I took over as manager when I was 12. My mates said why the hell are we listening to you!
But it worked and Ange Postecoglou won his first title. No wonder he’s changed the face of Tottenham already
SOMETHING has changed at Tottenham. A senior member of staff, used to observing the team at their training ground, noticed it the minute Ange Postecoglou arrived. ‘He’s just very approachable, always comes over to chat, shares his thoughts and asks questions,’ said the staff member. ‘He just seems a really open person. That didn’t really happen with the coaches before.’ The dark cloud that descended over the club in the latter days of Mauricio Pochettino and the reigns of Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo and Antonio Conte, where the football got regressively worse, seems to be lifting.
It is very early days to posit a revival at a club where the man who owned it, at least until last year, is facing 25 years in jail for alleged securities fraud and who are also the club who recently appointed a director of football who was soon after banned by FIFA.
Yet given that they have sold one of their greatest-ever players this summer, it was hard to imagine that they would approach today’s north London derby with this amount of bravado. It remains to be seen whether the renewed sense of well-being survives 90 minutes at the Emirates, but ‘Big Ange’ — as Robbie Williams christened him in his serenade to the new manager — might just have turned something around.
Craig Foster, the former Portsmouth and Crystal Palace player and now prominent Australian pundit, goes way back with Postecoglou. So far back that they have fallen out publicly on TV in spectacular fashion, kissed, made up and since grown into mutual admirers.
‘We all knew it was only matter of time before Ange moved into the Premier League and we were all just delighted it was Spurs, given their historical commitment to attacking, attractive football,’ said Foster. ‘And he’s coming on the back of Antonio Conte, whose football was absolutely turgid, almost impossible to watch at
times. The way they have started is absolutely no surprise, he’s done it time and time again.
‘The thing about Ange is that Australian coaches have to build their capability with a lesser level of player. So they have to find a way to make every player better. [Now at Spurs] It’s like going from a pretty good sports car to a Ferrari. You’re able to do the same things at a much higher level.
‘Some years ago I was doing my pro licence and Ange came along to have a chat. He said: “The hardest thing for coaches is to disregard the concept of time. The vast majority of coaches are scared of losing jobs in the next few weeks; that’s how the industry operates. That conditions a lot of their thinking and work. In tough situations, they tend to make compromises to buy more time. But you can only work at your full capacity in life when you disregard the consequences”.’
Postecoglou once believed his Australian passport would bar him for ever from being accepted into major European football, recalling being introduced to clubs’ owners. ‘They just didn’t know who I was. It was so depressing.’
But it turns out being formed outside the treadmill of European football might actually be his super power, the feature that makes him unique and accessible and Tottenham exciting.
ALBERT PARK is an oasis in South Melbourne, a green lung in the city centre, from where you can see the clear blue sea of Port Phillip Bay just a few blocks away. Nearby is Port Melbourne, where the ferries dock and where once thousands of migrants coming from Europe took their first steps into a new life.
‘A lot of migrants got off the ship and ended up around the ports and inner city in South Melbourne because that’s where it was affordable,’ says Kimon Taliadoros, part of the Australian Greek diaspora.
These days Albert Park plays host to the Australian Grand Prix, yet until 1994 it hosted a more culturally significant venue: Middle Park stadium. The ramshackle ground built in 1959 was a community hub that hosted South Melbourne Hellas Football Club, a refuge for the migrants, a corner of Australia that was for ever Greece.
‘It wasn’t the most hospitable environment for migrants coming to Australia and they found themselves coalescing in areas that gave them comfort,’ says Taliadoros, now CEO at Football Victoria. ‘Football was one of them, food was another as were community and family. And those all came together at Middle Park.
‘It was accessible to everyone and sufficiently far away from the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of AFL [Australian rules football] and cricket. You wouldn’t catch anyone in and around the precinct going to the MCG in those days.’
The smell of souvlaki, the chatter of Greek provided a home from home. For Dimitris Postecoglou, an Athens carpenter forced to work in Libya due to economic chaos in Greece in the late Sixties, who then decided to move his family to Australia, it was a weekend solace.
‘I know my dad struggled a lot,’ his son, Ange, who was five when he moved, wrote in his book, Changing The Game.
‘You have to be in such a situation, with no language, to really understand how debilitating it is, how dehumanising. It wasn’t just a man, his wife and kids in a restaurant where they couldn’t read the menu; it was a vulnerable family arriving in a new county. There was no way in. No familiarity. You could only go as far as the language could take you.’ For Dimitris and Ange that was as far as Middle Park, a few blocks from their Greek dominated neighbourhood of Prahran. ‘Football was the only thing that relaxed my father. Maybe it was because he was surrounded by the people with the same sort of issues, all of them just there to enjoy the game and get a weekly release from the ordeal of being a stranger in a strange land. Eating and speaking Greek — one can imagine how powerful an analgesic that was,’ wrote Ange.
