Mauricio Pochettino: Tottenham motivation against Chelsea is 'massive'

Posted Monday, May 02, 2016 by theguardian.com

Mauricio Pochettino: Tottenham motivation against Chelsea is 'massive'
Pressure will be on Harry Kane to score against Chelsea to keep Tottenham's league title hopes alive.

Tottenham play at Chelsea on Monday night knowing they must win to keep the Premier League title race going to the penultimate weekend. Anything less will confirm Leicester City as champions.

Spurs have not won at Stamford Bridge since February 1990 but Mauricio Pochettino said his players need no extra motivation for a derby match.

He said: "It is always difficult at the end of a season because of the fatigue – not only physical but mental – but the way we train every day, sometimes we have to stop them because it is too much. The motivation is massive."

Pochettino hopes his new contract will help Spurs attract top players this summer and keep their current ones. He has agreed a two-year extension that will keep him at White Hart Lane until 2021, with the deal expected to be confirmed in the coming days. It ends speculation the Argentinian could be prised away at the end of the season and has come as a relief to the players, who were growing nervous about their manager's future.

"I think it is important for the players and the potential players that will come that they don't hear rumours about whether Pochettino will be here or not," he said. "I think that is very important. We are ready to compete in the market to try to add the players that can help us in the future. Not that we need much because we have a good squad already."

Pochettino insisted he did not ask for any assurances about players coming or going this summer. "I did not need assurances. I didn't ask for anything," he said. "In the moment the president wanted to extend my contract he showed his ambition. The players are very happy here. I want to be involved in the future of the club."

Chelsea will not need any added motivation, or at least their captain, John Terry, will not, according to Guus Hiddink. Terry has missed 10 of the past 12 matches with a hamstring and an achilles problem but is poised to return against Spurs. The 35-year-old defender could be in his final days as a Chelsea player, as the incoming manager, Antonio Conte, is still to determine whether or not Terry will receive a one-year contract extension.

"He was almost unapproachable when he got his physical setback," Hiddink said. "He's not a player who says, 'OK, it's the end of my career, or maybe I have one or two years more.' The desire is there and you see it in training sessions as well.

"He's always motivated. I never had one training session with him – even in my previous spell [in 2009] with different players – where I said: 'Hey, John, today you were not there.' He was always there.

"In training he's tackling the same whether it's one day before the game or one or two days after the game. I have to put the brake on a bit, which means the desire is still high. You must have the deep-down fire in your body, in your soul."

Terry played every minute of Chelsea's Premier League title-winning campaign last season but was substituted by Jose Mourinho for the first time, at Manchester City in the second game of this term.

Hiddink traces his major disappointments this season to when Terry was unavailable, for the Champions League last-16 tie with Paris Saint-Germain and the FA Cup quarter-final defeat at Everton, when the defender returned from a hamstring problem as a late substitute.

"That was a bit of the problem and I don't like to complain a lot, mustn't grumble," Hiddink said. "But at the time we went out of the FA Cup and Champions League we had a lack of players also in central defence. Kurt Zouma had fallen away [with a season-ending knee injury] and John, so we had to reshuffle a lot which makes the team less secure."