You’ll have to forgive us, but we’re going to have to pick on Henry Winter a little bit here. We’re pretty sure he can take it, and it’s just one example among many.
We’ve chosen Winter because few others have so flawlessly captured what’s happening right now in two wonderfully specific tweets 10 months apart.
Here he is in April last year after another shambolic Premier League defeat for Ange Postecoglou’s Spurs against a Big Six rival.
And here he is this weekend after another shambolic Premier League defeat for Thomas Frank’s Spurs against a Big Six rival.
It’s already clear that this country’s football media is deploying cover for Frank that it never did for Postecoglou, but it leads us to two thoughts.
First, a grim chuckle at the way the very excuses that were dismissed out of hand when Postecoglou made them are now being wheeled out to defend Frank, who is only now having to field anything like the cartoonishly underpowered defence with which Postecoglou battled through last winter, and who cannot possibly be blamed for the kind of ill-discipline that was very much within Ange’s remit a year ago.
But the second thought is a more simple one: why? Genuinely, why have the media decided so entirely to bat for a manager so obviously failing as badly as Frank?
It surely can’t just be that he’s polite rather than spiky in press conferences? They can’t actually be that pathetic, can they?
Sure, the name Thomas Frank makes him sound like he’s from the home counties, but what Frank is getting here really does amount to full British manager privileges of the like we’ve never before seen afforded to a continental type.
Maybe it’s just that he’s been in Our Game for so long. Or maybe it’s just that Winter and the lads had convinced themselves Frank was better than he is and now just don’t want to back down.
But they all fell in love with Postecoglou at the start of his Spurs adventure, and it never stopped them (quite understandably) turning on him when it all went south.
For what it’s worth, we don’t disagree with anything Winter said there about Postecoglou after a mortifying defeat at Chelsea in which the Australian absolutely did make a complete chop of himself with a mocking celebration aimed at his own supporters for a goal that would subsequently get VARed out of existence. It was the managerial equivalent of a Richarlison tops-off yellow card for a goal that ends up never having existed in the first place.
But beyond the superficial similarities in which Franks’s struggles, which are definitely not his fault because reasons, so deliciously and perfectly mirror Postecoglou’s, which were entirely his fault because reasons, is that line about the fans when it came to Postecoglou. ‘Fans have clearly had enough of him.’
A lot of them absolutely had. Yet even then, as he was openly mocking them, plenty still supported Postecoglou. Even those who had run out of patience and wanted him gone still at least understood what he was attempting to achieve (HINT: He went on to achieve precisely it).
Almost no Spurs supporter now backs Frank. And even the ones that do are doing so more out of a sense of just not wanting to keep repeating the same old fire-and-hire cycle.
Everyone understood what Postecoglou was trying to achieve, whether they agreed with it or not. Nobody understands or for the most part even knows what Frank is trying to achieve, and almost nobody agrees with how he’s going about it.
He has lost a far greater share of the fans and far more decisively than Postecoglou ever did. Yet losing the fans no longer seems as important as it did 10 months ago.
We’ll hold our hands up and admit we flip-flopped on Postecoglou during those confusing months at the end of last season. He did appear to have lost his way so thoroughly that he couldn’t continue, but after the elation and cathartic release of Bilbao, we kind of thought he’d earned the right to fail; earned the right to at least find out if the third series really is always better than the second.
We think we know the answer to how that would have gone. But we definitely know the answer with Frank. He’s been floundering for months now. The only difference between now and a month ago is that West Ham have awoken from their own slumbers and thus the threat of relegation is very, very real.
And this is the other key point of difference. The other reason why, if you were going to back either of these managers through historically awful league campaigns, it would be Postecoglou.
We’ll be careful to avoid revisionism here. Spurs were having an awful league season even before Postecoglou decided to abandon it altogether; a big part of the reason he could abandon it altogether was because of how bad it was. That qualifying for Europe that way was so distant and unlikely a prospect that chucking all the eggs into the Europa League knockout basket was the way to go even if it didn’t pay off.
But Postecoglou was also never facing anything like the current crisis-level threat of relegation. The diciest things ever really got was after a cruddy 3-2 January defeat at Everton which left Spurs still eight points clear of the drop.
Yet by the time the Europa League knockout rounds came around Postecoglou could disregard the league because Spurs were safe. It was around this time last year that they made their last real concerted effort of the Premier League season, picking up three consecutive wins against Brentford, Ipswich and Manchester United that gave them the freedom to focus entirely on the ultimately successful Europa League bid.
After the third of those wins in late February, Spurs were 16 points clear of the marooned bottom three. That number right now under Frank is currently six; closer to the bottom three than Postecoglou’s patched-up side ever were, and a month deeper into the season. And with West Ham resurgent and Spurs’ next two games against Newcastle and Arsenal, it is entirely possible the gap is zero points at around the precise point Postecoglou was putting even lingering doubts entirely to bed.
Even more importantly, of course, Frank hasn’t actually sacked the league off. He’s just naturally been this bad. Unless he’s trying to follow the Postecoglou example of prioritising a very winnable Europa League by prioritising an entirely unwinnable Champions League. In which case he should be removed from office anyway on grounds of insanity.
Postecoglou perhaps takes some lingering blame here, in fairness; what he did was normalise league defeats to an unhealthy degree. However valid his reasons, he unintentionally created a world where Spurs could finish 17th even if the gap from there to 18th was a chasm.
Frank has been able to exploit that normalisation to his advantage, however disingenuously. He’s been able to paint this season’s struggles as a continuation rather than the nightmarish new low they actually are.
Yet even he has realised it can fly no longer. Even Frank has stopped saying “Guys, we were 17th last year you know” while pretending that was the full story and also perfectly normal and not the very specific aberration that got the last guy fired despite winning a trophy exactly as he said he would.
As Spurs slump ever closer to that same position, with league form that is worse than Postecoglou’s and, due to the presence of an actual relegation battle bubbling away ever closer to their bare feet, far more dangerous, it loses its protective power.
But it has already carried Frank this far. It has got him through a winless January full of six-pointers, where victory in any one would have put Spurs almost safe.
It has carried him to a point where his many, many media supporters can suggest it’s now simply too late to change things anyway even after a defeat to the one team that highlights better than any other how utterly untrue that is.
We’re not here for a hagiography of Postecoglou’s reign. His Premier League form was awful long before he abandoned it altogether. He could have no real complaints, and has hardly proved Spurs wrong with his own subsequent efforts. But even the sh*ttiest parts of his time could at least be understood, and did in the end achieve their stated aims.
Frank’s sh*ttiest parts are sh*ttier and serve no such wider purpose or grander plan. Frank is as bad as Postecoglou ever was in the Premier League; the difference is that Frank is, we can only assume, trying his absolute best.
We wouldn’t be particularly minded to go to bat for either of them. But we know which one we’d pick if we had to.