As Ange Postecoglou chews over what just happened, he might ultimately conclude his greatest misfortune at Tottenham was to work under the one man more stubbornly committed to his beliefs than he is.
Because we have seen Postecoglou bend. Not much, and not nearly soon enough, but he did change. Ever so slightly, Ange the evangelist deviated from his high lines and higher ideals.
But Daniel Levy? A different level of devotion, that guy. Fuzzy feelings never stood a chance when numbers stood on the other side of his dilemma.
And so it has ended, their separation formalised on the second anniversary of Postecoglou’s arrival by a statement on Friday evening that was suitably heartfelt and an iron fist to the crotch all the same: thanks for the silverware, please accept our eternal gratitude, but 17th place weighs more than liberation from a 17-year curse.
An incidental detail about that statement is there was no name attached to it. It wasn’t signed by Levy, nor was he quoted, but his fingerprints were on each of the 368 words.
None were clearer than the following: ‘Whilst winning the Europa League this season ranks as one of the club’s greatest moments, we cannot base our decision on emotions aligned to this triumph.’
But there were also numbers, and of course there were. Not the ones we have sporadically discussed for a few weeks, about 22 defeats in a 38-game league campaign, but instead an even deeper breakdown: ‘Following a positive start in the 2023/24 Premier League season, we recorded 78 points from the last 66 games. This culminated in our worst-ever PL finish last season.’
Cold, but the coldness is what Levy likes in a number. The coldness is their truth. The coldness means they can be trusted. In a game of bluffers, gamblers and romantics, numbers are his north star.
They probably led him to the correct place on Friday. Too many losses, too many glaring shortcomings in the tactics, too many games like Ipswich and Leicester at home, too much culpability for the same injury problems cited in mitigation. Too few indicators that a trophy would break the trends.
Added up, the split from Postecoglou was right, even if it does feel awfully wrong to most and borderline obscene to the majority who travelled to Bilbao and wouldn’t trade the memory for a dozen straight top-four finishes.
To see Postecoglou cut down goes to the heart of what football has become, which is to say it is a game that increasingly undervalues the worth of such moments. It took Tottenham 17 years to win a trophy and just 16 days to sack the fella who orchestrated it.
That provokes a thought exercise: if Spurs lost the final and finished sixth in the league, thereby missing the Champions League, would Postecoglou have lost his job? Almost certainly not. It really is a twisted game we follow.
That he has been axed is the modern-day epitome of the industry’s callousness. It is also fuel for the granite-hard suspicion that trophies, and moments, are not Levy’s priority.
But where is the sense in being a sentimentalist in a shark-infested sport? Where is the logic in ignoring the signs of season two by commissioning a third?
Those are questions born from football’s realities rather than any admiration for how it has evolved to be this way. Those are questions born from an entrenched pattern of disfunction, save for one utterly wonderful cup run, and the distinct likelihood that Postecoglou peaked and it’s best not to push your luck into a new campaign.
In Levy’s heart, and contrary to depiction he does have one, he won’t have relished the hard call. Nor the extra venom it will bring his way from supporters, who were long past the point of mutiny around his spending habits before he gunned Postecoglou. Those close to Levy say he is far more sensitive than meets the eye.
But it is his job to make detached decisions. If we are to condense and censor a line from Logan Roy in Succession, you don’t want the kind of pilot who can recommend a good Pinot, and you probably also don’t want the kind of chairman who acts with a fan’s every impulse. But it would be preferable to those who follow Spurs if Levy would at least attempt to find the middle ground.
For my view, I find many elements of Levy’s approach and outlook to be the opposite of what the game should be, but equally I have never detected stupidity in his actions. Just a lack of spirit, of adventure, of a footballing heartbeat, which always made the pairing with Postecoglou so fascinating, because he has those senses in abundance.
He is the manager who quoted Billy Joel but lived like Sinatra, committed to doing it his way, even when everyone else in the room could agree it was bonkers. Just as Sinatra had his chaotic, destructive relationship with Ava Gardner, Postecoglou had his high line.
There is something to love about that madness in Postecoglou, the dreamer who took the hard road to the big league and would get grumpy as hell when his methods were questioned.
That he has been booted out before his third act will remove the Premier League’s most compelling individual. One of its prime antidotes to a creeping sterility.
But to him, the timing might even be beneficial – he departs a hero, a deliverer of second-season promises, elements of his reputation restored. Given the localised view of Levy, Postecoglou will probably become something of a martyr, his qualities enhanced in absentia.
The alternative could well have been a November sacking after a reversion to the norm, each defeat chipping away at the edges of those Bilbao recollections. That would have been grim.
Instead, he is applauded on his way out, primarily because of that trophy, secondly for finishing fifth in the first campaign without Harry Kane, but also for the fun. For neutrals and those more invested, it was a riot and riots have a way of getting messy.
We have since heard a significant chunk of the players hate the decision. Levy will have to absorb that. It also isn’t popular with many of his rank and file, for whom Postecoglou signed autographs with a typical message at the end of the season: ‘For a true believer.’
Some of those beliefs were a little daft. And none of them were as zealously held as those guiding the man who just fired him.
The Brailsford conundrum
Sir Dave Brailsford has had his powers reduced at Manchester United by Sir Jim Ratcliffe. It is doubtful such a move will impact on Brailsford’s level of self-regard, but at the very least it might encourage Ratcliffe to question his own wisdom as the man who made the bizarre decision to put him there in the first place.
McIlroy's post-Masters minefield
Rory McIlroy missed the cut by a mile at the Canadian Open this week and now heads to Oakmont, arguably the hardest course in golf, for the US Open. Those of us who thought the removal of a Masters-sized monkey from his back would immediately free him to reach six majors appear to have made a wild miscalculation on the timeframe.
His admission that he has struggled for motivation since Augusta is common enough. His griping about media doing their jobs in the reporting of his driver debacle at the PGA Championships was more out of character.
It presumably hasn’t helped his mood that his Masters win has coincided with, or perhaps inspired, an ominous revival in Scottie Scheffler. In the context of where McIlroy goes from here, the latter scenario very much feels like shedding a monkey and gaining a gorilla.
Coventry should be under the lens for Khelif farce
Should Imane Khelif be stripped of her Olympic boxing gold medal now that leaked details of a 2023 sex test have emerged in public, carrying the conclusion that the Algerian has the ‘male karotype'?
The better question remains the one most of us raised at the Paris Games - how on earth did the International Olympic Committee, in possession of the details at the time, allow such a dangerous farce to occur?
Considering that Kirsty Coventry, now the president, was part of the brains trust that permitted this saga last saga, such lines of enquiry should be repeated until the IOC has apologised to each of Khelif’s opponents.
