It is never a good sign when a football manager displays an iciness about his own team’s supporters.
Roy Hodgson’s passive-aggressive reference to ‘the famous Anfield support’, which he was not experiencing during his unhappy time as Liverpool manager, was ominous.
Ange Postecoglou did not seem entirely aligned, either, when asked about Spurs shipping 13 goals in three consecutive home games.
‘If people can’t see the obvious, I’m not going to point it out,’ he said after Sunday’s 6-3 home defeat by Liverpool. ‘If people want me to change my approach, it’s not going to change.’
Postecoglou cut a highly sensitive figure and found himself depicted on Sunday as a middle-aged Australian man who does not take the notion of winning games seriously. Yet there is something joyous about the attacking creed to which he adheres — his ‘religion’ as he has called it — at a time when football is narrowing into a data-driven homogeneity.
Premier League football is a world of grey pragmatism now, everyone clinging on for dear life. On Sunday, we witnessed an individual clinging to a philosophy and an aesthetic, regardless of the gathering storm.
How football needs that. Graeme Souness wrote in these pages two weeks ago about the hard watch that Premier League football has become at times — ‘too much playing in your own half and too much passing from side to side’ and often shorn of ‘unpredictability’.
A sequence of results which reads 3-4, 1-1, 5-0, 4-3, 3-6 is wilder than any Spurs fan wants, but Postecoglou has imbued spirit, after the grinding, soulless football under Antonio Conte and Jose Mourinho — two grimly pragmatic men.
There are statistical signs that the Australian, whose squad is ravaged by injuries to eight key personnel, is heading in the right direction. Spurs have had more shots and more expected goals per game this season than last and scored more goals. They have created more big chances.
They have lost the ball less in their defensive third, conceded fewer shots and conceded fewer goals. By almost every useful metric, they are better than they were 12 months ago.
The data also points to a different mode of attack. The team’s number of ‘fast breaks’ — and goals from those breaks — has shot up, suggesting they have become far more reliant on counter-attacking. The number of sequences in which they pass the ball 10 times or more is markedly down. Their ‘average possession’ and ‘build-up breaks’ have dropped off, too, reflecting the shift to counter-attack.
The problem — and it is one which frustrates Souness — is the holes Tottenham are leaving all over the pitch. That might not have been a problem at Celtic for Postecoglou, but now his tactics are rumbled and weaknesses are spotted. This marauding Spurs team find themselves hugely dependent on the few players who can provide the defensive blanket when they lose the ball. Above all, central defender Micky van de Ven, whose hamstring problems have been a worry and forced Postecoglou to field Archie Gray, an 18-year-old, out of his natural position there against Liverpool.
Pape Matar Sarr, the midfield anchor, has a good engine but is inclined to be rash.
Dejan Kulusevski has been a wildcard — a better buy than many anticipated — but rival clubs could try to poach him if Spurs offer no prospect of trophies. In the meantime, Son Heung-min has lost his way and has contract uncertainty coming up.
Selling Richarlison would let Postecoglou bring in the players Spurs need: a versatile forward, a midfielder with a sharper brain than the current personnel and a defender who could provide cover.
Opportunities are there. Spurs have been offered the excellent former Everton full back Ben Godfrey, from Atalanta. But Richarlison, while frustrated by a lack of game time, is not keen to leave.
This is the most fascinating test of a football ideal since Kevin Keegan managed Newcastle United three decades ago, with a squad including Alan Shearer, Les Ferdinand, Peter Beardsley, Keith Gillespie, David Ginola and Tino Asprilla — and sometimes fielded all five together.
‘That was his way and he wasn’t going to change it,’ Shearer said recently. ‘It cost him in the end, because we’d be so far ahead and kept going and going and still trying to score goals. And there are shades of that in this Tottenham team.’
This Spurs team look more fragile than Keegan’s Newcastle did and even Keegan displayed greater flexibility than Postecoglou.
Sunday’s Spurs side were as attack-minded as ever, despite rookie Gray’s presence in the rear and 24-year-old Djed Spence as a makeshift left back.
Even Kulusevski suggested, in the aftermath of the defeat, that the footballing ideal must be adaptable for difficult circumstances.
When it was put to him that control during matches was something Spurs ought to seek, he said: ‘If you want to get a result, maybe yeah. You have to think about how are we physically. “Who’s playing? How many games have we played the last week? Who are we playing?”’
Ferdinand, who left Keegan’s Newcastle for Spurs in 1997, said in a studio discussion with an invited Spurs audience last week that he felt there needed to some degree of compromise from Postecoglou. ‘That could be his downfall,’ Ferdinand said.
He cited the 4-1 defeat by Chelsea last season, when the team continued to attack after going down to nine men. ‘I remember him saying that day he was not going to change the way he was playing. The supporters were positive but would not react in the same way today.’
Whatever happens next, we will witness the same philosophy Postecoglou laid out in an interview on these pages a year back, not long after that defeat by Chelsea.
‘I don’t know any other way,’ he said. ‘In the broad church of football philosophies, I have stayed really strict to one religion. I went into a library of football books and got stuck on one section that was about attacking football. It’s the only space I feel comfortable in.’
We will remember him long after football’s drab pragmatists have gone.
