Postecoglou sack incoming? Angeball abandoned as Liverpool thrash Spurs to reach Carabao final
Fair to say it’s a drum we’ve been banging for quite some time, but Ange Postecoglou really could now be one game from the sack. He can’t say he hasn’t been warned.
The cup runs and injury crisis have been the two saving graces for Postecoglou but there was little mitigation to be found here in the meek and, frankl,y gutless way in which Spurs’ hitherto heartening Carabao Cup campaign ended with not even a whimper.
There is no shame in going out at this stage to a Liverpool side this good, especially after a run that has included wins over both Manchester clubs. But the manner of this second-leg capitulation has pushed Postecoglou to the brink. The very real and present danger now is that Spurs will go out of both domestic cups in the space of four days, and very possibly without landing a blow in anger.
Aston Villa away is not a kind FA Cup fourth-round draw, and it’s so hard to see how Postecoglou can lift his players – and indeed himself – after this painful humiliation. But he must.
For the second time this season, Liverpool battered Spurs into submission. For the second time this season a thumping scoreline nevertheless flattered a broken and humbled Spurs, who somehow remained technically level in this tie at half-time in the second leg. But it never, ever felt like that. A 4-0 Liverpool win on the night for a 4-1 aggregate success still told only some of the story.
What really hurts Postecoglou here, though, is this was a night to completely explode what remains of the myths around this team. Spurs aren’t even just who they are, mate. Not any more. They didn’t lose this game 4-0 by going toe-to-toe with a superior side. This was a team set up to try and low-block-and-counter its way to somehow preserving the one-goal lead with which they arrived. And getting battered anyway.
It was a plan that never ever looked like it might work. It was, in its own way, every bit as naive as the infamous 0-7-1 against Chelsea or any of the rest of Postecoglou’s more macho bits of posturing, performative over-attacking nonsense.
The temptation will be to try and present this as some kind of gotcha for his critics. ‘See? You wanted him to show adaptability – he did, and they still got spanked.’ But that’s to miss the point. There exists a fairly sizeable middle-ground between kamikaze gung-ho attack, attack, attack and timid, gutless defend, defend, defend.
If you want a near flawless example of it, you need only look at Tottenham’s opposition here. Spurs aren’t as good as Liverpool, obviously, but there really isn’t a compelling reason why they can’t play football in at least something approaching this fashion, with attacks full of verve and menace and importantly numbers, that don’t leave the back door wide open.
Spurs currently both attack and defend like a team that has been reduced to 10 men. There’s almost something impressive about the ability to appear outnumbered in every part of the pitch, in possession and out. It was even the case for large swathes of the win at Brentford last week.
Postecoglou’s defenders will point also to the catastrophic individual mistakes his players made tonight. They will be right; Spurs were truly horrible in possession here. All too often the second touch was a tackle and sometimes not even that.
But those individual errors do not exist in a vacuum. The deeply negative system Postecoglou deployed and subsequent the lack of runners, the lack of energy and apparently also desire and belief that spread throughout the team is going to lead to error-strewn performances. Especially against a team like Liverpool.
Simply put, Postecoglou can no more avoid all responsibility for those errors than he can the injury crisis. When you are hit by that many misfortunes, it really can’t all just be bad luck.
Spurs started the game nominally in a 4-3-3 but in practice it was a 5-4-1 when Spurs were out of possession, and they were out of possession a lot. And if they weren’t out of possession, you could be confident they soon would be.
Liverpool, meanwhile, were everything Spurs were not. The gulf between these two clubs has been growing for years now but even on previous one-sided evenings it has never appeared quite so wide as here.
Arne Slot’s side were focused, slick, confident and determined. They were strong in the tackle, crisp in the pass, and pressed Spurs relentlessly knowing the mistakes would come but surely surprising even themselves with the frequency and ease with which they were generated.
What was somehow Liverpool’s only goal of a comically one-sided first half came from one such moment, Yves Bissouma casually and carelessly giving the ball away and seconds later Cody Gakpo was continuing his fine recent form with a precise first-time finish.
Still Spurs did nothing. Even at their worst last season and for good chunks of this they have remained a front-foot team. At its best, Angeball works as a philosophy rather than a tactical plan. It’s possible to defend positively on the front foot. Even here, there were glimpses of that from Spurs’ full-backs Archie Gray and Djed Spence. But for the rest, either body, mind or both was unwilling.
It was a sorry sight. There would be no criticism for Spurs in getting outplayed at Anfield. But there is in appearing so much less enthusiastic for the task. This was a far, far bigger game in the context of Spurs’ season than it was in Liverpool’s. You would never have guessed it from the way the two teams set about the task.
Spurs were simply overwhelmed in a second half that bordered on the embarrassing at times. One wonders what Mathys Tel made of it all from his isolated vantage point up front. He’ll certainly have had plenty of time to think about things, and wonder if maybe his first thought wasn’t in fact the right one after all.
As Liverpool’s quadruple bid carries relentlessly on, Spurs look utterly lost. They surely can’t set up like this again at Villa Park on Sunday, but even a belated return to some of Angeball’s supposed core values might well now be too little, too late.
But surely if Postecoglou is going to go down he’ll at least want to go down his way and on his terms. At least go to Villa and have a bit of a go. At least get the sack for playing his football badly rather than playing this grim passionless, nihilistic Mourinho-lite dreck, also badly.
Say what you will about tenets of Angeball, but at least it was an ethos.
