Mauricio Pochettino ‘breakthrough’ leaves only one ‘obstacle’ to Man United manager job

Mauricio Pochettino and Manchester United obviously dominating the media landscape today.

What are the obstacles to his appointment? Is it actually a good idea? Which of his former players will he sign after a ‘raid’ on his former clubs? Should it matter that journalists like him?

Obstacle course
The Mauricio Pochettino gamble was right, and it does very much look like he will now be the next Man United manager as the club make inroads into installing him even as poor old Michael Carrick continues to take training at Carrington.

The Daily Express have the latest:

Man Utd strike Mauricio Pochettino breakthrough but face one final obstacle

First up, can you ‘strike’ a ‘breakthrough’? We’re really not sure you can strike a breakthrough. You can strike a deal. You can strike a light. You can strike a match. We’re guessing they’re thinking of the ‘deal’ one here. But you don’t strike a breakthrough, do you? You reach a breakthrough. Perhaps even achieve one.

But we’ve allowed ourselves to become bogged down in semantics there. Shocker. What’s the one final obstacle?

However, they are yet to reach out to US Soccer, who would be owed millions in compensation.

Maybe striking a breakthrough wasn’t actually the most curious choice of language here.

Pro former
Always a reliable feature, this one, whenever a manager returns to the Premier League with a new club. The Daily Express do the necessary here, having taken as read that the ‘obstacle’ will be overcome:

Tottenham and Chelsea face being raided for five stars by Mauricio Pochettino and Man Utd

We really must at some point do the maths on just how many times these things actually happen. How often managers do in fact just go out and buy their previous players from previous clubs. Our inkling is ‘not actually that often’. Not every manager is Harry Redknapp; not every player is Niko Kranjcar.

But no, Poch is going to sort out United by signing players from the other two conspicuous basket cases among the disintegrating Big Six. That should definitely be his plan, definitely will be his plan, and definitely will work.

United arguably require a completely new defensive line and additional options on the flanks and in attack. While United bolstered their midfield during the summer, including the acquisition of Andrey Santos from Chelsea, those additions have failed to deliver.

Consequently, it would come as little shock if Pochettino seeks to raid Spurs and the Blues for players he has previously managed.

We do admire the honesty of conceding that United have already quite recently tried buying Chelsea players with minimal success. And, if we’re honest, we admire even more the point-blank refusal to allow such fripperies to halt the march into a feature that has long since been decided.

There’s one obvious problem, of course. It’s really quite a long time now since Poch was Tottenham manager. Unless he’s thinking of bringing in Ben Davies as Luke Shaw’s long-awaited left-back cover, and not even a Daily Express hypothetical is willing to stretch things quite that far, Pochettino is not going to be raiding Tottenham for any of his former Spurs players.

Don’t worry, though. The Express have already thought of that. Conor Gallagher. He is a Spurs player and a former Poch player. Aha! Done. It also actually does make a lot of sense, given Gallagher is a powerfully Pochettino midfield runner and a bit-part player at Spurs.

There are obviously lots of Chelsea ones, including the inevitable insistence on pretending United might sign Cole Palmer in January, but still, one Tottenham player – even a compelling one – isn’t really quite enough, is it? You do need another one, really.

So who have they gone for? Richarlison. A player who, slightly inconveniently, has never played for Pochettino, and who doesn’t now actually play for Spurs after being left out of their Premier League squad.

The Express have made some attempt to explain away the former.

Pochettino attempted to recruit the Brazilian for Spurs nearly a decade ago, so he clearly admires him.

That is, we might contend, an extremely bold deployment of the present tense.

But even if we’re going to allow that, we are still going to need to see your working-out to justify signing Richarlison as a ‘raid’ on Spurs. It’s more going through the bins.

Media studies
For what it’s worth, Mediawatch agrees with an awful lot of The Sun’s ‘five reasons why Pochettino is perfect choice for Man Utd’.

We might argue that no perfect choice exists while those above the manager remain in situ, and that the point where Pochettino was a perfect choice was probably seven or eight years ago now. But there are good reasons mentioned here why he might at the very least be among the more less imperfect options.

He is good at developing players. He has created harmonious dressing rooms from previous chaos. He has come into clubs that are a bit of a mess, and left things better than he found them.

Heck, he’s even had experience working for very awkward owners who are distracted by trying to build a shiny new stadium.

But we still think it’s interesting that The Sun chose to just say the quiet part loud for one of their five.

PALS IN THE MEDIA

But Pochettino happens to have a brilliant relationship with the British press.

The popular boss even appeared on Gary Neville’s Stick to Football programme earlier this year.

‘We’ll cut him more slack because we like him’. We all know that it works like this, obviously, but you’re not supposed to just admit it!

Who watches the Watchmen?
It’s a rare day where Mediawatch holds its hands up and admits it was wrong. But today is one such day.

We’ve always been absolute in our view that the dullest, deadest, dreariest of all possible ‘sports’ features is the boilerplate ‘Inside [Multimillionaire superstar player X]’s £[xx]million car collection’

We, like all right-thinking people, could not give the tiniest of shiny sh*tes about what expensive toys footballers decide to spend their own money on. We understand why they’ve never been able to outgrow the inherently childish idea that cars are interesting in any way, and we don’t judge them for it. But we sure as sh*t don’t want to read about it.

Unless Bugatti Chiron is a promising young left-back at Udinese who’s attracted interest from Newcastle, Everton and Villa, we simply aren’t interested, okay?

But such features about Ronaldo’s cars – and about 83% of them are specifically about Ronaldo’s cars – have now lost their long-held and rock-solid grip on top spot in the list of dullest sports features, which is also a list that only exists in our heads and definitely isn’t one that we’ve had laminated to keep in our wallet. We don’t know where that rumour started, but it’s simply not true.

Anyway. Move over, Ronaldo, and your shiny brum-brums that go brrrr, there’s a new dreary sheriff in town, courtesy of The Sun.

Inside Declan Rice’s £1.6million watch collection with Arsenal star boasting timepieces from Richard Mille and Rolex

The only way we’d be interested in a £1.6million watch collection would be if it comprised 53,333 Casio calculator watches. We worked out the maths there on our… well, you get the idea with that.

Anyone else ever have the Pac-Man game watch? No, us neither.

Forced pun of the day
You can never get to mad with The Sun for a bit of cheeky wordplay, but the times when we will are when it’s so bad that it just reads initially as a complete non-sequitur.

Throughout the USA’s run to the last-16 at the hands of Belgium, he wore the same custom Hugo Boss outfit – a super-lightweight navy virgin-wool overshirt that cost around £370, with matching wide-leg navy trousers, and white trainers.

Hugo Boss even provided two identical custom versions with the US crest sewn in.

So, with that in mind, perhaps Poch is the perfect fit for Man Utd.

Doesn’t really work, or follow.