Ange Postecoglou believes it was 'glaring' that Tottenham needed a bigger squad for this current campaign and he admits that things could have turned out very differently last season.
The Spurs boss ended up taking the club to a fifth-placed finish in his maiden Premier League campaign, with more points, more goals scored and fewer conceded despite losing Harry Kane on the eve of the season and then having an injury crisis that left him with a list of unavailable players reaching double figures during much of the middle of the season.
The Australian admits he took plenty of lessons from his first season at Tottenham and one of them was squad size. With just two new faces in 18-year-olds Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall arriving this summer so far, it's clear that Postecoglou will want more transfer business done before this month is out.
"There’s always learning, I mean, I think one glaring thing about last year was just it was quite obvious we didn't have a squad that was equipped to handle the rigours of a Premier League campaign, particularly when you're trying to challenge and sustain some sort of level of intensity and competitiveness in the toughest league in the world," he said.
"It was obvious to me that if we had any setbacks along the way in terms of squad absences, we really felt it - probably more than some of the other teams, our competitors up there, so that was something that we've tried to [sort].
"And it wasn’t surprising. For me, it was understanding that you really need a core group of players who are going to be able to maintain a level of consistency for us to challenge, and some of that is just because it was my first year, and we had a lot of injuries, which I think was just the remnants of us training the way we train and the way we do things."
He added: "You’d like to think this year, we’re a lot better equipped to handle that side of it, and some of it was just because it was new to the players, so yeah, my thinking is we’ve got to go beyond just building a team, we've got to build a squad to compete and I think last year was more about trying to build a team that would give us a competitive edge.
"Because I still think it has been a significant rebuild, but we're still in the midst of that. It was a squad, a group of players that was coming to a natural conclusion. You could see that even by the length of contracts in place. We had about four or five really key players all getting to the end of their contracts, so that told you it was a team at the end of a cycle."
football.london put it to Postecoglou that although he wanted a stronger squad this season to handle all the different competitions he has so far only got two new faces in Gray and Bergvall. The Spurs boss said transfers will happen this month and that he is not getting emotional about the situation because he believes the overhaul at the club is bigger than many thought.
"I don't think it'll all get done [in this window]. I've never believed in quick fixes and I think I said that it would have been great if we had done our business already, but I've always maintained a discipline not to go off and sort of get too emotional through these times," he said. "It's a difficult time. This is the part of the season where I've probably got the least control over decisions and I've learned to stay disciplined and make sure that we do what we set out to do. We've added the two young guys, but I also think there's been growth from other guys from last year, which naturally makes us stronger this year.
"But yeah, we obviously still got a hand in this window, but I think we'll go beyond this window. This was wasn't just tinkering around the edges when I took over, it needed, you know, a big shift from where it was. I was just thinking about last year's pre-season, you know, I reckon 50% of the people who were on that tour are probably not here now. So we've already done a hell of a lot and we don't need to do as much, but I still think there's...because it's not just about having success one year. What you're trying to build is another, hopefully another cycle of success, and I think that'll take a bit longer."
Postecoglou admitted that last season could have gone in a very different direction and even though fifth wasn't an exciting final league position, it was an important one in the grand scheme of things at Tottenham.
"I don’t dismiss last year, because it could’ve gone very differently," he said. "I get that we obviously got off to a flying start and then we sort of petered out in the end, and people kind of hang on that, and we finished fifth, which is not exactly exciting, but you know, when you take over a club that's finished eighth, with big expectations and you lose a generational player on the eve of the season, and you know there’s some major squad restructuring, team restructuring.
"I mean, you just think about our transfers. If I’d got even one of them wrong, if I’d got Vicario wrong, Van de Ven wrong, Maddison at the start of the year the way he was performing. If we didn’t get the best out of Pedro [Porro] and [Cristian] Romero and [Yves] Bissouma, it could've been a very different year, and I might not even be sitting here if it had gone that way, so I’ll take great pride in that, because I thought it was important for a club like Tottenham to not go into freefall.
"Where we sit here now you say, ‘Oh, that was unlikely,’ but not necessarily. it could’ve gone very, very differently, so I love that we kind of hung tough as a club and as a group of players.
"Okay we didn’t do anything too flashy or exciting that people will talk about for years to come, but I think we made an impact with our football and more importantly, I think for want of a better term, I think we steadied the ship of a big club, and that gives us a chance there, and hopefully, relaunch to get back to trying to strive for some success."
Even this summer's pre-season trip to Asia came without the mess of last year's, which featured one postponed match and another game in which Roma dropped out as the opposition late in the process.
