The clearest memory is of the tears. On a late spring Amsterdam night, Mauricio Pochettino cried plenty – tears of joy, of relief and of disbelief.
But also remembered from the dramatic night he reached his pinnacle as a coach is the moment just before his emotional release, the moment he needed to contain himself.
His Tottenham Hotspur had just snatched, last gasp, a place in a Uefa Champions League final. Pochettino’s players – “my heroes,” he called them – hurtled towards him to celebrate an astonishing comeback at Ajax.
But Pochettino turned away from them to first attend to protocol. He stopped his run on to the pitch and, straight-faced, he embraced the losing coach warmly and sympathetically whispered a word of consolation into Erik ten Hag’s ear.