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On Saturday, Tottenham Hotspur demolished four-time reigning champions Manchester City.
The 4-0 scoreline was City’s heaviest defeat at Etihad Stadium, their worst league defeat since 2003, and was City’s second loss to Spurs in less than a month.
For most of the year, Spurs manager Ange Postecoglou has been dealing with questions about his tactics, with many ‘experts’ urging him to be more ‘pragmatic’.
Here are just a handful of the headlines you can find with a quick Google search:
Former Tottenham player says Ange Postecoglou's tactics work better in cup competitions than Premier League
Ange Postecoglou does NO tactical work in training reveals former star
Graeme Souness: Everyone thinks Ange Postecoglou is brave – he’s not, he’s naive and lucky
Jermain Defoe states what is 'silly' and needs to change under Ange Postecoglou at Tottenham
The fatal flaw in Ange’s tactics which exposed Spurs against Leicester
Are Postecoglou’s tactics holding Tottenham back this season?
Something that you need to understand about Postecoglou is that for thirty years he’s been willing to stand in the fire that comes with trying to change the game.
His autobiography, literally called Changing The Game, is a tale of the unrepentant doubt he’s faced throughout his coaching journey. At every stop, Postecoglou has had ‘experts’ urging him to be more ‘pragmatic’.
Thrust into his first head coaching position at age 31, Ange was already shaking things up. He pushed his boyhood club, South Melbourne Hellas, to be great and not accept the cycle of inconsistent success they’d endured. “There may have been an expectation that I’d slip into the coaching job and hit autopilot,” he writes. “There was no way I was going to be that type of coach. I was going to hit the ground running. I was going to put the club and everyone involved on notice.”
Postecoglou did just that, delivering back-to-back NSL titles for South Melbourne.
When he arrived at Brisbane Roar, Postecolgou wanted to implement Barcelona’s famed tiki-taka style. The experts urged more pragmatism, citing the general narrative that Australia produced physical players, not technical players capable of such an elegant style.
“Because these unbelievable players at Barcelona were playing this keep-ball game, the assumption was that you had to be the best in the world to do it. But I took the contrary view, that the roots of that style of game aren’t embedded in extreme technical ability. In fact, it taps into the things that are close to Australia as a nation: teamwork, courage, never taking a backward step, and always being prepared to help your mate out. That’s what this football is about. The basic philosophy is togetherness. That wasn’t a hard sell. After all, isn’t Australian sport’s mythology drenched in that sort of stuff?”
It turns out that Australian players could play in the Barcelona style, and Postecoglou delivered back-to-back A-League titles for Brisbane — including a 36-game unbeaten streak.
And so the story continues…
He was urged to be more pragmatic with the Socceroos, and ruffled feathers by telling the country it should stop dreaming of making the World Cup and dream of winning it. He delivered the Asian Cup in 2015.
He was urged to be more pragmatic with Yokohama, with some difficult early defeats leading his players to go to his translator to question his credentials. He delivered the J-League title in 2019.
He was urged to be more pragmatic with Celtic, with many suggesting he should alter his tactics in the Champions League in order to avoid a large defeat.
To that request, here was his response:
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Many times, coaches suffer from this affliction. But in this case the insane ones are the ‘experts’ who urge Postecoglou over and over to be more ‘pragmatic’.
In an interview with Mark Schwarzer on Optus Sport, Postecoglou explained why:
“From my point of view: everybody wants me to do is what everybody else is doing. I’m simply not going to do it, because there is a reason why I’m here, and it’s not because I’ve done what everybody else is doing. I don’t come here to do what other people do. People will say we should be more pragmatic like everyone else, I don’t want to be like everyone else. That doesn’t mean I will necessarily be successful or that my approach will work, but what I won’t do is just become one of the ‘masses’. Because what’s the point? If I do that, I’m going to get lost in it, I’m going to fade away and I’m not going to have the impact I want to have. What others see is a kind of stubbornness or that I’m dogmatic, but what I see is simply a belief in what I’m doing.”
I’m writing this post because of how regularly coaches come to me to profess that they’re lost. The game has dragged them away from who they are and what they believe, and they don’t know how to get it back. They let one thing slide, and it turned into a landslide.
To coaches that are striving to shed the fear of compliance and do things their own way, Ange Postecoglou is a shining light, a beacon for us all.
And in the Sameness Era of coaching, we need these beacons more than ever.
If you have big dreams, different ideas, and high standards, I say this to you: Don’t change!
And if you’re Ange Postecoglou and you’ve turned over Pep Guardiola twice in a month: Don’t change, either!
Cody’s Notes:
@opengoalsport Ange Postecoglou Advice On Management & Coaching #fyp #foryou #fypシ #viral #opengoal #spurs #tottenham #tottenhamhotspur #premieleague #oz... See more