Mauricio Pochettino puts Tottenham’s poor form down to small home pitch

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/oct/28/mauricio-pochettino-tottenham-pitch-small

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Mauricio Pochettino believes Tottenham Hotspur are being stifled by the tightness of the White Hart Lane pitch. The London club have struggled at home once again this season, particularly when visiting teams have sat deep to compress the space.

Tottenham have the joint-shortest pitch in the Premier League, according to the official statistics, alongside Stoke City and Queens Park Rangers, and only those two clubs have narrower playing surfaces. Tottenham’s pitch, which measures 100 metres by 67 metres, is 6% smaller than half of the others in the division.

Pochettino has seen his team lose three out of five home league fixtures – against Liverpool, West Bromwich Albion and Newcastle United – and he has come to feel hemmed in, when the onus has been on Tottenham to prise apart visiting teams.

“Our style means we need a bigger space to play because we play a positional game,” Pochettino said. “It’s true that White Hart Lane is a little bit tight and it’s better for the opponent when they play deep. On Sunday there were two shots from Newcastle – it was unlucky for us. And they play deep. West Bromwich play deep, Liverpool the same, they play very deep and it was difficult for us. We need time to adapt to our new set-up and to understand better our position on the pitch.”

Tottenham have looked more polished away from home in recent seasons – they certainly did under one of Pochettino’s predecessors, André Villas-Boas – and it has been easy to see them as being more at ease on the counterattack. At White Hart Lane, where they face Brighton & Hove Albion in the Capital One Cup on Wednesday night, they have sometimes frustrated the home crowd, who have made their displeasure known.

Villas-Boas reacted to the perceived negativity towards the end of his tenure, when he said that “it is like it drags the ball into our goal instead of the opponents’ goal” but Pochettino has no problems with the expectation levels of the home support. “In football there is always big expectation,” he said. “In Tottenham, in Espanyol, in Southampton, in Real Madrid and Barcelona, it’s how you manage the pressure in your situation.”

Tottenham are not managing it well at present and, although it is very early days, Pochettino’s tenure has been bogged down by some of the problems that Villas-Boas faced and could not solve. There have been the travails at home, possession without incision, individual errors and questions, which Pochettino has not been to slow to raise, about the squad’s mentality.

“We did a lot of work [on the psychological side] in groups and as individuals on the training ground, in meeting rooms and in my personal office,” Pochettino said. “But always you need more time to change the habits. We talk about mentalities and changing habits. It is harder to work on. The mental process is always more slow than the physical or tactical. We know that our challenge is to change this mentality.”

Pochettino was asked whether he had used a sports scientist to bolster his players. “I think we are the psychologists,” he replied, with a nod towards himself and his coaching staff, which features the assistant, Jesus Perez, who has a background in sports science. “The players want to hear the manager and the staff. We can help them.”

Pochettino also said that he wanted his players to take the initiative and hold their own meetings in order to grow as a unit. “We’ve tried to push this because it’s important sometimes that players have different meetings with the captain to realise some different situations,” Pochettino said.

“But this isn’t because we can’t hear something from them because we are always open to hear everything. We are a family and you always need your teammates. Our challenge is to create something special between 25 players so that they can know each other and improve the togetherness and show it on the pitch.”