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Ange Postecoglou has made two major concessions about the last six months of his coaching career in the Premier League: that his trophy with Tottenham Hotspur was won by consciously going against his usual methodology, and that his decision to later join Nottingham Forest was a “mistake” that his family, friends and advisors all warned against.
After appearing on one of the highest-viewed episodes of the Stick to Football podcast last week, Postecoglou returned to open up further about the final days of his time with Spurs and his ill-fated 39-day, eight-game stint with Forest.
“There’s not much to talk about the Forest thing because this program will last longer than my tenure,” Postecoglou joked.
He made no bones about it: going there was an error on his part, perhaps the biggest of his time in coaching. He said he was “sucked in” by the quality of their squad but soon realised it would never work out due to ongoing instability at the club, their reluctant separation from previous manager Nuno Espirito Santo, and the high demands of owner Evangelos Marinakis.
“That was a bad decision by me,” Postecoglou said.
“I’ve got to take ownership. There’s no point in me blaming that I didn’t get time or anything. I should never have gone in there. It was too soon after Tottenham. I was taking over at a time where, obviously I’m going to do things differently [to what they were] kind of used to doing … and I’ve got to cop that. It’s no one else’s fault.”
Postecoglou’s sacking by Spurs was the first time he’d ever been dumped by a club or team mid-contract, and it left him feeling “lost”, he said.
“Usually in the off season, you go away with your family – but there’s transfers, there’s pre-season. I was lost,” Postecoglou said.
“When you go into a club, most of the time that club wants change. The reality of it is, I think they were reluctant to get rid of Nuno … so you’re not walking into an environment, a playing group where they’re really looking for change.
“We just never got any traction. And it’s no wonder the supporters never took to me, that even the players were kind of ... still seeing me as the Tottenham manager. You need to leave some space for people just to process everything. But I just wanted to work, mate.”
Despite assumptions that because of their shared Greek heritage, Postecoglou and Marinakis were personal friends, that was not the case. One of Postecoglou’s big regrets is not having proper talks with Marinakis about the way he operates as a coach.
“I look back at it, and I’ll go, ‘What was I thinking?’” he said.
“I didn’t have extensive discussions with him about it, and I should have. That’s what I should have done. But I’ve always been: ‘You know what? Get me in there and I’ll show you. You’ll see it. From the first day, you will see it, the players will see it, the staff will see it, you’ll feel it around the place.’
“It’s too easy for me to say, ‘Well, I should have had more time.’ The owner, it’s on me. I made that decision knowing, full disclosure, exactly what I’m walking into – and in the end, obviously, I was optimistic about what I could do, but [it was] the worst-case scenario.”
Postecoglou also peeled back the curtain on the planning behind Tottenham’s Europa League victory – their first piece of silverware in 17 years – and why he decided to move away from his typical tactical approach in that competition.
Asked by former Manchester United captain Gary Neville about recent comments from Spurs defender Micky van de Ven, who claimed that players had approached him midway through the season, seeking a turn towards pragmatism, Postecoglou cracked a joke.
“It’s the old adage of success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. Everyone contributed to the Europa League – but the league was all on me,” he said, referring to the 17th-placed finish that ultimately cost him his job.
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But the Europa League, he believed, was a real opportunity – and with Spurs sitting 16 points clear from the relegation places on the Premier League table, they had the scope to commit everything towards winning it.
Postecoglou said he closely studied the Europa League, and the tactical profiles of the teams that had won it in recent years, and found a common thread: they played low-risk, highly structured, defensively minded football, which is not the kind he usually deals in.
“I did have discussions with the players,” he said.
“I was being a bit, sort of, facetious about it [with my previous comment] but I wanted them to buy into it because it was a little bit of a departure. But they were all in for it.
“Cup football, anyway, is different from your league football. So we would train differently, we would prepare differently. People will say, ‘Well, why don’t you do that in the league?’ Well, they were doing that in the league with Antonio [Conte] for two years, and they didn’t like it. So that’s not what the club wanted. But this was about a process of getting to winning a competition that had a clear sort of strategy, you could do it. So we did.”
Towards the end of the final against United, Spurs had seven defenders on the pitch – something that, in typical circumstances, Postecoglou would never do. And he knew it was a contradiction with ‘Angeball’, so much so that the original inspiration for it, his late father Dimitri, would have hated it.
“I was looking at the bench to see if there [were] any other defenders. I could hear my dad going, ‘What are you doing?’” he said.
“But, at the same time, I knew if we shut down Bruno [Fernandes], they weren’t going to score. We were still aggressive with our press, that didn’t change. But in terms of being a little bit more direct, yeah, for sure, and a lot more sort of defensively rigid - that definitely happened. But that was because in my mind, I’ve gone, ‘Well, what a unique opportunity. And we know this works. I reckon we can replicate’.”
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Don’t expect to see that style more often from Postecoglou’s teams, though.
“I can’t pretend to be something else,” he said. “If I could, I would, but it isn’t going to work. If you ask me to go out on the weekend and just produce a 1-0 - I did it in the Europa Cup final, but I can’t do that sustainably. It’s not me. It’s not who I am.”
As for the future, Postecoglou said he is still hungry to coach again – but he has to be selective about where he goes next, and ruled out any prospect of “going back” to one of his previous clubs, including Celtic and Tottenham.
“Whatever the next step is, it’ll be something new, something I can make an impact in, somewhere I can win things,” he said.