Friday 26 / April / 2024
Having previously turned out in goal for Leicester City under boss Martin O’Neill, Chuck Martini is one who follows the Barclays Premier League with an eagle eye and a voracious obsession. Now serving as Head Coach of the Muscat Football Academy, the 44-year-old – who represented his country of birth, Morocco – is looking forward to next season, which could see a few changes before the first whistle is blown.
Chuck, your thoughts on last season’s Premier League?
It was really interesting from start to finish because you had three foreign managers start their full first seasons in England and it’s a completely different animal to what they thought it would be. Pep Guardiola is used to winning things at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, but Manchester City didn’t do as well as he expected them to and he will learn that in the Premier League, no game is over until it is over. Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool is the sort of person who people will like because he just has that sort of personality and people will automatically want to play for him, while Antonio Conte started poorly and everyone expected him to not finish the season well, but then he found the formation that best suits his players and it has worked wonders.
What do you think of Tottenham’s season?
For a long, long time, Arsenal fans have been laughing at Tottenham because they’ve been finishing above them for so long, but now the tables have been turned and you can see Spurs really want to kick on from where they finished last season. They finished second, and after three years of finishing in the top four, everyone expects them to be one of the teams to challenge for the title and that brings with it a different sort of pressure, because earlier no one had any expectations of them, but how they respond to pressure is going to be very interesting. Can those players still perform the way they used to when the eyes of the world are watching them, and more importantly, how many of them are going to be there next season?
Why do you say that?
Spurs are not one of the teams who have traditionally challenged for trophies so a lot of their players are going to think ‘this is far as I am going to go with this team’. Yes, they might win a few things, but there is a totally different mentality when you play for a team that has consistently won trophies because the atmosphere there is different.
But if you look at players like Harry Kane, who has now had two or three outstanding seasons for Tottenham, and then individuals like Dele Alli and Song Heun Min, their agents are going to be receiving calls from the best clubs in the world, and when they come along, it’s very difficult to say no. If Real Madrid for example came in for Kane tomorrow, they’d offer him money that Spurs could never match, and he’d be playing alongside people like Cristiano Ronaldo, Luka Modric, James Rodriguez, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema and these are some of the best players in the world.
When such clubs come calling, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and more often than not, if you say no, these chances don’t come knocking once again.
If Kane goes to Madrid, Dele Alli is transferred to Barcelona and Son Heung Min and Christian Eriksen go to Bayern Munich or Juventus this summer, what do you do then, because all of a sudden, the Spurs attack looks far less intimidating than it was this season.
But if they can hold on to all their players – ex-Arsenal legend Ian Wright said it himself, he’d join Spurs above Arsenal if given a choice today because Spurs are on the up and Arsenal have gone backwards, – so that’s where any up and coming player would want to go.
Owner Daniel Levy and Mauricio Pochettino have built a young, English squad there and there’s a bright future for them.
How will their new stadium help them?
Actually, I think it will be detrimental to them because they are playing at Wembley, a stadium with a lot of history and character that speaks volumes. When other teams come to Wembley, they prepare for the best game of their lives and they really up their level so this is going to be really concerning for Tottenham. If I were a coach of a mid-table club, for example, I’d tell my players to play better than they ever have before because we’re going to Wembley, and there’s something special in that it is a sacred stadium that has long been the home of the nation
has achieved,” he told me, by way of introduction, and he wasn’t half-wrong. “Jose is a man who makes everything about himself, and he always needs to show himself as bigger than the club. I think in the end, someone like him will end up becoming his own downfall. “Look at the state in which he left Chelsea last year,” recalled the former Morocco international, who travelled to the United States as part of his country’s World Cup squad in 1994.
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