Ange Postecoglou said something interesting before Tottenham’s game against Brighton at the weekend.
While being interviewed on Sky Sports, reporter Natalie Gedra asked him how, given the game was likely to be quite open, Tottenham planned to exert some control. Postecoglou smiled and said: “We don’t! Let’s keep it open, that way we entertain everyone and hopefully get the result we want.”
From one perspective, clearly there’s nothing wrong with this. Who doesn’t enjoy open, entertaining football? For those of us who had just sat through Aston Villa vs Manchester United — a stultifying match that by the closing stages had inspired a sort of zen state whereby you actually didn’t want anything exciting to happen in the last five minutes, because it would jar so much with the preceding 85 — the prospect of something a little more freewheeling was very enticing.
And, to be fair, Tottenham delivered. After a tedious 0-0 draw, what could be finer and more diverting for the neutral audience than seeing a team go 2-0 up in the first half, before completely soiling themselves and ultimately losing 3-2?
But his statement did raise a question: when he says “entertain everyone”, who is he talking about there?
There are a few possibilities.
Possibility one is that he sees himself as some sort of ambassador for the game, a sort of fun tsar with a broad remit to ensure fine viewing for the good people at home.
Possibility two is that when he says “entertain everyone”, he means Tottenham fans. They are, after all, his primary audience, the people he essentially works for and who, in one way or another, he is trying to make happy.
Possibility three is that Postecoglou actually isn’t really the sort of naive idealist that it’s easy to conclude he is, more that he truly believes that the way his teams play is the best way they can win. The entertainment part is secondary, but it’s just a sort of happy coincidence that his idea of winning football happens to be what is typically thought of as entertaining football.
Possibility four is that this is all a colossal ego exercise, that Postecoglou’s football is less about what is necessarily best for the team and that the primary purpose is to satisfy his own muse or, as he has said before, to create a team that he thought his father would admire.
Possibility five is that he misspoke, that this was a slightly flippant comment made in a pre-match interview when his mind was understandably elsewhere, and his words don’t actually reflect his own ideas about the game.
To address the last point first, that is backed up by something he said to the Australian journalist Vince Rugari in Angeball, his excellent biography of Postecoglou. “As a coach, when I’m watching the game, I’m just not comfortable when the opposition have the ball,” he said. “I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m watching the opposition working us around the pitch or looking for space. Even our defensive work doesn’t stray from what our core belief is: we want to be a team that has the ball.”
In that respect, he couldn’t really be clearer about how he feels about control, which goes against the idea that he’s not interested in it, if it goes against the greater good of entertainment.
But he did still say it, and he has to be conscious of the fact that it can easily be interpreted purely as possibility two.
The truth, which is rarely neat enough to be contained in a single thought, almost certainly lies in a combination of possibilities two, three and four: he does want entertain Tottenham fans, he does believe that this is the best way of winning, there is clearly an element of ego and the influence of his father. All of those things can be true, all of those things can coexist, all of those things are understandable, none of those things are necessarily wrong.
He clearly does want to entertain. In Angeball, Postecoglou tells Rugari about the influence of Ferenc Puskas, who was a coach at South Melbourne when the young Ange was a player. Puskas encouraged his players to play with freedom, that they were ‘entertainers first and foremost.’
“I just thought to myself, what a fantastic outlook to have,” he says. “Because as a manager you’re kind of bogged down by all these things as much as the players are — of failure, of things not going right, of potentially getting the sack. All these things are there to stop you actually playing the football you want your team to play.
“That had an effect on me of, OK, that’s the kind of manager I want to be. Play football the fans want to see, play football the players want to play, and provide the structure that’s going to make you successful.”
Which is where we get into the meaning of what ‘entertainment’ is to football fans. In Postecoglou’s view, entertainment is fast, attacking, visceral football. Which it can be. But to think that entertainment is only that type of football misinterprets the nature of fandom, or at least the fandom of about 95 per cent of supporters.
As a rule, for fans, entertainment = winning. It’s not that nobody cares how they win, but the how is very much a secondary concern. For many fans, a dug-in, gritty, perhaps even nasty 1-0 away win is just as entertaining as a 5-0 home victory in which your team totally outclasses the opposition. Sometimes even more so.
There’s a deep satisfaction in those kind of games. There’s a deep satisfaction in winning games that your team demonstrably does not deserve to win, victory via an offside goal with an unspotted handball in the build-up (which is another way in which VAR is sucking the joy from the game, but that’s a debate for another day). There’s a deep satisfaction in a superior, technically more advanced opposition getting undone by your team playing 5-4-1 and winning from a long ball to the big man up top.
You don’t want that all the time. If that sort of attritional football stops working then the defeats are much bleaker. Broadly speaking, positive, attacking football is preferable. But variation is good too. Like a manager that adapts depending on changing circumstances.
For all Pep Guardiola is sometimes thought of as the ultimate fundamentalist, the reality is that he changes the way his teams play all the time. Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal have evolved, and played according to the circumstances when down to 10 men against Manchester City recently.
Compare that with how Tottenham played when they had two players sent off against Chelsea last season. Rather than switching to Plan B, Postecoglou turned Plan A up to 11. It didn’t work. Spurs lost 4-1. “It’s just who we are, mate,” he told the media after that game.
This is not to say that he was necessarily wrong. Plan Bs often don’t work either. It’s just that entertainment comes in many different forms: had Spurs stuck all of their outfielders behind the ball and come away with a point or even a win against Chelsea, then their fans would have been enormously entertained.
With all of this in mind, when someone is as fundamentalist as Postecoglou, it’s fair to question who he is doing it for. His goal is to win, and he sees his type of football as the best way to do that, which is entirely fair. But he also has to understand that when he makes comments like the one he did before the Brighton game, it’s also fair if some Tottenham fans get annoyed and think he’s doing this more for himself than for them.
Postecoglou isn’t going to change. Partly because this is the football he has always wanted his teams to play, partly because this has brought him success so far, and may well bring more success at Tottenham. He’s loved at most of the clubs he has managed before, but while the football is a reason for his popularity, it’s the winning that’s more important.
(Top photo: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
