Why Tottenham and Mauricio Pochettino need patience in more ways than one

As badly needed as the 5-0 win over Red Star Belgrade was, Pochettino and his players know there is still much more to do

Tottenham Hotspur manager Mauricio Pochettino and Christian Eriksen (PA)

As the Tottenham Hotspur players returned to training on Thursday after a day off, there was a different - but discernible - air about the place. There wasn’t the same pressure. There wasn’t the same tension. They’d won again.

It's amazing what a victory can do for a team.

As badly needed as that 5-0 win over Red Star Belgrade was, though, Mauricio Pochettino and his players know there is still much more to do. They know it was just one win, against a beatable side. They know there’s still some way to go to turn this season, and maybe even the entire era of this team, right back around.

There’s already an immediate stumbling block: a trip to Anfield, and a match against this Liverpool.

The Premier League leaders’ supreme form may make it feel like it’s something of a free hit for Spurs, but it is a highly weighted fixture for reasons beyond Pochettino’s intense desire to compete at such a level.

There is similarly so much this specific Liverpool team, and this club, represent.

They offer many concrete examples of converting managerial regimes that had taken a turn for the worse.

Jurgen Klopp himself, however, isn’t one of those examples. It’s actually funny how things can work out.

Had those at Borussia Dortmund - including Klopp himself - decided to stick amid the struggles of the 2014-15 season, and not felt a change was so necessary, Liverpool might never have encountered this glorious new era.

It might have been the Bundesliga club enjoying another spell of glory. Because, as rightfully admired as Dortmund are for their intelligence in the continuation of an exciting approach first instilled by Klopp, they have still only won one trophy - the 2017 DFB Pokal - in the time since he left. They’ve often been sensational sure, but it’s felt a level down from what Klopp was capable of.

This isn’t to blame anyone, of course. The fair feeling at the time was that everyone was just exhausted. Which sounds familiar.

But it also points to something that has now been almost entirely exhausted in the modern game: no one gets the chance to build again.

It feels like you get one cycle… and that’s it.

The general truth in football, uttered by pretty much everyone in the game, is that “when it goes, it goes”. When a team reaches breaking point, that's it.

Mauricio Pochettino needs time to turn things around (Getty Images)

And that has been seen with virtually every manager and every team in football. It similarly conforms to Bela Gutmann’s rule of the third season being “fatal” and Sir Alex Ferguson’s firm belief that a three- or four-year cycle is the most you can have with any one group. That isn’t because of any mathematical clock in the sky, but because of the inevitable mental effect of working with the same people for so long.

But this is what is key. Why not reverse it, and give a proven manager time to rebuild? Why not give him the two years or so you would usually allow a new manager who comes in - and that Klopp pretty much got when he arrived at Anfield?

That, after all, has pretty much been the story of every turnaround. Clubs have taken the decision to hit pause, to be patient.

Some of the most instructive of those stories have come from Liverpool. Both Bill Shankly, in the early 1970s, and Bob Paisley, around 1981, endured serious drop-offs in the level of title-winning squads. One of those, in 1980-81, even involved a run to a European Cup final. Both were ultimately given the space to create a new team.

Precious few of those stories, however, come from the Premier League era.

This is indicated by the rather stark fact that, of all the managers in the competition’s history who took a job after the 1992 landmark - so excluding Sir Alex Ferguson, George Graham and Brian Clough - Pochettino is the eighth longest serving, at five years and five months.

That in itself is remarkable, and points to how rare it is for managers to get a second go.

This, it should be said, isn’t a plea for patience in the way we hear any time a new manager is struggling. The overwhelming majority won’t prove to be Ferguson.

But this isn’t about new managers. It’s about proven managers, and those like Pochettino who remain at the very forefront of the modern game.

Daniel Levy knows Pochettino can turn things around (AFP/Getty Images)

It is even rarer, with them, that they don’t succeed when given that chance to build a second team. Pretty much all the greats have. It’s why they do what they do.

Many might argue here that Pochettino doesn’t deserve to be put in such a category since he hasn’t won anything, but that’s something else that is genuinely different in the modern game. The Argentine - as should barely need saying by now - has raised Spurs to standards of performance that should not be possible for a club of their resources. He has worked wonders. He has turned them into a Champions League contender, with Daniel Levy to be fair fully building on that with the construction of a truly Champions League stadium.

That was never going to be indefinitely sustainable, especially not with a team where many key players are the wrong side of their prime. Pochettino knew this as early as 2017, but the club’s economic restrictions have prevented him from acting upon it in the way Ferguson - or Shankly, or Paisley, or Sir Matt Busby - would have.

It is why the club should overlook what is a standard process in football, in the decline of one group of players together, and continue to invest in something special.

There is a proven way out of this, tough as it seems right now.

For his part, Levy is well aware of it. He knows Pochettino better than anyone, bar assistant Jesus Perez. More coldly, he also knows the price of getting rid of the Argentine, and getting in a new manager. There would be no guarantees there either. There may be a similar waiting period, especially if you make the wrong choice. Just look at what has happened with Unai Emery at Arsenal.

The feeling among some at Spurs is that results will start to right themselves once the new players - like Tanguy Ndombele, like Giovani Lo Celso - fully attune and get up to speed, which would also give more licence to drop the want-away players.

That could see things start to turn properly.

Until then, and especially this weekend, patience may be required. In more ways than one.