Personally I feel that the team stopped performing as they didn’t continue to recruit. Without competition players get lazy and don’t push themselves. It’s known that making a few changes each year refreshes the squad and keeps players on their toes. Without this, you see performances drop and players don’t work as hard.
I also feel that it must be extremely difficult getting players back in the right mood after such a defeat as in the CL final. To be so close to the pinnacle, but to be left with nothing must take it out of a player, manager and the staff.
The summer would have been the right time to leave, but they stuck with each other even though the relationship was looking strained towards the end of last year. You can’t blame the board or Poch for trying to work it out, they had a good few years together.
Poch is still a top coach and he and the players just needed a change of atmosphere around them. Just look at what he achieved and how he and his team turned the fortunes of Spurs around, the squad he left behind is a clear indication of quality. I’d happily take him at United.
It wasn't a lack of competition that killed Poch. Almost all of their best players just weren't happy playing for him anymore and he wasn't happy playing with them. That's what created the internal impasse that ended Poch's job. When you can't even get a friend and consummate professional like Kane to back you behind the scenes, you're done.
Of course, Poch losing the players - which is where I place the vast majority of the blame, not on the board - still doesn't necessarily mean that he'll make the same mistakes elsewhere. Five years is a hell of a long time to manage any club these days. It was always incredibly difficult to not only retain but boost standards for so many seasons and from now on, I think it's going to be almost impossible. I could envisage Poch being the last manager to ever lead any club from Europe's elite leagues for more than five years tbh.
There's no more revealing statistic regarding the strange death of Poch at Spurs than the numbers for distance covered per player at last week's West Ham match. Many people, myself included, believed that successive ankle injuries had harmed Kane to the extent that his days of sustained dominance over the whole pitch were done. He physically couldn't run that far or fast anymore, we thought. When, in his first game under Jose, he covered more distance than anyone on the pitch, playing with more energy than I've seen for literally years, I was overjoyed to learn that Kane had suffered minimal long-term impact from his injuries.
I was less happy to realise that Poch had been an albatross around the Spurs neck for far longer than even I had suspected. Almost the whole squad has clearly felt it, albeit to differing degrees, and Jose has already got them - many previously half-assing it intentionally, most with no realistic competition for places, and some still planning to leave at the end of the season - playing like the rough diamond of a team they were at the start of 2015.
The only potential problem with Poch having lost the faith of the players is whether he might do the same again in future. Poch is a man manager, a motivator, not a master tactician by any means. It's only taken Jose two games to demonstrate tactical superiority over Poch. Poch relies on morale and trying to improve individual players, especially in terms of confidence. His tactical weaknesses will be continually exposed as the season goes on, I feel. His tactical rigidity is one factor that will be exposed time and again, as it was by Jose against Olympiakos when the latter did something Poch never did throughout his long tenure and made an unforced first-half substitution.