Sitting down to speak in Seoul not long before the current trip came to an end, Postecoglou admitted that this season's tour was a world away from his first one at Spurs.
"It’s been a good trip. Sometimes they can drag a bit, but it’s been pretty good, everything has run seamlessly," he said. "I mean last year it was chaos, games getting cancelled, training facilities not great, so this year, that kind of stuff’s been good, which helps.
"Conditions have been tough, which I kind of expected, but it doesn’t feel like it’s gone on too long. Just watching the players out there and how they’re working, and I think we’re probably at our limit now, but it’s been a good camp."
Those who have listened to Postecoglou's team talks and the way he communicates with players say that he comes at football from a different view point. He fuses life and his relatable experiences into what he imparts and his players often admit that they learn to become better people as well as footballers under him.
The Australian refutes the suggestion that he might be some wise Yoda-type figure and believes it's more about the road he has travelled.
"I don’t think I'm that wise. Some of it is just that I’m 58 years old, so you live life," he said.
"I've been pretty fortunate, because I’ve travelled the world through football, and I’ve used that as not just an experience but a vehicle to learn about life and understand that people are different, cultures are different, and what we can learn from all those, and the fact that all around the world, human beings are human beings.
"They make mistakes and they do things wrong sometimes, and I think sometimes with football we can get a little bit too focused on outcomes and not...processes is a pretty boring word, but for me, that’s the foundation of how you build things.
"Once you’ve built something, everyone can see whether it’s beautiful or it’s ugly or whatever anybody's opinion is, but I love that you can build things in football, and I think a lot of that is reflective of life - certainly my life."
Postecoglou also has context to bring to football. There were periods were he didn't work in the game, including immediately after hanging up his boots when he went to ply his trade in a bank in Melbourne to make ends meet.
He once told the story about how he received a phone call while working there one day, asking him if he wanted to be caretaker manager of his former club South Melbourne for three matches. Postecoglou put the phone down, quit his job and walked out of the bank, leaving a queue of confused customers behind him.
It proved to be the right decision as he earned the South Melbourne job on a full-time basis, took them to four titles and it launched his career as a manager.
Looking back now on that time in the bank and how it influenced his unique way of seeing the game, he said: "I think it’s because I’ve had a unique journey. Working in a bank was a huge motivator for me to be successful in football. I didn’t want to go back to the bank.
"It gives you life experience. I mean, I’ve said to people, I guess I’m pretty fortunate to be working at the highest level you can in our game in terms of the Premier League, but I literally started on the factory floor.
"I’ve done every job, and I’ve got here because I’ve worked hard at every part of that process, it’s not because of my reputation or my playing career or where I’ve come from. If anything, that’s been a bit of a hinderance to get to where I am, but like I said, that’s the life experiences I’ve had.
"It’s not something you can prescribe, because I’m not sure many people end up going from working at a bank to being the manager of a Premier League club, so I’ve had some sliding-doors moments in my life which have bizarrely put me where I am now, but I haven’t forgotten that.
"I think the biggest thing for me now is trying to pass that on to all people I work with, particularly the players and even the coaches. We’re pretty lucky to be where we are. We’re all very, very fortunate and we should not take that for granted."
football.london asks whether Postecoglou believes in fate or destiny, because he's had a lot of those sliding doors moments peppered throughout his life.
"When I think of how I got here, people have moments when they just don't understand why that happened, so you kind of go ‘Is it fate, am I pre-empting my own fate by doing what I do?'" he said.
"I don’t know, you know, is it goal-setting? I don’t question it too much, but there’s certainly some things where I just think, well, it could’ve been very, very different for me at many points along the way, not just in the last five years.
"I’ve been doing this now for 26 years. There were so many moments where I just thought it could've gone in a totally different direction, and yet something intervened to keep propelling me along to where I am today."
One such moment came in a car park. Postecoglou had been adrift in the football coaching wilderness for a couple of years after an infamous argument during a TV interview with pundit Craig Foster while he was in charge of the Australian international youth set-up.
After leaving that job, he eventually began working as a pundit himself to keep money coming in and one day he came out of the television studios and had a chance encounter as he walked to his car.
"I was struggling to get a job, and there was the CEO of the A-League [Archie Fraser] and I just saw him in a car park – and I’m not one to reach out to people. I'm not the greatest social butterfly in public places – but I just for some reason said hello from a distance," Postecoglou told football.london.
"He turned around and we had a quick chat. I just said, ‘Look, I’m keen to get back into coaching, I’ve been out after the national youth team for 12, 13 months'. He was great, he just said, ‘Look, Ange, I’m well aware of you,’ and obviously, at the time, the league had a fair bit of control over coaching appointments and who they put forward to owners.
