Culture
Mauricio Pochettino aims to bolster belief as USMNT role takes him outside his comfort zone
The question came 20 minutes into Mauricio Pochettino’s introductory press conference as U.S. men’s national team coach; the first query of the event in his native Spanish.
“It’ll give me a break,” Pochettino joked at the chance to rest his English.
“What was the challenge that made you want to take the U.S. job?” the journalist asked.
The question got to the root of an issue that hovered over the entire event at a glitzy high rise in New York City’s Hudson Yards development. Why would a manager with such a massive reputation see this as his next step?
The 52-year-old former Tottenham, Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea manager spoke first about the feeling he had meeting with U.S. Soccer executives, and then about the great potential of the sport in the U.S. Then he got to the task at hand: taking the USMNT to a different level.
“It’s a challenge that takes us out of our comfort zone,” Pochettino said in Spanish, smiling. “For us, the easy thing to do is take on things we already know, and we already have a quick vision and an idea (of how to accomplish it). But here it is about taking on something one does not know as well; getting out of your comfort zone so that you can challenge yourself.
“It is not only about a challenge to achieve things together but also about challenging yourself.”
CEO of U.S. Soccer JT Batson, technical director Matt Crocker, Pochettino and president Cindy Parlow (Luke Hales/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
Whether knowingly or not, Pochettino put himself on a parallel path with his new team. For several cycles, the idea of “getting out of your comfort zone to grow” has been a part of the USMNT’s journey toward improvement. The idea dates back to Jurgen Klinsmann’s era, but it was also discussed often by former coach Gregg Berhalter.
But the idea is about more than just going to Europe to play for the biggest clubs. It is about understanding how to find the right challenges that force you to grow. To get better.
That Pochettino sees this job as a challenge for his own growth was, perhaps, the most important takeaway from Friday’s press conference. The U.S. needed a new voice to push them to take that next step, beyond potential and into results. They will now begin that journey with a coach who has a bigger reputation than anyone else in the room but who is seeking that same type of growth.
Pochettino came across as charming, excited and motivated in the press conference. He spoke about how happy he was to be with the U.S., about the honor of being the first Spanish-speaking Latin American coach in the history of the program, and of his connection with U.S. women’s coach Emma Hayes and the potential influence the winning history of the USWNT can have on the men’s program.
He told a story about learning the English-language term of being “over the moon” in his early days as manager of Southampton in the Premier League and said he and his family are over the moon that he has taken this new job.
That he switched back and forth between English and Spanish was, in itself, a historic moment and representative of how this hire creates an unprecedented opportunity for U.S. Soccer to reach this country’s massive — and growing — Latino population.
Pochettino clearly understood, though, that reaching fans, both new and old, will come down to one thing: winning.
Pochettino is presented to the media at Hudson Yards (Luke Hales/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
Several times over the course of the morning, Pochettino returned to a simple idea that he thinks can push this team forward: belief. He said the word “believe” a dozen times over the course of the hour-long event. For a coach famous for his ability to inspire a dressing room, it hinted at the way he’ll target mentality and psychology as much as he will tactics.
“’Believe’ for me is a word that is a powerful word,” Pochettino said. “You can have enormous talent and you can be clever, but in football, you need to believe. Believe that all is possible. If we find a way to believe all together, then for sure we will achieve.”
Later, he reinforced that idea with his sights set on the World Cup tournament the U.S. will co-host with Mexico and Canada in two years’ time.
“We need to really believe in big things,” Pochettino said. “Believe that we can win not only a game, we can win the World Cup. … We want players that show up, day one at the training camp, and think big. That is the only way to create this philosophy or this idea all together to perform and to put your talent in the service of the team. That is going to be our massive challenge.”
Bringing that belief back will be first on his to-do list as the USMNT coach.
