Ange Postecoglou has now explained why Tottenham approached the Europa League differently than the Premier League last season after Micky van de Ven claimed that the players asked for a more defensive approach.
The Australian has been speaking to The Overlap and has not held back in his criticism of the Tottenham Hotspur hierarchy.
Postecoglou has accused Spurs of not operating like a big club and not living up to the club’s ‘to dare is to do’ motto, with the way they operate in the transfer market.
The Australian has now made an admission on his decision to change his tactics in the business end of the Europa League last term.
Ange Postecoglou reveals Tottenham trained differently for Europa League knockout games
In his own appearance on the same podcast back in December, Micky van de Ven revealed he and Cristian Romero challenged Postecoglou’s gun-ho tactics mid-season.
The Dutchman explained that the pair had told the former Tottenham boss that the team had to be ‘more defensive sometimes’, which he agreed to.
When asked about Van de Ven’s revelation, Ange Postecoglou has now told The Overlap: “Yeah, it’s the old adage of, you know, success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan,” he said. “Everyone contributed to the Europa League, the league was all on me, by the way! That’s totally on me, but the Europa League, we all contributed to that!
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“So, my thought process around that was, we got to February, I think we’d just lost to Liverpool, because we had a deep run in the Carabao Cup, the second leg, and we’d won the first leg 1-0, but we were on fumes by then, so Liverpool battered us.
“So we’re out of the Carabao Cup, I said okay, we’re 16 points from relegation, that isn’t going to happen. We’ve got a real narrow path to winning something, right, for this football club, which we know what that means, but also, Champions League, Champions League money, so, again, I’m obsessive about the game.
“I did a deep dive on who’s won the Europa League in recent times, Unai [Emery] who’s won it three times, Jose [Mourinho’s] won it, Oliver Glasner’s won it, I think Diego Simeone won it. There’s a thread through there of the kind of football, because it’s different from the Champions League, the Champions League is a bigger variance of quality, the top teams in the Champions League to the bottom, massive, and you always get the best teams winning it.
“In the Europa, it’s not that much, because the teams from the Premier League compared to the teams that finish fourth or fifth in Germany or Spain, it’s quite competitive. What I saw what they were doing, well, they were playing pretty risk-free, very, you know, strong defensive organisation, and if we could somehow create that model for the Europa League with the players I had.
“Key to that was Van de Ven and Romero, and I did have discussions with the players. I mean, I was being a bit facetious about it, but I wanted them to buy into it, because it was a little bit of a departure, but they were all in for it. I said, ‘look, this is the kind of football that will get us through, because I know cup football anyway, is different from your league football’. So, we trained differently, we were prepared differently.”
Postecoglou reveals why he did not change his tactics in the Premier League
While Spurs may have adopted a more pragmatic approach in the latter stages of the Europa League, their approach did not change domestically, even though their results were going from bad to worse.
Postecoglou revealed that he did not want to change his style in the league since the club had bought him in to play attacking football.
The 60-year-old added: “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 the process of getting to winning a competition that had a clear strategy, you could do it.
“So, we did. And if you look at the final. By the end of it, I put on Kevin Danso to turn the back four into a back five, then I put on Djed Spence, I think I had about seven defenders on there, and I was looking at the bench to see if there was any other defenders!
“I could hear my dad going ‘what are you doing?’ And, you know, we’ve got a line of about seven players on the edge of our box at one stage. But at the same time, I knew if we shut down Bruno [Fernandes], they weren’t going to score. I just felt with United, the way they set up with Ruben [Amorim] and the kind of ways they would try to break us down if we were really solid defensively, as long as we scored, we had to get a goal. 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 I, in my mind, thought, well, what a unique opportunity.”
