Escalating wage demands from unhappy players, insufficient additions to an already stretched squad and the 'Wembley' factor - many would forgive Spurs' Mauricio Pochettino for feeling a little stressed at the beginning of another Premier League season.
However, almost 25 years ago whilst playing for Argentina's Newell's Old Boys, Pochettino experienced stress at a level that makes these contemporary issues pale in comparison; the young Argentine roomed with Diego Maradona.
In the same manner that anyone who had a sniff of an English cap throughout the 1990s has a story about Paul Gascoigne, Pochettino's fleeting experience with 'a person that when he’s with you he makes you feel the best', was typically anarchic.
If Danny Rose had hoped to unnerve Pochettino with his publicised disillusionment regarding money, he best pay attention. On one particular morning when Pochettino and Maradona were supposed to be sharing a room together, it became apparent to the former that the latter was now nowhere to be seen:
We were together in the room during pre-season in Mar del Plata ... He loved basketball and went to see it in Mar del Plata – the final in the conference. And then, in the morning, I woke up and he wasn’t in bed.
I then go to breakfast, the manager asked about him and I said: ‘No, no, no, he didn’t come back to the hotel.’ After breakfast we went to training. Nobody knew about Diego and at lunchtime it was breaking news on the television … Diego shoots journalists in Buenos Aires! Four hundred kilometres away!
1994 would become a watershed year for Maradona. Having left Napoli under a cloud of controversy - he still owes the Italian government €39 million in tax - Maradona would later be found guilty of doping during the World Cup that summer, being sent home before Argentina's third group game.
Despite his obvious personal difficulties during this period however, Pochettino maintains that Maradona is a person about whom he 'loves everything',
I knew Maradona, the real Maradona. We see him on the pitch and then there is his image. Outside it was crazy. But I promise you, if he arrived here and opened the door we’d all be in love with him.
It may seem an unusual pairing, the relatively controlled, taciturn Pochettino and the larger than life Maradona, but, having 'learned a lot from' the 1986 World Cup hero, Spurs players may think twice about being so vocal in the future. What's an unhappy wing back when your own teammate has taken pot-shots at a pack of journalists?
[Guardian]
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