The U.S. was clearly lacking confidence in the September window, something Pochettino said was understandable considering the results in the Copa América. The performances in a loss to Canada and a draw with New Zealand only magnified the issues within the group. Pochettino, though, didn’t seem overly concerned with the overall culture of the group, alluding then to the idea of tapping into the “winning mentality” that permeates American sports and taking inspiration from the winning culture the U.S. women have long demonstrated.
“We are here because we want to win,” Pochettino said.
The video board announces Pochettino’s appointment at the friendly against New Zealand in Cincinnati (John Dorton/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images)
There were, of course, ideas about how to play discussed as well.
“We are in the USA,” Pochettino said. “I think to convince our fans, this is about to attract (them), and the aesthetic is really important. We want to play nice football, good football, exciting football, attacking football. And then, of course, we want to have the possession, because we are coaching staff also with a philosophy to have the ball. We need to run, we need to move, we need to give options, good angles to your team-mate. … And then when we don’t have the ball we need to run, we need to be aggressive, we need to be competitive.
“The potential is there. The talent is there. It’s only to create the best platform for them to express themselves.”
While Pochettino acknowledged that those are the trademarks of his team, he also said he wants first to get a feel for his players before he declares how this U.S. team will play.
That process will start in the coming days, as Pochettino inevitably goes to sit and meet with members of the player pool, chief among them star winger Christian Pulisic. Pochettino said he wants to hear from members of the team individually, to get feedback on how they see things. Then he will gather the group together for the first time next month for friendlies in Austin, Texas and Guadalajara, Mexico.
The process to get a deal over the line has been a long one, stretching more than two months from the beginning of recruitment to his formal introduction. Pochettino admitted it was difficult to wait it out. He was ready to get to work.
Now, the clock has started. The U.S. has less than two years until the World Cup and a mountain to climb to be ready. They have a coach, though, that few would have imagined would take this group into that tournament.
A coach who now will try to inject belief into and around this team.
GO DEEPER
How USMNT landed Pochettino: Hayes’ role, Chelsea delays and Argentine steak
(Top photo: Luke Hales/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)
Judith Barnard, a freelance writer who stumbled on a second career as a best-selling author at 50, when she teamed with her husband, Michael Fain, a onetime aerospace engineer, to publish a potboiler novel under the pen name Judith Michael, died on May 6 in Chicago. She was 94.
Her death, at a hospital near her home, was caused by heart failure, her daughter, Cynthia Barnard, said.
Combining their first names to create the pseudonym Judith Michael, the couple published 11 commercially successful novels over the years, starting with “Deceptions,” an out-of-nowhere hit, in 1982.
Equal parts romance and thriller, “Deceptions” concerned identical twin sisters — Sabrina, a globe-trotting socialite living in London, and Stephanie, a suburban Illinois housewife — whose fleeting experiment with swapping lives proved to be less fleeting than expected.
Entertaining, yes. A Kirkus review called it “a strenuously inventive, big-budget” romance.
High literature? Not so much. The same review described the book as “glossily seamless nonsense” but noted its potential as fodder for a TV movie — an observation that proved prescient when NBC adapted it in 1985 as a two-part mini-series with Stefanie Powers, of “Hart to Hart” fame, playing the twins.
Then again, their plan had never been to give Thomas Pynchon a run for his money.
Ms. Barnard had already taken a stab at a literary career, publishing her first novel, “The Past and Present of Solomon Sorge,” in 1967. An introspective tale about a Midwestern university professor whose wife of 30 years abruptly abandons him, the book sold only a few thousand copies, leading Ms. Barnard to turn to freelance work on educational films and textbooks, as well as writing articles for Chicago magazines and newspapers.
Her literary horizons expanded after she married Mr. Fain, her second husband, in 1979. “We were looking for something we could do together,” she recalled in a 1991 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “Michael had written technical articles and liked the process but hadn’t found a field he was happy in.”
They began by writing articles about marriage and family for newspapers and magazines, including Good Housekeeping and Redbook. “We had such a good time working together that one day Michael said, ‘Enough of this! Why don’t we write a book?’” Ms. Barnard recalled in a 1999 interview with The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla.
