Ange Postecoglou agrees because he knew just as well as anyone how it would have been portrayed. “Firstly, you can say that if we lost the other night, we would have been in crisis,” the Tottenham manager says. He is discussing the Carabao Cup tie at Coventry on Wednesday, which came three days after the home loss to Arsenal, a result that left Spurs with four points from the opening four Premier League games.
Postecoglou had fallen at the first hurdle in last season’s Carabao Cup, going out on penalties at Fulham, having made nine changes to his starting XI. He swapped eight players at Coventry and there is no doubt that relief was the most prominent emotion when the substitutes Djed Spence and Brennan Johnson scored late goals for a 2-1 comeback win.
Postecoglou had not finished his argument. “If we won our first game of the season, I’d probably be sitting here and people would have been saying: ‘Can you win a title this year?’ Both of them are just not the reality of my world.” The reality for Postecoglou these days is volatility, extreme judgments from game to game because the climate has shifted for him since that stirring start to last season, his first at Spurs, when his team took 26 points from an available 30. Since then, it has been 44 from 30 matches, which equates to a 56-point season or mid-table mediocrity.
Some of the fans are not only booing at matches (they do that regularly when unhappy with the scoreline) but grumbling about where they are going under Postecoglou. The tone of it all was reflected in many of the questions he faced in his media conference to preview Saturday’s visit of Brentford. There is a lot of noise around Spurs, plenty of it taking in the merits of Angeball, the entertainment-value-versus-results debate. And more about individual players.
Take Johnson, for example, and Postecoglou wanted to do so after the forward’s bolt from zero against Arsenal to match winner at Coventry. Johnson received such abuse on social media after his poor performance in the derby that he deactivated his Instagram account. “He won a game of football for us the other night with a really good finish and at the critical moment,” Postecoglou says. “I reckon you put any of his critics in that situation and they would be looking for a change of pants pretty quickly. But they don’t think about that in the moment.”
It was when the conversation centred on Dominic Solanke that Postecoglou laid bare his exasperation. The striker, signed for a club record £65m, has not scored in his three appearances; he missed Spurs’s second and third games of the season with an ankle injury. “People are just so quick to judge,” Postecoglou says. “If he has gone 15 games without a goal or 15 games where he hasn’t contributed … I just think take a breath. Do a bit of yoga. Think about the world for a second and make an assessment after that.”
For Postecoglou, there were two obvious questions. Does he do yoga? “No mate, jeez, I don’t have the patience for it … nothing wrong with yoga by the way.” And, more seriously, how does he cope with the intensity and craziness of the professional realm that he inhabits? “I have always been pretty good at staying clear-eyed and focused about what is important,” Postecoglou says. “The external noise, whether it’s valid or not, I just find it’s a massive distraction. I learned along the way … whether things are going well or not going well … not to let that external noise distract me.
“In many parts of my life, I’m not very disciplined, especially around eating. But when it comes to football, I’m really disciplined. Nothing will take me away from what I think needs to be done.” A section of the Spurs support booed when Postecoglou substituted the midfielder Lucas Bergvall at Coventry but the manager said such negativity did not affect him. “I’ve always said fans are more than free to feel what they feel,” he says. “We’ve just got to stay clear-eyed on what we’re trying to achieve and the kind of football team we want to be. If that’s swimming against the tide sometimes, that’s all right – it makes you stronger.”
Postecoglou clarified that he was not swimming against the tide at present. “The point I’m trying to make is I ignore the tide and just keep swimming,” he says. “Others may feel that way and if they do, there’s nothing wrong with that. You need to embrace the struggle. You don’t get success just by everything rolling out perfectly. But I ignore it.”
Postecoglou was reminded that he is the first Spurs manager to complete a full season since Mauricio Pochettino in 2018-19. “Yeah, they had a cake for me the other day,” he deadpans. All he feels his team needs is a spark in the final third. “In our first four games we were about as dominant as we were last season for any series of games,” Postecoglou says. “In all four, we’ve out-possessed the opposition, created double the chances, played the game mostly in the opposition half. But we haven’t really got a reward for our dominance and that’s the area we are trying to focus on – in that front third.”
