Ange Postecoglou is nothing if not a compelling talker and on Friday, the Nottingham Forest head coach delivered another defiant defence of his record in English football.
Speaking before Saturday’s home game against Chelsea — when Postecoglou will be aiming to earn the first victory in his eighth game at Forest — the Australian claimed he had been branded “a failed manager who’s lucky to get this job” after overseeing Tottenham Hotspur’s 17th-place finish last season.
“I know you’re smirking at me but that’s what’s being said, right, and I can find the print where that’s actually said,” Postecoglou told reporters.
The 60-year-old’s aim was to present “an alternative story”, centred not on Tottenham’s league finish but their historic Europa League triumph in Bilbao, the club’s first trophy in 17 years.
“Maybe I’m a manager who if you give them time, the story always ends the same. At all my previous clubs, it ends the same — with me and a trophy,” he said, echoing his promise to win silverware for Spurs in his second season.
As he acknowledged, the prevailing view is that Postecoglou is under “serious pressure” at Forest — perhaps even that Saturday could be his final chance to save his job — but his message was clear: with time, he will deliver again.
“Some will look at the weeds, I’ll look at what’s growing,” he said.
To emphasise his point, Postecoglou ran through his two years in north London (in a single answer spanning over five minutes), pointing out that he had joined a club scarred by the Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte eras, which finished eighth in the 2022-23 season and lost record goalscorer Harry Kane on the eve of his first league game.
“Somehow that year has disappeared from the record books. In fact, it was used as a reason for me losing my job because even Tottenham decided to exclude the first 10 games – because they were an anomaly, apparently,” he said, seemingly referring to Tottenham’s statement confirming his departure, which pointed out that “we recorded 78 points from the last 66 Premier League games” – excluding his fast start.
“Although the first ten games here are very important, apparently,” he continued. “Anyway, we finished fifth and I got them back into European football, which a club like Tottenham should be.”
Postecoglou then talked up his success in winning the Europa League, which he said had enabled the club to shed its ‘Spursy’ tag and reap the rewards of a return to the Champions League – and insisted there was no need for an “in-depth” justification of their record-low finish in the Premier League last season.
“Just have a look at the last five or six team sheets of us in the league last year and see what I prioritised – who was on the bench and who was playing,” he said.
It was a typically forthright speech, full of the sarcasm, self-belief and grit characteristic of Postecoglou.
From arriving from Athens with his family as a five-year-old, he has clawed his way from the relative backwater of Australian football to the very top of the European game. Postecoglou is a seasoned fighter and has always used the doubters — real or exaggerated — as a potent fuel.
He has a point about his first season at Spurs. Fast start or not, his side probably did overperform in finishing fifth after losing Kane while transitioning to a new style of play, and on occasion Spurs, were the victims of bad luck.
Even now, it is possible to wonder what might have been if Son Heung-min’s ‘goal’, which would have put Spurs 2-0 up against Chelsea nearly two years ago, had not been chalked off for a fractional offside; Spurs may not have lost Micky van de Ven and James Maddison to serious injuries and Cristian Romero and Destiny Udogie to red cards in a 4-1 defeat, the start of a run of one point from five games.
Postecoglou himself was unfortunate that a freak set of circumstances left him at odds with a majority of supporters during the 2-0 defeat at home against Manchester City in May 2024, which appeared to fray his relationship with the fanbase.
His defence of his second season, however, is more contentious. Even factoring in the slew of mitigating circumstances — an unprecedented injury pile-up over winter and the obvious focus on the Europa League — Spurs chronically underperformed in the top flight, finishing the campaign with a club-record 22 league defeats.
Their success in Bilbao was seismic, but it should not be forgotten that Spurs started the season as favourites for the Europa League alongside runners-up Manchester United.
It was only because both clubs had such wretched domestic seasons that it came to feel so miraculous that they met in the final. On paper, Spurs had one of the two strongest squads in UEFA’s secondary competition and benefitted from the rule change that meant no Champions League clubs dropped down into the Europa League.
They did not beat anyone en route to the final that they were not expected to, and their style of play in the knockouts was often attritional.
That is not to undermine their achievement, but to point out that winning the Europa League is not necessarily enough to excuse Tottenham’s league form.
There has been little, too, about Thomas Frank’s start at Spurs (or indeed Postecoglou’s time so far at Forest) to suggest the club made a mistake in replacing him with the Dane in the summer.
More relevant, though, than the actual merits of Postecoglou’s presentation of his time at Spurs is whether his passionate rhetoric can convince Forest’s fans and, most importantly, owner Evangelos Marinakis to stick with him if results do not dramatically improve.
During his two years in the capital, there were occasions when Postecoglou talked himself into a hole, but more frequently, the sheer force of his conviction in himself and his approach helped to relieve the pressure on him or change the narrative around his team.
Postecoglou’s oratory may even have helped to keep him in a job for so long. It is hard to imagine a coach who was less expressive publicly — say, his Forest predecessor Nuno Espirito Santo — surviving the same series of results and performances without being able to continually sell his vision to a large section of the fanbase (and indeed the media).
For Spurs fans, most of whom are now occupied by the intrigue of a new era at the club, Postecoglou’s status is already decided. To many, he is a hero who delivered one of the finest nights in the club’s modern history in Bilbao, but could have few complaints about his eventual dismissal.
The bigger question is whether his past achievements and present rhetoric will be enough to keep him in his latest job.