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Your support makes all the difference.Mauricio Pochettino admits he has never been more unhappy as Tottenham Hotspur manager.
Spurs announced this week that a move back to White Hart Lane has now been delayed further until January 2019 at the earliest.
They may be riding high in the league, with their best start to a campaign under the Argentine, ahead of a key game against Manchester City at Wembley on Monday night, but Pochettino is a man frustrated.
He is frustrated most tellingly at the stadium delay but a lack of summer signings and several players returning fatigued after the World Cup is also on his mind.
“The season so far, it’s strange because my feeling is the worst feeling I’ve had in the five years that I’ve been here,” he said. “It’s the worst. My feeling, but it’s the best start ever for the club in the Premier League. It’s strange, no?
“I don’t know, it’s so difficult to explain because the circumstance because many things happen, I am disappointed we are still waiting for the new stadium when the expectation was to be there at the beginning of the season.
“I don’t know, many things happened in the summer, many things that make myself not in my best mood or best humour. I know I always have a good relationship with you [the press] but my feeling is not the best feeling, I had better feeling in previous seasons.”
Pochettino is clearly a man disheartened by Tottenham’s tag of nearly men, failing to beat PSV Eindhoven in the Champions League on Wednesday heightening his disappointment with progression in that competition only a remote possibility now.
“I think, like a team, we still didn’t win nothing,” he said. “We fail but we achieve. And of course always when we arrive at like a final game, we always fail.
“It’s about learning to compete. It’s about learning to be better. It’s about changing something we need to do different.
“Or maybe we are never going to learn because we have some quality but we cannot cross this level. I prefer to think that we will learn more and we need more time to improve as a team.
“Still we are not showing that level to be a real contender. That is my opinion.
“Today we need to fix other problems and different circumstances that happen that don’t help the team or the club to only be focused on winning titles.
“Sometimes people expect that we should be winning or we must win titles when the circumstances are not ideal.”
Of course, it is that new stadium that is causing most of Pochettino’s anguish as he contemplates just how to match up against other members of the top six including Manchester City.
“I don’t have the answer how we are going to act when we are going to move there,” said Pochettino. “It is easy to see in the last few years how we act in front of the market, how we act in front of everything and how the other teams were acting. That is the difference.
“Everything is not perfect but we are in a circumstance and a project that is completely different to another club, at the moment.
“But maybe when we arrive to the new stadium in the future, we will be in the same project, or we are going to act the same as other teams are acting like Liverpool, City, United, Chelsea and Arsenal.
“It is my wish and I hope for the club, for the fans, for everyone to be available to fight in the same condition as the other clubs and show our real skills.
“The way we have been competing in the last few years, the frustration is massive because we have had less in every single aspect.”
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