Right.
Cinch.
It’s not a terrible idea but was just really weird watching them with the seatbelts on.
Maybe they were meant to drive but for some reason they couldn’t?
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Manager Ange Postecoglou
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Right.
Cinch.
It’s not a terrible idea but was just really weird watching them with the seatbelts on.
Maybe they were meant to drive but for some reason they couldn’t?
It might just be a short clip from a longer video
Would also make sense
I feel like that's a very convoluted explanation for a very simple scenario of a manager deciding to choose his best, star player in a massive match.
It’s fucking stupid. In a car in a garage seatbelts on.
How Ange Postecoglou is rewriting the narrative at Tottenham
At Spurs, they’ve never heard anything quite like Ange Postecoglou’s team talks, speeches that knit together football and life, the personal with the wider cause, whose words burrow into your brain and your heart. He has the orator’s trick of swelling in volume when a point needs emphasised.
www.thetimes.co.uk
At Spurs, they’ve never heard anything quite like Ange Postecoglou’s team talks, speeches that knit together football and life, the personal with the wider cause, whose words burrow into your brain and your heart. He has the orator’s trick of swelling in volume when a point needs emphasised, yet they never sound scripted. “It’s like he’s talking normally,” said someone who hears them. “He lifts the room. You think, ‘right – here we go.’”
He’ll say, “I’m telling you now, three times out of ten our press isn’t going to work so I want you to sprint – sprint back. Guys. Our football. You’re just going to have to run.” Another wisdom that strikes chords is, “what type of football did you want to play when you were ten years old? Let’s play that.”
Thomas Broich, whom Postecoglou turned from football dropout to ‘the greatest player in A League history’ described his mentor as, most of all, a “storyteller.” And it’s through messaging that cuts to the soul of Tottenham Hotspur that Postecoglou is rewriting narratives around the club. On elements like culture, outlook and style of play it feels he has had more impact after six games managing Spurs, than Erik ten Hag has at Manchester United, 16 months into his reign. Of course it’s still early days, and Spurs are the original False Dawns FC, but at a fans’ forum last week Daniel Levy said the same thing supporters sing: “we’ve got our Tottenham back.”
Spurs approach their first North London derby in a decade without the fixture’s all-time top scorer, Harry Kane, somehow not thinking about that. Rather, the intrigue is how ‘Ange ball’ will fare against its best opposition to date. Spurs haven’t won at the Emirates in the league in 13 years but, Postecoglou said on Friday, “we’ll go in there and play our football and see where it takes us,” .
The idea of ‘our football’ as something to treasure, take ownership of, and live or die by is key to the stories Postecoglou tells. At Spurs it’s reinforced in practice sessions quite unlike the long, dour, laborious ones of Conte, overseen by Chris Davies, the No 2 Postecoglou recruited following his impressive work with Brendan Rodgers at Leicester City and Celtic.
Postecoglou had never met Davies – who was close to accepting a No1 job in the Championship – before offering him the post and the appointment typifies the Australian’s willingness, throughout his career, to go into roles without taking with him an entourage of familiar staff. Instead, he’ll work with those already there or appoint new people with the best expertise. Conscious that, at 58, he is now a very different age to players he wanted a young staff at Spurs and alongside Davies are coaches Mile Jedinak (39), Ryan Mason (32) and Matt Wells (35).
While they train the squad, Postecoglou stands silently, pitch-side, going days sometimes without saying much to the players, making his words, when he does speak, even more impactful. But staff have found, in debriefs, that he notices everything. Tim Cahill, who played for his Australia side describes training and “feeling something burning in the back of your head.” Postecoglou’s eyes.
Spurs practice at high intensity, using Davies-devised exercises that promote the Postecoglou tenets of pressing high, dominating with the ball, playing forward quickly and going ‘all-in’ with attacks where bodies flood the box. They lead the Premier League for distance covered, high intensity runs and sprints and despite Kane’s departure, were the competition’s third highest scorers after five games with seven different players scoring.
Postecoglou’s use of full-backs is catching fellow coaches’ eyes. Inverted full-backs are not novel but the extent to which he commits to the concept is, with Destiny Udogie and Pedro Porro/Emerson Royal adopting unusually narrow positions when Spurs play out from goal kicks and both staying inside when the team moves forward. Udogie spends as much time in central attacking midfied positions as traditional full back ones and the shape is often 2-3-2-3.
“I’ve always tried to coach in the future,” Postecoglou told a 2020 coaching webinar. “I’m building teams for five years’ time. If I follow the current trend, I’ll be copying everyone else.” That quote figures in a fascinating new book, Revolution: Ange Postecoglou. The man, the methods and the mastery, by award-winning Scottish writer – and licenced coach – John Greechan. It’s especially compelling on Postecoglou’s formative years in Australia.
Postecoglou arrived there, aged five, on a boat from Greece, with parents, Jim and Voula, who emigrated for the sake of their kids. The new start was hard. His sister, Liz, would lie awake hearing their mother crying at night and Postecoglou has told the story of his dad and uncle going across Melbourne to collect a mattress someone was giving away then being unable to find their way home in a city where they couldn’t read the street signs. Postecoglou “wasn’t raised to shirk from a challenge just because it might cause a bit of discomfort,” Greechan writes.
Postecoglou talks a lot about imagining his dad sat in the stand, evaluating his team. It’s why he has to play beautifully. Football was how he and Jim bonded and their “utopia” was Holland’s 1974 team. But the English game was always a fascination. Dad steered him away from a liking for Don Revie’s Leeds towards appreciation of 1970s Liverpool, and – here’s one for North London dynamics – Postecoglou idolised Charlie George when George came to Australia for a stint in its old National Soccer League.
