No more Mr Nice Guy if Poch is going to pull it off at Chelsea

ONE of the features of Mauricio Pochettino's five-and a-half years in charge of Tottenham was his ruthlessness with players who did not fit his ethos or stepped out of line.

Throughout the Argentine's first few seasons at the club, Spurs seemed to permanently have at least one player on the naughty step, providing a constant reminder to the rest of the squad of the perils of crossing the manager.

"He's got two sides to him," Harry Kane told me in early 2017. "He's very respectful if you respect him, he'll show you respect back. If you work hard for him, he'll give you his time. But he's ruthless if you cross him. If you don't want to work for him and you don't want to be a team player, you won't be part of the team." This darker, uncompromising side of Pochettino is occasionally overlooked because he was, above all, like a warm big brother to many of his young players.

Over the course of his first season at Spurs, Emmanuel Adebayor, Étienne Capoue, Younes Kaboul and Aaron Lennon were frozen out, forming a bomb squad who were rarely seen.

But it was not just senior players unwilling or unable to adapt to Pochettino's gruelling training demands and hard-running style who were sidelined.

Academy graduate Andros Townsend was banished from the squad after clashing with a fitness coach, while Nabil Bentaleb was also sent to the under-21s for most of a season.