It is practically blasphemous in English football circles to talk ill of Wembley but Mauricio Pochettino must be sick of the sight of the place.

In 2017, Pochettino's Tottenham were forced from the cosy confines of White Hart Lane, where they had just gone an entire season unbeaten, to the unfamiliar expanses of Wembley while their new stadium was being built. Spurs ended up spending 18 months in Brent and their progress faltered.

Pochettino also lost three showpieces at Wembley with Spurs, making Chelsea's defeat to Liverpool in Sunday's Carabao Cup Final his fourth straight reverse at the national stadium in a neutral game — and quite probably the most painful and damaging of the lot.

Forty-eight hours on, Pochettino was still dealing with the fallout from Gary Neville's instantly memorable one-liner about his Chelsea side during commentary on the match.

Neville, for those unaware, described the contest as "[Jurgen] Klopp's kids against the blue billion-pound bottle-jobs" after Virgil van Dijk's 118th-minute header earned a 1-0 victory for a depleted and youthful Liverpool deep into extra-time.

Speaking ahead of tonight's must-win FA Cup fifth-round tie against Leeds United, Pochettino labelled Neville's comment "unfair," but the damage is done.

The "billion-pound bottle-jobs" tag now threatens to stick to Chelsea and Pochettino, and may even come to define and immortalise this new era at Stamford Bridge.

Jamie Carragher, Neville's colleague and sparring partner, predicted on Monday Night Football that Chelsea will be known as the billion-pound bottlers until they win something.

More relevantly for Pochettino, his Tottenham side were labelled "the Harry Kane team" by Pep Guardiola, which lingered, and were never able to shed their "Spursy" tag during his five-and-a-half years in charge.

Pochettino's failure to win anything at Tottenham has not been forgotten and, rightly or wrongly, there is a feeling among many Chelsea supporters that he is not truly a winner and has somehow carried his Spursy-ness across London.

Chelsea's surrender in extra-time on Sunday and Pochettino's unconvincing explanations of their performance — including an admission that his side were playing for penalties before Van Dijk struck — have only entrenched this view among his critics.

For me, at any rate, Pochettino remains down the list of people to blame for Chelsea's underwhelming season and Sunday's disappointment.

He is not responsible for gutting a Champions League-winning squad, nor sanctioning over £1 billion spending on a callow group of replacements.

He is not the mastermind behind a flawed business model that will likely require Chelsea to continue selling off academy players to remain within the Premier League's profit and sustainability rules.

Pochettino is not without blame, but he is presiding over a mess which is not of his own making.

You wonder, however, if the ubiquity of Neville's one-liner could genuinely damage Pochettino, and certainly the framing of Sunday's defeat has added to a sense that the head coach is at risk of being the biggest victim of Chelsea's dysfunction.

It felt significant that after the match Pochettino wistfully wondered if he was running out of opportunities to win silverware in the UK.

When he left Spurs in 2019, Pochettino rightfully belonged to an elite bracket of coaches, linked with the Real Madrid and Manchester United jobs. His next step appeared certain to be at a European heavyweight and, sure enough, he pitched up at Paris Saint-Germain — chaotic and new-money, admittedly, but boasting a front three of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe.

There is still time for Pochettino to be a success at Chelsea and render the defeat to Liverpool a valuable lesson — just as at Spurs, where he also lost the League Cup Final in his maiden season but went on to have an enormous impact.

But if his spell at Chelsea unravels without success he would likely emerge from the job with his reputation tarnished and place among Europe's elite coaches in jeopardy.

As Pochettino himself suggested, his players have time to shrug off Sunday's defeat and, with it, Neville's bottlers tag, but it may not be so easy for him.