Ten Hag and Pochettino clash for first time since epic Champions League semi-final

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. Only then did he let his tears flow.

More than four and half years on from overseeing Spurs’ semi-final victory over Ajax, a tie in which Pochettino’s team were trailing 3-0 on aggregate with a little over half an hour left, he and Ten Hag will confront each other for the first time since.

It seems a long while for two elite managers not to have met again. “It will be good to see him,” said Pochettino ahead of Chelsea’s visit to Ten Hag’s Manchester United. “After that semi, we have not had the pleasure.”

The reunion features the club in seventh place in the Premier League against a Chelsea in 10th, far lower placings than either boss would regard as meeting expectation.

If that wild night in the Netherlands, where Lucas Moura completed his hat-trick in the seventh minute of injury time and, with that goal, steered Pochettino’s Spurs into the only European Cup final of their history, remains a landmark for the managers involved, they would equally both prefer if fewer