Mauricio Pochettino was pretty spiky in his press conference today. He had a friendly exterior, but wasn’t taking any nonsense.
He was asked whether it was going to be harder to motivate his players now, given that there are no trophies to play for, just the questionable promise of a place in the Conference League.
He gave an interesting response – he puffed his cheeks out and gave a grunting “wow,” then explained that he didn’t think it was on him and his staff to motivate the players. They should be motivated themselves by the fact that they’re playing for Chelsea.
“It’s difficult to accept [players not being self motivated]. Even when you play for nothing, in a friendly game… if you don’t have the motivation, it’s difficult. If you told me we have to motivate the players to play tomorrow, I think we have a big problem.”
We know what he means, of course. We’d like every player to be at 100% for every game. But that’s not how life works. We’re not sure how facetious he was being, or whether he was just sending a message to the players, but it was quite some statement either way.
You can see the coach speaking in the clip embedded here:
It seems pretty clear it’s a message to the players. Although Poch has continued to provide his players a fair amount of cover, we’ve also seen him begin in recent weeks to send messages (through the press). This definitely strikes me as one of those moments where he’s making no bones about it—he’s telling his players that he expects them to battle every minute of every match. Implicit to all of this is the fact that Poch has defended them time and again, even as it’s meant that he takes more of the heat, and now is the time when, if they do truly have his back, they need to show it by fighting for his job. Will they? He’s certainly thrown down the challenge.
What he saying is not making sense u coac have to motivate your players.