Tottenham vs Liverpool: The rise of Sadio Mane, 'lethal, unique' and Mauricio Pochettino's one that got away

Newcastle 5, Tottenham Hotspur 1. May 2016, the final game of the Premier League season. Newcastle were already relegated and Tottenham, according to a furious Mauricio Pochettino, "were already on holiday".

It had been 2-1 to Newcastle when Aleksandar Mitrovic was sent off but it became worse for Tottenham and in the final 25 minutes, they conceded three more goals. Though they had pushed Leicester City for the title, it was not reflected in the final placings – finishing third.

Pochettino had made two half time substitutions. One of those removed was Ryan Mason, who would never play for the club again. The other was Son Heung-min for a teenager in Josh Onomah. Son had scored just four league goals in his first season having signed from Bayer Leverkusen in 2015. His Tottenham career was on the line as well after just one year and with interest from Germany, where he’d also played for Hamburg, Pochettino would have sold him had he been able to recruit Sadio Mane a couple of months later.

Pochettino had wanted a forward who was more direct and aggressive to vary his options because he felt he had too many similar types: Son, Erik Lamela and Christian Eriksen liked the ball played into feet whereas Mane was able to break through defensive lines.

He would take Mane around Tottenham’s new training ground in Enfield, promising “world class facilities”. Yet Liverpool promised £130,000-a-week wages and this proved to be beyond Tottenham’s reach and so, the Senegalese went there instead.

While Son has emerged as a key figure in Pochettino’s team, scoring 38 league goals across the next three seasons – 59 if you include cup competitions – the Spurs manager still feels his side has lacked a Mane-type at times in each of the subsequent campaigns. It is reflective of Mane’s skill-set that for Pochettino, it hasn’t been a simple case of going out and getting a like-for-like replacement. “Pochettino thinks there are players like Mane but none are as quick, as explosive and as lethal in front of goal,” a Spurs insider told The Independent last week. “He thinks Mane is a unique footballer.”

His record since joining Liverpool is similar to Son’s – 59 goals in total, though seven more in a league he was already adjusted to by the time he moved to Anfield.

In terms of assists, Son has been more consistent in the same period of time: six a season, and four more than Mane, who may have been equal had it not been for the anomaly of 2018/19 where he created just one goal.

This, perhaps, is justified by an increase in the number of goals. Having scored 22 times, Mane shared the Premier League’s golden boot award with his teammate Mohamed Salah. Jurgen Klopp does not place individual targets on his players but at the start of the season he had asked Mane to shoot more often. Out of Liverpool’s front three, he had shot less than Mohamed Salah and Roberto Firmino in 2017/18 and if there’s one thing Klopp demands, it is shots because he believes it so important to involve opposition goalkeepers.

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While Son’s three goals against Manchester City put Spurs into the Champions League semi-finals, Mane – who like Son has sometimes recently operated as a centre forward rather than a left winger – has emerged in the second half of the season as Liverpool’s most prolific striker. In 2019, he has scored 16 times overall, compared to Salah’s nine and Firmino’s six.

Teammates inside Liverpool’s dressing room have noticed how Mane has become a more prominent voice. Despite his aggression on the pitch, he is modest off it and if you listen to those who have played a role in his career he has always been this way: quiet initially before he becomes comfortable enough to have his say.

In Senegal, he had come from a village in Bambali to live in Dakar – a six-hour drive away, and at the Generation Foot academy, Abdou Diatta was concerned about Mane reluctance to socialise with the other boys his age, whose backgrounds were urban while his was rural even though that did not show during games where his skill melted into the collective.

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“One day I went to him and said, ‘Sadio, you're a footballer. When you're here, put yourself in the group, with the group, together, all the team.’

“I warned him, ‘If you continue to be shy like this you risk ending up going back home, because football's like that. You have to be part of this team not outside it.’”

Klopp had wanted to sign him for Borussia Dortmund but he instead went to Southampton in 2014 because Klopp was unsure whether he had the the sort of outward personality he tends to work better with.

“I have made a few mistakes in my life and one of the biggest mistakes ever was not taking Sadio when I was at Dortmund,” Klopp confessed. “We were together in my office but I wasn’t sure about signing him. It was completely my fault.”

Klopp did not make the same mistake twice. It had actually been Mane’s red card in Klopp’s first league game in charge of Liverpool at Anfield that made him realise fire lay beneath. Four minutes earlier, Mane had equalised for Southampton and later that season he would score twice to secure a victory for his team at the expense of Liverpool who had led 2-0.

Klopp by then had seen what the coaches at Metz saw years earlier. Patrick Hesse was the assistant manager there and he had never seen a player who could influence what was happening as quickly as Mane.

“He was driving opponents’ crazy with his explosiveness on that first touch of the ball," he remembered. "We were always amazed. It was hard to catch him without making a mistake. It has such a thrust, it was extraordinary."