"I think it was a Friday night, and then on Sunday morning, the job became available. I must’ve been sort of front of mind for him. He said, ‘Look, get on a plane, go meet the owners, I reckon they’ll like you.’ And that was the Brisbane job that I ended up getting."
Postecoglou's career would really ignite at Brisbane Roar as they became the first team to win back-to-back A-League championships and they did so with a thrilling attacking style that would become his hallmark and earn them the nickname 'Roarcelona'.
Life just seems to have worked that way for Postecoglou, football has always been intertwined with what happens to him.
"Football has just been intricately involved in my life, so all the major relationships I have in my life – apart from my mum and dad, but even that, there’s a football connection there – one of my best friends I met when I was nine years old playing for my football club; I met my wife through football," he said.
"Football’s kind of been alongside my life in many respects, so I’ve always treated them almost as one, and in many respects, like I said, I think life can learn from football. I think football can learn from life as well.
"Life’s not perfect and football's not meant to be perfect. I’m not going to go on a rant about VAR again, but that’s probably my biggest gripe about it, is they’re trying to create some kind of perfection in an aspect of our game where the beauty of football is that it is a flawed game, in that anybody can win.
"The lowest team can beat the top team. It’s a game of mistakes, that’s the beauty of it, you’ve go into football not knowing the outcome. That’s what life’s about, you know, you can’t hope you wake up in the morning and you plan your day and it goes like that. Invariably something will come along that will change it and veer it off course.
"But you embrace that and it doesn’t mean it’s been necessarily a bad day just because it hasn’t worked out the way you planned, and football’s very much a reflection of that.
"Look, I’m the manager, I want to control as much of a football match as I can, but I know that that can’t happen – and it shouldn’t happen - because I think that’s why the game is the most popular in the world. it is in many respects a reflection of life where it’s never perfect."
A good example last season of adapting to and embracing what happens came with Postecoglou's goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario. The Italian had an excellent first campaign between the sticks for Spurs, replacing long-serving World Cup winner Hugo Lloris.
However, midway through the season opposition teams began targeting him from set pieces, with very little protection from the officials. Vicario chatted to football.london while out on tour and he spoke about those difficult moments with a real defiance as he refused to accept any excuses.
Postecoglou believes that all of the noise around those handful of matches were probably important for the Italy international.
"Yeah, it was challenging I’m sure for him, but that’s what you want. That’s how you get growth. If it was all linear, then you wouldn’t get the growth you need," said the Australian. "I mean, I thought he was outstanding for us last year, and there was a period there, particularly around set-pieces, where I thought the officials were getting it wrong, but we had to weather that storm, and the beauty of it is that he accepted that.
"He wasn’t making excuses; he wasn’t coming in on a Monday, saying, ‘Oh, I can’t believe I’m not getting protected.". He was going, ‘Okay, how do we resolve this?’.
"But as soon as I had a conversation with him [before he signed], I knew he was the right bloke for us, because it’s just beyond him being an outstanding goalkeeper. He’s an outstanding human being, so if you bring a person like that into your dressing room, he’s going to give you more than just being a goalkeeper.
"He’s the kind of guy who is going to have an influence over everything we do. That’s how you keep learning, by bringing these kind of people in. I think he needed to have a tough patch at some point. How he responds to that is more important, because there’ll be another tough patch, could be something else.
"But I really liked the way he handled it, but it didn’t surprise me he handled it the way he did. I think it’s made him a better goalkeeper. When you think about where he came from - It wasn’t a big club in Italy - to coming to one of the biggest clubs in the toughest league in the world, he had an outstanding first year."
So what does the future hold down the line for Postecoglou, the well-travelled man who usually spends no more than three to four years at a club? Now 58, will he return to international management or will he, as he often jokes, end up on a sunbed in Greece as a retired man?
The answer is that he has learned the future is always unclear. One thing that is clear is that he has big things to achieve at Tottenham first and that is all that's on his mind.
"I really don’t know [what comes down the line] because I never sort of planned that way. I don’t know how I got here, so who knows where I’ll be in five years?" he said.
"What I’ve always done is the job I’ve done. I’ve tried to do everything I can to bring success to where I am, and usually, that’s meant that another door opens or my career takes on a different path.
"First things first is to do the job I’m doing today and make sure I'm going to fulfil the obligations I have now."
If Postecoglou fulfils those obligations at Tottenham that means real success for a club that has been starved of it for so long. If he achieves that then he will have truly earned that Greek spot in the sun.
