Rickie Lambert has revealed the ruthless side of Mauricio Pochettino as he explained how the Tottenham manager pushed the Southampton players to new heights during his reign at the club.
Lambert explained how the Argentine introduced exhausting Monday training sessions that pushed the players to their physical limits soon after he took after at St Mary’s Stadium in January 2013.
Pochettino transformed Southampton from relegation candidates to an established Premier League side during his 18-month spell, steering the club to eighth in his only full season before quitting to join Tottenham in the summer of 2014.
But Lambert recalled in an interview with Radio Solent that it was not all plain sailing during the early days of the Argentine’s reign.
“I just couldn’t cope,” said Lambert of Pochettino’s famous Monday drills. “We would come in on Monday after 90 minutes on the Saturday and do 12 horseshoe runs [of the training pitch].
“I had the bottle to go into his room, pull him to one side very respectfully and I said, ‘Mauricio, listen, we understand what you’re trying to do, but you’re pushing us too much on a Monday, you just need to calm it down, we’re not used to it’. Mauricio was dead polite, said ‘yes, that’s fine, I understand’, we shook hands and went back to the lads, made up, thinking, just sorted it for you boys.
“Next Monday, we came in and not only did we do 12, we did 24 runs. I was running around laughing, almost crying. I knew what he was doing, he was trying to break me and he did, he broke me.”
????? “I just couldn’t cope”
Former #Saintsfc striker Rickie Lambert on the day he questioned the training methods of Mauricio Pochettino ?? pic.twitter.com/9wPbwcgIXY
— BBC Solent Sport (@solentsport) October 10, 2017
OPINION
Lambert’s story provides brilliant insight into not only the methods of Pochettino, but his ruthlessness. The calm, smiling exterior masks a passionate winner with rock-solid ideas on what it takes to make a group of leading footballers perform at optimum level. There have been suggestions that Pochettino over-trains his teams and they run out of steam at the end of the season, but Spurs’ strong finish to 2017-18, in which they finished second, has knocked that theory on the head.