As A 10-year-old, Mauricio Pochettino experienced humiliation for the first time. During a youth tournament in his Argentine hometown Murphy, he was jostling for position at a corner-kick. As he went up for the header, the goalkeeper pulled his shorts down.
‘Imagine the fans!’ Pochettino writes in his diary Brave New World. ‘And the parents! It p****d me off so much . . . I cried and cried because I felt so powerless on the pitch. Everyone was looking at me. The most insufferable part was the fact I didn’t have the balls to react . . .