'Fantastic': Eric Dier makes brilliant point about Mauricio Pochettino's methods amid Chelsea struggles

Eric Dier believes Chelsea manager Mauricio Pochettino has the gift of giving young players the fundamental tools they need to develop after working with him for five years at Tottenham.

Dier, now on loan at Bayern Munich praised his former manager for his attention to detail and credits him for bringing the best out of him and other Tottenham players when they were young.

He told the Overlap, brought to you by Sky Bet: "With [Mauricio] Pochettino, I was young, we were all very young, it was a little bit of the case that the club got a little lucky. 

"I cost £5 million, Dele [Alli] was £5 million, Harry [Kane] came through the academy, Danny Rose and Kyle Walker were both bought and brought in at a young age, and then you had a core of really good professionals, a bit older but still quite young. 

"[Christian] Eriksen was still young, [Jan] Vertonghen, [Moussa] Dembele, [Toby] Alderweireld, and [Hugo] Lloris – I’m sure they didn’t expect us to do what we did in the space of the next couple years, but what we were able to do was a lot down to the manager. 

“He [Mauricio] was fantastic at giving us the basics as young players, his attention to detail was incredible, he gave us great fundamentals on the pitch with body shape, the way you moved your legs – all these things, he was obsessed with those details.”

Both Dier and Pochettino have all moved on now with the 52-year-old manager now the boss at Chelsea, but the development of young players hasn’t gone entirely according to plan. The Blues are ninth on the league table and have just drawn away at Bramall Lane with Pochettino forced to admit his squad might not be ready to compete.

He told reporters at the weekend: “At 52, you identify really quickly whether the team is ready to compete or not. Maybe this group is not mature enough to compete in games every three days. It's a new team and we are still learning about their profiles. 

“The process always takes time. It's not a magic thing. It's a project, a three or five-year process to build a team.”

Under Pochettino, the club could miss out on European football if results do not improve.