He found the only bookshop in Melbourne that sold English football biographies and would take the tram there, as a kid, to buy what he could. He collected English magazines like Roy of the Rovers, Match and Shoot. His school had no football team – so he formed one and coached it himself. At 12. Though a decent full-back who scored goals and hated defending, he always suspected management was his calling and went straight from a job in a bank to the dugout at South Melbourne, whom he steered to a continental title, giving Manchester United a tricky game at the 2000 Club World Cup.
A League titles followed with Brisbane Roar. He then built, exciting, successful Australia, Yokohama Marinos and Celtic teams. Arteta has faced him before - as Pep Guardiola’s No2 when Manchester City played Yokohama in 2019.
“He had this thing about ‘no limits.’ He said ‘if I set limits when I was younger, I wouldn’t be here,’” says Chris Bradley, opposition scout for Postecoglou’s Australia at the 2014 World Cup. Bradley describes a working environment without hierarchy, thanks to Postecoglou’s humble leadership style. He identifies with something the observer at Spurs said: “Ange isn’t dominant. When you sit round a table with him, he doesn’t have to be the loudest there. He’s just a bloke sitting at that table.”
Postecoglou said there was “no dramas” over Kane’s exit from the club
YUI MOK/PA WIRE
A trait, in all his postings, has been to ditch older players and start again with a younger team and his first team sheet – v Brentford last month – reverberated through his club. Udogie, 20, played instead of Ben Davies, Pape Sarr, then 20, instead of Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, and Micky van de Ven, 22, instead of Eric Dier. His choices for a new leadership group were shrewd with Heung-min Son embracing promotion to captain and James Maddison and Cristian Romero observed at the training ground as having “grown” since becoming vice-captains.
How Postecoglou handled Kane’s departure impressed too. He took Kane aside for a chat before training a couple of times, but there were “no dramas” – no big summits with the star and nothing to signal the situation was any distraction. Ange gets on with business. Coaching meetings are short – as brief as two minutes – but always result in decisions.
In The Age of Ange, a 2015 film about his career, there is an endearing moment when Postecoglou’s wife, Georgia, explains how she fell for him. They met when she was South Melbourne’s marketing manager and he was head coach. “I initially wondered why everyone around the club was so fascinated and respected him. Because he’s not someone I would describe as charismatic or – he’ll hate me saying this - a charmer,” she said.
“But afterwards I got to understand him as a person. You’d see him at the ground. He’d strike up conversations with kids. Because he saw how much they were enjoying what he enjoyed - and how much he loved the game.”
Have to agree, Howe is being held up by Saudi dinars!
He’s done really well there to be fair regardless of the money
Couldn't be seen driving and talking...cunts would have complained...but then again...
Howe is a good manager and I'm sure he would have done well at Celtic, but I'm not at all convinced that he wins the league in that first season Ange took over.
Rangers were coming off a season where they didn't lose a game and were a pretty good side at the time, as evidenced but them reaching the EL final, beating Dortmund over 2 legs, etc. Add to that the fact that the Celtic squad was in a real mess and requiring a serious rebuild. A number of their best players (Edouard, Ajer, Christie, Brown) were leaving, they didn't have a first choice RB, the CB's were gash, the goalkeepers were worse.
Ange's recruitment and knowledge of the Japanese market, along with his ability to galvanise everyone and get them pulling in the same direction, was huge. Howe likely would have relied on the English market for the bulk of his signings, where it is far more difficult to get value for money.
Rangers were coming off a season where they didn't lose a game and were a pretty good side at the time, as evidenced but them reaching the EL final, beating Dortmund over 2 legs, etc. Add to that the fact that the Celtic squad was in a real mess and requiring a serious rebuild. A number of their best players (Edouard, Ajer, Christie, Brown) were leaving, they didn't have a first choice RB, the CB's were gash, the goalkeepers were worse.
Ange's recruitment and knowledge of the Japanese market, along with his ability to galvanise everyone and get them pulling in the same direction, was huge. Howe likely would have relied on the English market for the bulk of his signings, where it is far more difficult to get value for money.
I started watching his first friendly v Spammers after 20 mins, already 0-2 down. But I thought on balance of play and decent chances we should have easily beat them. Equally importantly it was the style that was refreshing, none of this anti-football crap that we'd had for past 3 seasons. The change was immediate, and completely rolled back 3-4 awful seasons.
It also tallied with the comments from a lot of you Celtic fans who came on the board even before he joined.
In the PL I'd give him 9/10.
We were a rubbish pen decision away from beating Brentford away first day, 100% record otherwise.
I loved the commitment et al v Sheff Utd but he left the subs very late and the winner was the latest in PL history.
I won't throw the toys out of the pram if we lose v Goons or LFC but I'm looking for good front foot footie that gives the oppo problems. If we win this pm expectations from the less rational observers will just go through the roof. Even 2 draws would be good results compared to the dross he inherited.
A few days ago I posted an analysis of our last 10 or so matches from last season. That pts tally extrapolated would have taken us down, no question. Top 4 from that would be a great achievement.
Turns into carpool karaoke
They could have done something like:
Chatting with Ange in line at the post office
and it would have been less shite.
But having an unlimited budget or rather a budget far in excess of most other clubs helps right?
Ange said himself after the game that he left the subs later as he knew there should have been 10+ mins added on.
Subs were perfect then in that context.
Yeah of course. But look at Poch / AVB 2.0 at Utd and he’s done much better than those two and spent less
Yeah, but cinch is a car selling website, not a post office selling website...
I like the bit at the end where he says he doesn’t get close to players because he doesn’t want it to affect his decision-making. One of Poch’s many failings.