Harry Kane has admitted that the approaches of Mauricio Pochettino and Jose Mourinho had little in common at Spurs.
Tottenham hit new heights as a club both on and off the pitch during Pochettino’s time in charge but the team failed to get across the final hurdle and win silverware.
The Spurs hierarchy thus brought in Mourinho in November 2019 hoping he would be the man that would bring trophies to the club.
However, the Mourinho experiment failed quite miserably, with the North Londoners having gone backwards and now looking a long way off challenging the top sides in the Premier League.
While the team struggled for consistency under the Portuguese coach, Kane played some of his best football under the former Spurs boss, who made the most of the striker’s vision and passing range by employing him in a deeper role.
The striker admitted that the approaches of the two coaches had little in common and put the team’s struggles under Mourinho down to a lack of leadership.
When asked how Pochettino’s and Mourinho’s coaches compared, Kane told Gary Neville on The Overlap (as relayed by Football.London): “It was pretty much completely different if I’m honest. Just in the style of play, the way they set up, tactical training we would do.
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“Obviously Mauricio we did a lot of gym work, it was a lot gym base whereas Jose wasn’t so much into that but Jose obviously expected us to be men and act like men on the pitch, have leaders on the pitch.
“To be honest, that’s probably where it didn’t quite work out with Jose we didn’t quite have enough leadership that we needed at the time.
“Obviously the club was in a difficult stage, with Mauricio getting sacked it’s never easy a new manager coming in.”
Kane stressed that he had a very good relationship with the Special One despite the way things unfolded.
He added: “I think with Jose I had a great relationship with him, we got on from minute one. I think we understood each other, we had a similar mentality and how we saw stuff on the pitch, off the pitch and mentality in training so we kind of built that relationship.
“Again it’s a shame we couldn’t go on to win things but I’ve been lucky enough to work with Mauricio and Jose, they’re two incredible managers that’s only helped me in my career for sure.”
Spurs Web Opinion
I am not surprised that Kane enjoyed working with Mourinho as the striker in many ways is a throwback to the personalities that were around a decade or two ago. The problem Jose has had over recent years has been his ability to motivate and get along with the newer generation of players like Dele Alli and Paul Pogba.
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