There will be three adversaries on Sunday at Wembley: Liverpool, Chelsea and emotion. There is a possibility that the Carabao Cup final represents Jürgen Klopp’s last chance to lead his club out at the national stadium but, then again, he could be back there in the FA Cup and, in any case, there is the title to be thinking about as well as the chance of a first Europa League trophy for the German.
Emotion, then, should not be a significant issue for the Merseyside club — not yet — but it could be one for Mauricio Pochettino, whose relationship with cup competitions is arguably framed by his passion.
In the Chelsea head coach’s formative years Argentina won the World Cup, first when he was six, in 1978, and then when he was 14, in 1986. They were magical occasions and Pochettino has spoken of his hero worship of Diego Maradona, who ended up, much to Pochettino’s incredulity, as his room-mate with Newell’s Old Boys. Those triumphs set a high bar both in terms of romance and character.
Perhaps that is why he has spoken almost disparagingly of his two victories, in 2000 and 2006, in the Copa del Rey when a player with Espanyol.
“We were very lucky,” he said in 2018 of those cup wins. “Maybe we didn’t deserve to win. I am in the history of Espanyol because we won but I don’t feel it made a massive change [to the club]. It changed nothing for me, personally. Nothing. Sometimes success doesn’t help you to be better. Sometimes you win because the draw is kind.”
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It has been different for the 51-year-old in the dugout. His two finals as head coach of Tottenham Hotspur were preceded by turmoil rather than such dour equanimity.
Three days before taking Spurs to Wembley to face Chelsea in the League Cup final in 2015, his team lost to Fiorentina in the round of 32 in the Europa League. Their elimination from the competition was doubly hurtful because they had chances to score that were spurned and made mistakes that were pounced upon by the Italian club.
In that 2-0 loss to Chelsea, Harry Kane was, at 21, still young enough to be frequently labelled a boy wonder and, overall, Tottenham lacked the maturity of their opponents. When José Mourinho shook hands with Pochettino in the rain at the final whistle, the Portuguese wore the expression of one who has nailed the way to channel emotion positively. The Spurs players and their coach simply did not exude sufficient self-confidence and were overwhelmed by Chelsea’s tactical and emotional intelligence, as well as their sheer physicality. But the overall narrative was that surely Tottenham’s time would come sooner rather than later and, sure enough, the next campaign brought the blossoming of the very talent that had been overawed.
The “Battle of the Bridge” of May 2016 was not an actual cup final but it felt exactly like one. Tottenham were just about still in the title race and needed, above all else, to hold their nerve, to keep their emotions in check. Instead, despite Pochettino’s side taking a two-goal lead as half-time approached, a late Danny Rose challenge on Chelsea’s Willian led to a mass brawl. Pochettino, instead of calculating how to maintain his team’s superiority, ran on to the pitch.
“I was involved in the game and I forgot my thoughts,” Pochettino said later. “It was a mistake. I cannot go on to the pitch.”
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The club were fined £225,000 for failing to control their players but, more significantly, they crumbled to allow a second-half Chelsea fightback that cost Spurs their slim tilt at the title.
In between the defeat by Chelsea at Wembley and the 2019 Champions League final came publication of a diary of the 2016-2017 season that pulled together Pochettino’s overriding philosophy so that it was also an autobiography of sorts. It was, by turns, revelatory, indiscreet and controversial. Critics and cynics wondered why he would sanction its release halfway through a campaign, and when this reporter asked him if he had to reassure his players that they could speak to him in confidence without their conversations going into another book, he labelled the question “naughty” and walked out of the press briefing. All of which painted a picture of a coach operating on emotion rather than with a composed, clinical and patient plan.
This is not to demean the role of emotion in football. Tottenham reached the 2019 Champions League final on its coattails. Lucas Moura scored an unbelievably dramatic 96th-minute winner to claim victory against Ajax on the away-goals rule in the semi-final.
The night before, Liverpool had pulled off their own miracle against Barcelona, which meant the final would be contested by two teams who had set pulses racing and might struggle to climb down from the clouds. But Klopp’s side were used to drama, so much so that many fans had not been the least daunted by their 3-0 first-leg defeat by the Catalan club.
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In Spurs’s own semi-final, two goals inside the first 35 minutes in Amsterdam meant the north London club were 3-0 down on aggregate, only for a Moura hat-trick to turn the tie on its head.
“It is one of the most important nights of my life,” Pochettino said, having spent 40 minutes out on the pitch to lap it all up. He was still tearful when giving his post-match TV interviews. I attended his press briefing and it was palpable just how much the havoc of the occasion had affected his nerves.
“To get the club to the final of the Champions League is very close to a miracle,” he said. “No one believed in us from the beginning of the season.”
This was less because of a lack of faith in Pochettino and more due to widely held doubts that Spurs had the innate character to succeed. He had three weeks after that heady night in the Netherlands in which to either calm down and plan a masterclass to defeat Liverpool, or to start to overthink things. Perhaps he needed the final to arrive more quickly, because the question of whether Kane would be fit became all-consuming. In the end Pochettino started the England striker but Kane was rusty and barely troubled Klopp’s side in what was almost a laughably pedestrian affair given how gripping the semi-finals had been.
As head coach of Paris Saint-Germain, Pochettino won the Coupe de France but in an empty stadium because of the pandemic, which necessarily dialled down the emotion — though it would not have been excessive anyway, given that the club have won the competition 14 times since 1982.
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Chelsea are hardly starved of recent silverware and that ought to diminish the pressure on Sunday but we keenly await the demeanour of the head coach as he strides out amid the pomp.
Carabao Cup final
Chelsea v Liverpool
Sunday, 3pm
Wembley Stadium
