Premier League: Pochettino crucial for under-achieving Spurs, but can they keep hold of him

“Typical Tottenham, they will let you down most times.”

The forthright words of Roy Keane as he watched one of Tottenham’s more underwhelming displays in defeat at Arsenal a couple of years back were muttered with genuine annoyance, as they were spoken by a one-time Spurs fan who had seen it all time and again.

Keane may be etched into football folklore as a Manchester United legend, but it was the skills of Tottenham stars Glenn Hoddle and Clive Allen that caught his eye as he set his sights on stardom in English football.

The combative Irishman admits he still has a soft spot for Spurs to this day, so he will appreciate that investing hope in a team that have specialised in disappointment for three decades and more has only rarely been a joyful experience.

Indeed, since the turn of the 21st century, the White Hart Lane trophy cabinet has been the recipient of a solitary piece of silver, with their 2008 League Cup victory doing little to back up their bid to be respected as one of the Premier League’s true giants.

With that galling statistic in mind, it has become increasingly hard for Tottenham to claim that are anything more than a team that makes up the numbers at the top end of the Premier League table since the mid-1980, with their London rivals casting them into the shadows time and again.

Chelsea have collected 14 major trophies over a 16 year period that has seen Tottenham toast that solitary success in the least significant competition they enter each year, but the mood has changed dramatically around Spurs over the last 18 months.

After so many years of excuses, too many hard luck stories and a tales of woe that have long since before tiresome, Tottenham are finally a force to be reckoned with once again and one man should take all the credit for their rebranding.

Despite reasonable success at Southampton, Mauricio Pochettino was still something of a mysterious figure when Spurs chairman Daniel Levy asked the Argentine tactician to become the eight manager of his sack-happy reign as the club’s chief decision maker.

Let’s not forget that the current Tottenham boss was very much a second choice option for Levy after he believed he had secured the services of Louis van Gaal early in 2014, yet Manchester United gazumped Spurs to snatch the Dutchman in a coup that dramatically worked in the favour of the London club.

After a season of rebuilding, Pochettino delivered on his promise by guiding Spurs towards their most credible Premier League title challenge in more than quarter of a century and this season he is promising even more.

As Pochettino highlighted his tactical mastery once again by comprehensively outsmarting Pep Guardiola and Manchester City at White Hart Lane earlier this month, the club that has specialised in being the bridesmaids of English soccer are suddenly looking like its new rising force.

Tottenham’s 2-0 win against a Manchester City side that was threatening to build-up an early season aura of invincibility was arguably the stand-out result of the Premier League season to date, yet Pochettino now faces the challenge of transforming promise into genuine success at Spurs.

“He has ambitions to go right to the top and will not be satisfied by what he has achieved so far at Tottenham,” stated one of the senior players who worked under Pochettino during his time at Southampton in an interview with Yahoo Sport.

“We could see from the moment Poch walked in the door that he meant business. He was so professional and that went for his backroom staff as well. All of them had a defined role and they bounced so well off each other.

“He took us up a few levels from the previous manager (Nigel Adkins) in both our ambition and our expectation. We were happy just to be a Premier League team when he came in as manager, but he wanted more than that, much more than that.

“Poch is brilliant at gaining the trust of players. He will show interest in your family, he will go out of his way to understand what makes you tick. That may be why we all felt he was such a great manager to work for. The best most of us have worked for and that includes the manager who followed him (Ronald Koeman).”

Pochettino’s exhaustive daily routine is designed to set an example for his players to follow:

* He can get to the training ground at 7am every morning a rarely leaves before 7pm at night every weekday.

* Pochettino is noted for putting on double training sessions that prove to be too much for some players as they are moved on.

* He delegates coaching session responsibility to his coaching team of Jesus Perez, Toni Jimenez and Miguel D’Agostino, with the quartet having regular meetings to assess the mood among their players.

* If you don’t fit in to the demanding Pochettino set-up, you tend to be moved on quickly, with Aaron Lennon and Emmanuel Adebayor among those who have fallen foul of his strict training regime in recent years.

It is a recipe for success that Pochettino appears capable of transporting and in the opinion of former Spurs manager Harry Redknapp, the man now sitting in the chair he owned between 2008 and 2012 is ready to move Spurs to the top of the trophy podium.

“I love what Pochettino is doing there and from my own experience at Tottenham, it is a fantastic club to be at when you get things moving in the right direction,” Redknapp told Yahoo Sport.

“You need the support of the chairman at any club and hopefully Pochettino gets that at Spurs because there is no reason why they shouldn’t be right in the mix to win the Premier League title this time.

“They probably should have won the title last season, but they just ran out of steam in the end, but I look at their squad now and they probably have the most settled team in the league.

“They have two of the best attacking full-backs in the Premier League in Danny Rose and Kyle Walker, they have the best English striker in Harry Kane and the best young midfielder around in Dele Alli.

“Vincent Janssen is a decent back-up striker for Kane and they needed that because Harry got tired at the back end of last season and cannot be expected to play 60 games a year without a break. Son Heung-min is doing the business up front as well at the moment, so they are well covered.

“On top of that, they are so well organised at the back and the holes in their squad have been filled by some of the signings they made during the summer.

“I look at that squad and even though they have the Champions League to contend with this season, Pochettino has a fantastic squad now that should be able to deal with everything that will be thrown at it over the next few months.”

With Tottenham set to open their new stadium in the summer of 2018 and the club’s dreams of being consistent competitors in the Champions League firmly stated, it appears, on the surface at least, that this story can only continue to move in an upwards motion.

Yet Pochettino may soon have his loyalty to the Tottenham cause tested and after an unwanted departure from the club’s set-up in recent weeks, how would he react if one of the game’s true giants came calling for his services?

Pochettino described himself as “very disappointed” by the departure of the club’s Sporting Director Paul Mitchell, who clearly struggled to work with Levy after he was brought to the club by the manager he developed a strong bond with during his time at Southampton.

Mitchell’s exit may have seen a brick removed from the wall Pochettino was piecing together at Tottenham and it remains to be seen whether that can be replaced.

With that blow still fresh in his mind, we may soon discover how convinced he is that he can realise all of his considerable ambitions at a club that has not won the English league title since 1961.

Strongly linked with the Manchester United job earlier this year, few would be surprised if a coach who has experience working in Spain with Espanyol would be on Real Madrid’s hit-list if they opt to change their manager once again over the next twelve months.

While their can be no doubt that Pochettino is a more influential staff member than any player or official at Tottenham right now, his loyalty to a club and a challenging chairman would be tested if the chance to take over at the Bernabeu or Old Trafford was thrust before him.

Tottenham will hope that scenario does not come to pass.