With “Deceptions,” they discovered a winning formula that they employed with many of their following books — what they called universal fantasies, about ordinary, if strong-willed, people who, by a stroke of fate, escape a quotidian existence to taste a life of wealth and adventure, only to face unforeseen challenges along the way.
In “Possessions” (1984), for example, a Vancouver mother of two, whose shady businessman of a husband vanishes, begins a glamorous new life as a jewelry designer in San Francisco, only to fall in with the wealthy family that he had concealed from her.
Similarly, in “Pot of Gold” (1993), a Connecticut housewife must learn for herself whether more money really does mean more problems after she wins a $60 million lottery.
Like their characters, Ms. Barnard and Mr. Fain found their lives transformed by unexpected success. As novel after novel climbed the best-seller lists, they traveled the world to research their books and divided their time between a spacious 16th-floor apartment overlooking Lincoln Park in Chicago and a second home in Aspen, Colo.
Also like their characters, they learned that success can be complicated — in their case, because it required juggling the usual pressures of marriage with the inevitable Lennon-McCartney-style tug of war that comes with creative collaboration.
As Ms. Barnard told The Ledger, “It’s very difficult to have a working relationship with this person who you think has done really dumb things that day and is going to be in your bed.”
Judith Goldman was born on Feb. 17, 1932, in Denver, the elder of two children of Samuel Goldman, who owned a shoe store, and Ruth (Eisenstat) Goldman.
After her parents divorced when she was a child, her mother married Harry Barnard, a prominent historian and biographer, and moved with her children to Chicago.
The family temporarily relocated to Ohio when she was in high school, and she graduated from Fremont Ross High School in 1949. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the Ohio State University in 1953. The same year, she married Jerre Papier, an electrical engineer. They divorced in 1970.
She met Mr. Fain by chance at a hospital, where both were visiting his ailing mother, a friend of Ms. Barnard’s. “Bittersweet times, as Michael’s mother was dying and we were falling in love,” she told The Ledger.
Once the couple decided to bet on a publishing career, there was no turning back. “We burned all our bridges, both quit our jobs, lived on our savings for one year,” Ms. Barnard said in a 1997 interview with The Oklahoman newspaper of Oklahoma City.
“We didn’t know how hard it would be,” she added. “We just thought it would be wonderful to work together. And it was, after a while.”
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Barnard is survived by Mr. Fain; her son, Andrew Sharpe; five grandchildren; and a brother, David Barnard.
It helped that the couple adhered to a strict division of labor. After what could be months of plotting and laying down a basic outline together, Ms. Barnard then did the writing, while Mr. Fain served as the editor.
“He’s a superb one,” she said in a 1988 interview with The Houston Chronicle. “And sometimes a harsh critic.”
Each book might require five or six drafts, with endless fiddling. When the inevitable disagreements arose, Mr. Fain, an amateur photographer, would disappear into his darkroom to cool off, he told The Ledger, while Ms. Barnard headed to the kitchen to “knead bread and take out her aggressions.”
Then again, their shared career also proved a marital blessing.
As Ms. Barnard once put it, “It probably kept us married because we always had a book to finish.”
As a lifelong fan of romantic comedies, my list of favorite “sweet” romances is extensive.
Not because I have a spice aversion — but because the rom-coms I love most, with that classic cinematic vibe, often come with fewer peppers on the spice scale.
Some people refer to these books as “closed door.” I prefer to think of them as “in the hall” romances (though that admittedly doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way). The reader is there for all the swoon, the burn and the banter — but when things head to the bedroom, the reader remains out in the hallway. With less focus on what happens inside the boudoir, all that juicy heightened tension and yearning really shine. Here are a few of my favorites.