A brief flirtation with Aussie rules football, with Ange winning a trophy for most-improved player at school in Year 5, was met by a stony silence from Dimitris. The message was clear: this father was not going to allow this new nation’s culture to break his filial bond. He need not have worried.
At 12, Ange had badgered his school sports department at Prahran High to start a football team. They put the music teacher in charge, who spent practice marking homework. ‘So I took over,’ recalls Postecoglou. ‘My mates in that team are still my mates today and they ask me: “Why the hell were we listening to you?”
‘We were are all the same age and I had no experience other than sitting around the older guys [at South Melbourne Hellas] listening to them. But the team, my peers, listened. I must have made sense.’
Indeed he must have, as they became Victoria state champions. Postecoglou would soon be progressing through the ranks as a player at South Melbourne Hellas, captaining the team to a 1984 national title at 19.
‘He was the youngest-ever captain of South Melbourne and was an aggressive and proactive overlapping left back — and this was in the mid-Eighties,’ recalls Taliadoros, who joined the club in 1987. By an extraordinary turn of events, he came under the tutorship of a life-changing mentor and the man who influences Tottenham’s current style.
‘Ferenc Puskas had been brought out by the Hungarian community in Melbourne to run some football programmes for kids,’ said Taliadoros. ‘Of course he was a
god among Hungarians. South Melbourne Hellas heard about that. Puskas spoke Greek [due to his coaching time at Panathinaikos] and so they approached him. He and his wife decided they liked Melbourne, so he found himself coaching a team that was a new generation of young players.’
Star of the Mighty Magyars who humbled England and architect of Real Madrid’s European Cup domination he have might been, but not all the team were fully aware of the coup the club had delivered. ‘When he arrived, they said: “We’ve got a new coach called Ferenc Puskas”,’ Paul Wade, a team-mate of Taliadoros and Postecoglou, told ESPN. ‘And we’re thinking: “Good on ya. Which suburb is he from?”’
But in an era where everyone played a 4-4-2, where defensive catenaccio still dominated European football, Puskas was a throwback to something more innocent. ‘He just did not like defending at all,’ Postecoglou told Football Focus yesterday. ‘His attitude was: “They score four, we’ll score five”. He wanted to play with wingers but didn’t want our wingers to come back over the halfway line. I was full-back and I was like: “Mate! You’ve got to come back and help at some point!”
‘We’d win games 5-4, it was ridiculous. And that stirred something in me, to say: “Why not just play the football everyone wants to play”?’ They won the 1991 National Soccer League grand final and the NSL Cup in 1990 but attacking football had its limits.
Puskas departed at the end of the 1992 season and it would take six years for South Melbourne Hellas to win the title again. They needed a bright, young manager, who had been schooled by Puskas. Postecoglou led them to NSL titles in 1998 and 1999.
Foster, who by that point was playing for Portsmouth, would take a particular interest in his success. As a successful export to Europe, Foster was renowned in Australia, while Postecoglou was making his way and coaching Australia’s Under-19 team. In 2006, Postecoglou’s team were knocked out of the Asian Cup by South Korea in the quarter-finals after a lacklustre campaign.
Foster, now a pundit, confronted Postecoglou live on air, resulting in an on-screen bust-up. ‘What I care about is the quality of your coaching,’ said Foster. ‘You should put your hand up and walk out.’
‘That says more about you than is does about me,’ Postecoglou shot back, accusing Foster of shoddy research. Foster protested it was not personal. ‘You’re not attacking me personally?’ said Postecoglou.
‘OK, I feel a lot better, because you’re a real close mate,’ his words dripping with irony.
‘We could have handled that interview better,’ says Foster. ‘We were both much younger and today that interview would be very different.’
During this time, Postecoglou had written about ‘parents working abroad and sending earnings back to their families. I see a lot of that now as I travel through Asia. I can’t help but feel empathy.
‘As I fly into and drive by these communities and am served in hotels by expat remittance workers, I wonder how their kids are being shaped as I was by that separation and transience?’ As he was when his dad went to Libya.
Then there is the renewed sense that Spurs might have reconnected with their fan base. ‘Coming out of South Melbourne Hellas, with that immense amount of passion, community and love for the club means he intimately understands the importance of how the players go about playing for the fans,’ says Foster. ‘This was an ethnic community living their dream through their club. And because he wasn’t a top player, he really saw the community side of it.
‘This is why Spurs is an ideal club for him. The fans are so desperate for something to believe in and so hungry to be proud of their football. He understands they want to feel the thrill. In football, you see a huge amount of pragmatism. And, that is probably true of life. People lose their job and then think: “Oh I wish I’d been more authentic, more true to my ideas”. But [what Ange told me is that] it’s of little use to be concerned about what might happen. The objective is to play the football you believe in.’
In other words, to dare is to do. Ange and Spurs do, for now at least, seem a perfect fit.
I learnt from Puskas to just play the way everyone wants to play