Emery exposing extent of Ten Hag and Pochettino’s failings.
The strain that comes with leading some of the biggest teams in Europe is something that Unai Emery is more familiar with than most people, so the coach of Aston Villa will be fully aware of what Mauricio Pochettino and Erik ten Hag are going through at Chelsea and Manchester United, respectively.
Having made three Champions League finals between them in the last fifteen years, two of the Premier League’s most successful teams have come to symbolise dysfunction. Both teams have a practice of ruining the careers of some of the most prestigious football coaches, then paying them off, bringing in another famous name, and starting the cycle all over again. But the coach is ultimately to blame when a team isn’t succeeding. They either manage to understand the squad’s performance or they don’t. At Villa, Emery is doing that, while Pochettino and Ten Hag are failing in their respective capacities.
When results and performances don’t meet with expectations at the top clubs, coaches can — and do — find plenty of mitigating factors and excuses to justify the failure to meet expectations. It can be injuries, poor recruitment, bad luck with refereeing decisions. In Chelsea’s case, Pochettino could argue he has too many new players attempting to settle in — he even called for more signings in January after Sunday’s 2-0 defeat at Everton — while Ten Hag could point to his United squad being overloaded with inadequate players who have been there for too long.
At both Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal, Emery faced the coach’s worst nightmare of losing control of his position due to a mix of subpar performances and an inability to handle players with high profile. However, the four-time Champions League champion is currently having a thrilling comeback at Villa. The 52-year-old may have learned from his painful 18-month stint at Arsenal, and Villa is currently benefiting from it. However, as James Olley’s assessment on Emery’s tenure at the Emirates made clear, his departure in November 2019 was accelerated by a combination of poor communication with players and staff, tactical disarray, and an inability to choose a settled side.
Pochettino and Ten Hag are both making similar mistakes at Chelsea and United right now. That is bad enough for their job prospects, but what is making the situation worse for both is that Emery has taken Villa from being mid-table also-rans into the top four in the space of 12 months. The Spanish coach has arguably done so with an inferior squad, and certainly with fewer resources, and his success is shining a harsh light on the failings of his counterparts at Stamford Bridge and Old Trafford.
What Emery is achieving at Villa is an example of how a coach can grip a team and transform its fortunes in a positive fashion. The opposite is happening at Chelsea and United. Top coaches simply find a way to overcome the obstacles in their way. Emery is doing that at Villa with largely the same squad that was heading for relegation last year under Steven Gerrard, but United and Chelsea are lurching from one crisis to another because their respective coaches are creating problems for themselves in already difficult circumstances.
Chelsea lost 2-1 at United last week on a night when Pochettino selected the out-of-form left-back Marc Cucurella on the other side of the defence. That poor selection led to United dominating that flank through Alejandro Garnacho until Cucurella was withdrawn at half-time. Similarly, Ten Hag selected the right-footed central defender Victor Lindelöf at left-back in the 3-0 derby defeat against Manchester City earlier this season, despite having the specialist left-back Sergio Reguilón fit and on the substitutes’ bench. With both Cucurella and Lindelof, the coaches made an inexplicable selection decision which backfired, at the same time as eroding the confidence of the players in their manager.
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Perhaps they were only small issues, but both Pochettino and Ten Hag have made other selection errors and each one creates a sense of confusion and doubt. They have shown too much faith in Nicolas Jackson and Anthony Martial, neither has been prepared to drop their own error-prone goalkeeper and they both continue to fail to resolve defensive problems that have led to each side losing seven of their 16 Premier League games so far this season.
For two coaches with such top-level experience, both domestically and in the Champions League, Pochettino and Ten Hag have been unable to instil the basic principles of good defending and organisation into their teams. So while players at both clubs can rightly be blamed for under-performing, it ultimately comes back to the coach.
The coach selects the team, plans the strategy, interacts with the players on the practice field, and is said to inspire and persuade them. In his final season at the club, 2012–13, Sir Alex Ferguson checked those items while leading United to the championship. The following season, United finished eighth, and David Moyes was sacked after ten months in charge despite still having the same squad. With coaches, it’s one manager doing everything right and the other doing pretty much everything wrong. Emery has reversed the trick by motivating Gerrard’s underperforming players to compete for the Villa championship.
Despite all of the mitigating circumstances, a team is typically only as successful as the coach tasked with leading it to victory, which explains Pochettino and Ten Hag’s failure.
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