ASSE-PSG: Will Pochettino (finally) succeed in running Paris and its stars?
Mauricio Pochettino on his arrival at Camp des Loges on January 1st 2021. – Bertrand GUAY / AFP
Mauricio Pochettino bases his flamboyant playing style on perfect physical condition.
The new Parisian coach takes the reins of the team that races the least in Europe.
The beginning of the year 2020 and his demonic calendar leaves little room for the Argentinean and his staff to pull the team up on this plan.
A boring presentation conf like a third confinement, apart from a little moment of grace when he discovered the yellow smile that we already knew all about his tactical setups before his first match at Saint-Etienne , this evening at 21 hours in the Cauldron. Mauricio Pochettino made his shy, so as not to frighten his people too much, including the state of the troops. With something like: “It is important that all absent are back as soon as possible to increase competition in the group.”
Premier League fans know this yet better than the others: to deploy the game he loves, Pochettino demands enormous physical debauchery from his men.
“The harder you work during the week, the easier the weekend game”
Out of curiosity, we put on the bio written with Guillem Balagué, so as not to be satisfied with just blowing the wind. The new Parisian manager makes several references to the torture sessions that Marcelo Bielsa inflicted on him at the start of his career, memories who partly built his vision as a coach : “The game we play at Tottenham has many parallels with Newell’s de Bielsa. Intense, at maximum speed all the time, with very high pressure on the pitch, a lot of almost mechanized movements, to dominate physically and suffocate the opponent when he has the ball ”.
Principles which require a considerable volume of races. At Espanyol, already, Pochettino managed to save the club from relegation almost assured after a commando preparation of ten days at the end of winter. His leitmotif, which he exported to England: “The harder you work during the week, the easier the weekend match will seem”. In his book, the former PSG captain describes his favorite exercise in the menu, witness to “his physical demands.”
Gacon test, high intensity sessions and commando training
In Southampton, he kicks off the high intensity midweek session, which looks a lot like terminator workouts set up by Fabien Galthié with the XV of France . A match of one hour to eleven against eleven, without touches or goal clearance, with a throw-in of a ball as soon as the previous one leaves the field. Confidence of Pochettino: “Some players of the time tell me that they still hear me say ‘press, press, press’ in their dreams. One even joked with my assistant one day saying that he needed two hearts to play with me. ”
The last nail in the coffin? The ex-Spurs coach likes to know the number of kilometers traveled by his team at the end of the match. On several occasions he points out in his biography that his team sometimes ran seven to eight kilometers longer than the rival in the big victories.
Paris, the team that doesn’t like to run
A sketchy detail, if we consider that the boy arrives in a club where the players hide to run: last year in the Champions League, PSG has achieved the feat of being the last team on the plateau in distance by matc: 103, 3 kilometers overall, just behind Galatasaray and his little old people in a walker. It’s even worse than the previous season, ended at the 30 is placed on 32, and the current one does not look much better: 90, 5 km on average, with two more shameful performances than the others.
Barely 98 terminals against MU at home , with some players who are particularly economical with their races (seven Kylian kiosks, is it serious?), and 98 kilometers traveled during the defeat in Leipzig, i.e. ten bounds less than the Germans. TEN TERMINALS.
Here we give a firm answer to the most enlightened critics, who will rightly estimate that a team which has the ball runs much less than those which try to catch it. If this is undoubtedly a valid observation in L1, where it is the little ones who monopolize the top of the ranking (Angers, Nîmes and Dijon in 310 – 2019 ), it lapses in the Champions League, where PSG emerges at 45% of possession barely, far from the cadors. Bayern, his executioner in the final, had the ball 53% of the time, which did not prevent him from putting more than six terminals in the view of the Parisians.
In short, at least two questions burn our lips by reading this apocalyptic gift:
1 – Can Pochettino put a team of fat lazy to work?
2 – If yes, how, and how long will it take him?
We say that because it is not the three sessions seen so far that will change (non) work habits securely installed. It was Sebastian, Mauricio’s son, who took charge of the physical preparation. AT 25 years, he had joined his father’s staff as a sports performance analyst before leading the work pre-activation (warming up what) and working on injury prevention for a few months in 2018 in Tottenham. He will be helped by Nicolas Mayer, a regular at the house, and everyone agrees that Pochettino is not into nepotism, but one can wonder if the young man and his father guess the state of the site.
Because this story has been pursuing PSG for centuries . Emery had already been chosen to power a team accused of snoring while Laurent Blanc improved his swing at the Golf National. The same for Tuchel, which we wrote to his arrival that the sessions transported the players so much that they shot faster than lightning. Like what we knew how to laugh at the time.
“It will not really be obvious for the new staff, recognizes the physical trainer Xavier Frezza who works with twenty professional players (Ben Yedder, Batshuayi, Mukiele). As with Zlatan, there are no super rigorous charismatic leaders any more, apart from Marquinhos. To make the group adopt greater rigor of work, it is necessary to get the executives to adhere, even if everyone cannot accept the same charges. That said in the short term it seems impossible given the indigestible schedule that awaits the PSG in January-February. ”
“Physically, this season, it’s done for a club like PSG, judge Xavier Frezza. There may be a way to do a mini-preparation in February-March in view of the end of the season, but with the Covid – 15, you never know if the squad may be affected and some games shifted, so it’s very difficult to plan in advance to raise the general level of the team . At first, it will go more through the speech than through the physical capacity itself. Pochettino is lucky to have an aura, 1346480983554420737 he had results with his method in Tottenham
, he can take the frames with him ”. Let’s pretend to believe it doesn’t cost anything.
