Madrid (AFP) – Mauricio Pochettino saw the ice-cream from a distance and went ballistic.
Espanyol’s players were at the airport about to go on a pre-season tour, when young defender Javi Chica was given an ice-cream by one of the coaches. He will still not say which one.
“Pochettino saw me and marched over,” Chica told AFP. “He said, ‘hey, do you know how many hours you have to run to burn off an ice-cream? Who gave it to you?’
“I told him, ‘if you have to punish me, punish me, but I won’t say’. He made me go to his room again later to try to get it out of me.”
Pochettino had taken charge of Espanyol in January 2009, returning to the club for a third time after two separate stints as a player.
The second had been to save the club from relegation and now he was back, to do it again as coach.
“We had just lost 4-0 (to Malaga) and we went to the house of the president Daniel Sanchez Llibre,” says Joan Collet, who was on the Espanyol board at the time.
“We said we wouldn’t leave until he sacked the coach and started talking about Pochettino.”
Not everyone was convinced. Pochettino had been a prominent player for Espanyol but his coaching experience amounted to studying Marcelo Bielsa’s sessions with Chile and a brief spell in charge of the Espanyol women’s team.
“I remember thinking, ‘oof, this guy has hardly any experience’,” said Chica. “He knew a lot of the staff, some of the players were his friends, it just seemed like it might be difficult. We were apprehensive.”
– Charisma –
They were in trouble too, 18th in La Liga, with three wins from 19 games and five points adrift of safety.
A 0-0 draw with Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona in Pochettino’s first game proved a false dawn as Espanyol sank to the bottom of the table in March after a 1-0 loss to Osasuna.
“I drove through Barcelona and cried,” after that defeat, said Collet. “We received threats, all sorts. We thought we were down.”
Instead, an astonishing revival, including eight wins and a draw from their last 10 games, kept Espanyol up and launched Pochettino’s coaching career.
“It was incredible,” said Collet. “I have never seen anything like it.”
As a player, Espanyol had found in 1994 – and then re-signed a decade later – a natural leader in Pochettino, as well as a feisty centre-back.
from World Soccer Talk http://bit.ly/2IdrUVi
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