Ange Postecoglou’s triumphant sacking holds the key to modern football
Some crackers in this excellent piece by Jonathan Liew….examples:
There have been better Premier League managers. There have been more charming and more entertaining Premier League managers.
But there may never have been a manager better at defining his own terms of achievement; a managerial reign so evidently built upon a towering silo of nuclear-strength bullshit.
From the very start, Angeball constructed its own bespoke logic as it went along. The journey matters more than the destination. There is a process, and we stick to it. There are principles, and however tough things get, you never deviate from or compromise on them. “Even if we go down to five men, we will have a go,” he said after
his nine men were defeated by Chelseain November 2023. The idea of Champions League qualification as a goal in its own right, unaccompanied by broader progress: “meaningless”, as he put it in March 2024.
In January 2024 he rejected the idea that a single trophy could ever constitute satisfaction or atone for mediocrity elsewhere (“You can’t just sit back and say: ‘I’ve just delivered a trophy, shouldn’t I have some latitude to not be successful?’”). In October 2024 he insisted that Tottenham’s league performance should be regarded as the “most meaningful” measure of his side’s progress.
Ange Postecoglou 2023-24: meet Ange Postecoglou 2025. The coach who promised to attack in all circumstances, who disdained the transformative effect of a single trophy, has just won a trophy with the lowest possession recorded in a European final because sometimes – as he put it in Bilbao – “you have to change your approach”.
A coach who urged us to judge him on the league now no longer judges himself on the league.
A coach who
blames Tottenham’s abject league performance on a freak injury crisis also takes no responsibility for that injury crisis, for a style of play in which Tottenham comfortably spend more time in high-intensity sprints than any other Premier League team.
All of a sudden, one February morning, the league is gone; survival secure.
The new dogma is defending like hell against continental Europeans on a Thursday. In fact, scratch that: this was always the dogma. There was no old dogma. This was what you were trying to build all along. Of course this has always been
Postecoglou’s real superpower: the cult of personality, the ability to render words convincingly true simply by emitting them from your mouth, to build castles and citadels of bullshit, an apparatus of demagoguery so potent and alluring that it supplants all previous logic.