SEEK THE TRAITOR’S SON, by Veronica Roth
I read Veronica Roth’s new novel for adults, “Seek the Traitor’s Son,” over one weekend and had a hard time putting it down, and not just because I was procrastinating on my house chores.
There’s much about the novel one would expect from Roth, the author of the Divergent series, one of the hottest dystopian young adult series of the 2010s. Thematically, the novels are similar. Like “Divergent,” this new book is also set in an alternate, dystopian version of our world; it is also packed with vivid, present-tense prose full of capitalized labels to let you know that something different is going on; and it also centers on a classic “Chosen One” who is burdened by the mantle of savior she carries.
These are classic tropes, but I, like many other genre fiction fans, enjoy that familiarity. Still, I’m always hoping for a subversion, a tornado twist that sucks me into imagination land.
In “Seek the Traitor’s Son,” our Chosen One is Elegy Ahn, the spare heir of the most powerful woman in Cedre. Elegy likes her life, even if it’s filled with danger. See, some time ago, a virus took over the world. The contagion is strange: Everyone who is infected dies, but 50 percent of the people who die come back to life with mysterious cognitive gifts.
After the outbreak, Earth split into two factions: The dominant Talusar, who worship the Fever, believe it is a divine gift, willingly infect themselves with it and consider anyone who does not submit to it a blasphemer; and Cedre, a small country made up of everyone who rejects the virus and the dogma around it. They are, naturally, at war.
Early in the book, Elegy, solidly on the Cedre side, and Rava Vidar, a brutal Talusar general, are summoned by an order of prophets who tell them: One of you will lead your people to victory over the other, and one of the deciding factors involves an unnamed man whom Elegy is prophesied to fall in love with.
Elegy doesn’t want this. But the prophecy spurs the Talusar into action, and so her mother assigns her a Talusaran refugee as a knight and forces her into the fray as the Hope of Cedre.
If that seems like a lot of setup, don’t worry. That’s just the first few chapters. Besides, if you know those dystopian novel tropes, you’ll get the hang of it. Roth gets through the world exposition quickly, and after a rather jarring time skip, the plot takes off, effectively and entertainingly driving readers to the novel’s exhilarating end.
The strength of “Seek the Traitor’s Son” is Roth’s character work. Elegy is a dynamic heroine. She has a lot to lose, and she leads with love, which is reflected in the intense grief she feels for the people she’s lost in the war and the life the prophecy took from her. It’s love that makes her stop running from her destiny and do what she thinks is right to save the people she has left.
Many authors isolate their characters to back them into bad decisions, so it’s refreshing that Roth has given Elegy a community to support her. Her sister Hela in particular is a treat. She’s refreshingly grounded, and often gives a much needed reprieve from the melodrama of the other characters’ lives. (She has an important subplot that has to do with a glowing alien plant, but the real reason you should pay attention to her is that she’s funny, loves her sister so much, has cool friends and listens to gay romance novels.) Hela and Elegy’s unwavering loyalty to each other casts a positive illumination on both characters.
My favorite character is Theren, Elegy’s knight, who is kind and empathetic to everyone but himself. As the obvious romantic lead, his character most diverges from genre standard because of the nuanced depiction of his trauma. He has been so broken by his experiences that he thinks what he can do with his body is all he can offer, and it’s worth nothing to him.
But like I said, I need subversion, and for all the creative world-building, I didn’t quite get it. The most distinct part of the novel was the setting and structure of alternate Earth, as well as the subcultures born from that setting. But after ripping through the novel, I found that those details didn’t provide nourishment for thought, and the general handwaviness of the technology and history of Earth was distractingly easy to nitpick.
I am a greedy reader, so I want my books to have everything: romance, action, an intellectual theme, novel ideas about the future, and character development. “Seek the Traitor’s Son” comes close. The novel is the first in a series, and I’m willing to hold my reservations until I read the next book. Elegy and Theren are worth it.
SEEK THE TRAITOR’S SON | By Veronica Roth | Tor | 416 pp. | $29
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