A COUPLE OF weeks ago, Mauricio Pochettino was receiving plenty of criticism.
The Tottenham manager’s crime? He had played a weakened team against Borussia Dortmund, with Spurs consequently losing both ties with an emphatic aggregate score of 5-1.
In the first leg, BT Sport co-commentator Robbie Savage basically spent the entire match moaning about Pochettino’s decision.
Some Spurs fans who had paid significant fees to travel to the game in Germany demanded their money back.
By playing such a weakened team against one of the best sides in Europe, Tottenham had effectively thrown in the towel.
Briefly, the love affair that Spurs fans had enjoyed with Pochettino looked to be under threat.
The North London side were just a couple of games away from a Champions League spot — surely Pochettino was obliged to put out his best side?
Yet on Monday night, as Spurs impressively swept aside Stoke in a convincing 4-0 victory, few people would have been still lamenting the Europa League disappointment.
Indeed since going out of Europe, Tottenham have looked increasingly impressive. In addition to drawing with Liverpool, they have recorded comfortable wins over Bournemouth, Man United and Stoke. It seems legitimate to question whether they would even still be realistically challenging for the title if they had the Europa League to contend with to boot.
At the very least, if they were still worrying about Europe at this point, it seems unlikely that they would be playing with such verve and high intensity on a regular basis domestically. Instead, Tottenham have been playing better than ever of late, and perhaps it is partially down to the freeing feeling of letting go of the Europa League and not having to cope with the burden of continually travelling to obscure locations on Thursday nights in order to compete in a second-tier competition.
Sometimes, in other words, you need to lose small to win big.
All of which brings us to Wednesday night, when Everton embarrassingly lost 4-0 to Liverpool. However, if you look past all the emotion and significance attached to one of football’s biggest derbies, it was essentially a meaningless end-of-season match as far as Everton were concerned.
The Toffees are languishing in mid-table mediocrity. They currently sit in 11th place — in no danger of getting relegated, but also incapable of challenging for Europe at this late stage.
They were heavily criticised for their midweek display against Liverpool, particularly in the second half. Everton’s efforts were so tame that, compared with Liverpool’s 37 shots, the Toffees had just three — all of which missed the target.
Goalkeeper Simon Mignolet’s night was so uneventful that he was given a ‘NA’ (not applicable) rating by the Liverpool Echo. Speaking on Newstalk’s Off the Ball, John Giles accused Everton of “packing it in”. Even boss Roberto Martinez described the performance as “embarrassing”. Eventually, the home crowd were ironically cheering every successful pass that their team made.
Unlike Tottenham against Dortmund, Everton picked the best team available to them, but like Spurs, they made it easy for the opposition, with a number of Toffees players effectively giving up following Ramiro Funes Mori’s deserved red card.
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Yet look at it this way: after 50 minutes, Everton were 2-0 down at Anfield with 10 men. They surely had no realistic chance of winning the match. They were faced with two choices — run as hard as possible for the remaining 40 minutes and try to salvage some pride from an already disastrous outcome, or they could take it easy and conserve their energy for their biggest game of the season, the FA Cup semi-final, which takes place against Man United today. Seemingly, they chose to do the latter.
Simply asking whether Everton behaved appropriately is symptomatic of how the game has gone and it is not an easy question to answer. From a traditionalist’s perspective, footballers should never give anything other than 100%, but in reality, few modern footballers abide by this philosophy. Even top coaches such as Jose Mourinho instruct players to target specific periods in games where they do the majority of their running and play with the utmost intensity.
Wednesday’s match with Liverpool could nonetheless come back to haunt Roberto Martinez. If he does lose his job this summer, it will probably be thought of as the moment when the wheels fully came off.
Yet as with Pochettino’s Dortmund debacle, should Everton beat Man United, the Liverpool result will be quickly forgotten about and his players’ non-performance will suddenly seem understandable.
On the other hand, if Everton lose, Martinez’s position will surely become untenable.
Even bearing in mind football’s notoriously fickle nature, rarely has so much ridden on one game as is the case with today’s match. Just as he did with Wigan in 2013, Martinez needs to win the FA Cup to put a positive sheen on a largely negative campaign. Should his side earn an unlikely success, even the Liverpool thrashing will surely be forgiven and in some respects, justified.
