which must be because it’s one of the few moments when I’m isolated from everyone else.

  *

  I’ve developed a huge amount since the days at Espanyol with Feliciano Di Blasi when we’d say to the boys, ‘Look, if you’re tired, put your hand on your chest and keep running.’ Now I look back and laugh at some of our ideas. But do you know what? They taught me something. Over time you improve your understanding of the game and the way you react to all sorts of situations. Your engagement with the players is dictated by their personalities and needs, and your own experiences.

  I tend not to work with psychologists. I don’t feel we need one on a regular basis, as looking after the player’s mental well-being, and understanding the context and applying solutions beyond the tactical, is one of the manager’s roles. Barely anything that we learn about footballers’ mentality is written in a book; you learn it along the way. It is only in very concrete moments of trauma or deep confusion that we might look to bring in professional help for some of the players.

  Falling in love with your players is a dangerous business. I don’t partake in such activities because it’s a concept that I save for my other half, not to mention that sooner or later you fall out of love. It happens faster in football than it does in life. The ideal scenario is to strike a balance between what the footballer needs and what I demand. I like to show respect to people who earn it and I believe it’s fair to treat the group according to the hierarchy established by graft and hard work.

  I like to sign players after analysing them and imagining what they can bring to the team. Given that we want good people as well as good footballers, I also rely on my feelings. I need contact with them, whether it means a quick five-minute chat or an hour-long meeting. On occasion, I’ve met up with a player, said ‘hello’ and quickly followed it up with ‘I have to go’ in order not to see him for a second longer. There have been other cases where five minutes have been enough to sign them or we’ve been together for three hours because it’s been such a pleasure. I’ve made mistakes, of course, but I always tell them what I want from them up front. That’s the only way to kick off a good relationship.

  I met Sir Alex Ferguson for a meal in London last year. There were lots of nuggets of information I took from it, as well as memories that will live with me for ever. He advised me that I must never lose control of the dressing room and that cavin
g into the 25 millionaire footballers with whom I work every day would be a monumental error. He preferred to confront a player at the first indication of a challenge to his authority, without hesitating for even a second. If the player overstepped the mark, he would boot him out, as he famously did on occasion. He managed to establish complete power back then, but I think things have changed now. The balance of power has shifted irreversibly towards the player.

  I don’t dish out fines. I prefer to give a player a number of chances until we reach the point of no return. Sir Alex and I are in agreement on this: you can’t have doubts relating to a decision circling around your head when you go to bed. You decide and move on to the next one.

  From quite early on in his managerial career, Ferguson decided not to work on the training pitch during the week. He felt it was necessary to come out of that bubble because he could see changes in players’ performance levels more clearly from a distance. It gave him perspective and allowed him to focus on their lives off the pitch. Do you have family issues? How are the finances? Are you tired? Observing and seeing things that you don’t expect is crucial. Maybe the Ferguson method is the step you need to take for an extended managerial career. I need to be out there, correcting things and demanding more, but often work with the players takes place in my office.

  *

  Luke Shaw, the youngest member of the Southampton squad at the time, used to come to my office every day, even when I barely spoke English. I’d give him a hug and a smile, which we both needed for different reasons. I’d make him a drink as part of his new nutritional regimen and we’d just chat, even when we didn’t understand each other all that well: ‘Do you have a girlfriend? Do you still have the same friends? What do you do for fun?’ I’d sometimes get angry with him. Luke would often go to London, but I didn’t like him doing that; it was an unnecessary and too regular distraction. I told him as much. Was he focusing enough on his profession? Did he enjoy it enough? ‘OK, I won’t go any more,’ he told me. He was living at a club residence, but one day his mother brought him to training. I asked her to come to my office. ‘Where’ve you come from?’