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Opinion
It seems to me a uniquely Australian affliction to tear down our greatest icons, especially when they make it overseas. We seem to do it for fun.
Imagine, for a second, that Australia’s (at best) fourth most popular sport produced a coach. He started his coaching career in a now virtually defunct state league, then moved to coach his country’s youth teams where he was most famous for clashing on air with a TV personality, then he went to a club in Greece that nobody had heard of.
Sounding familiar to anyone?
Let’s continue anyway.
He flamed out in Greece unceremoniously and went back to coach a suburban side. Then he gets the gig at some miscellaneous club in one of the sport’s most miscellaneous leagues. He turned them into a juggernaut. Then he went to the biggest club in that miscellaneous league and turned them into a winner, even if he isn’t there for all of the winning.
At both clubs he took a league famous for turgid football and made it watchable.
He is responsible for the apex of that league, which is now on what looks like an unarrestable slide.
After that, he coached the national team. He dared to play some decent football, a rarity in a nation that has generally been allergic to being watchable on the pitch. After getting hounded out of that job by an ungrateful and unambitious public (after a major international trophy and shortly after qualification for the World Cup), the serial winner went to Japan and did a bit more winning all while continuing to play beautiful football.
Ange Postecoglou (Photo by Rob Casey/SNS Group via Getty Images)
Finally, he got the job at one of the biggest, most recognisable clubs in the sport. Indeed, in global sport. He took over after a period of desolation for the club, and what does he do? Wins everything.
Twice.
And does it his own way, once saying in response to a query about his “play it from the back” style: “If you are a vegetarian, you don’t just drop into Macca’s on the way home because you are hungry.”
This is the Ange Postecoglou story. He has never lost his vision. Always played beautiful football. He has always won. A Melbourne boy come good.
And now, by all accounts, he’s heading to Tottenham.
Yep, that Tottenham. One of the six biggest clubs in the biggest league in the world. The club that has been recently by Mauricio Pochettino, Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte.
And what do we, the Australian football public do? We deride him. “Why would you take the Tottenham job?” we ask.
Tottenham are serial losers who have absurd expectations set for themselves and are run by a meddling American who loves nothing more than to stick his finger into as many pies as possible, we say. He’s just going to get smashed in the Champions League and he’ll be no good, we project.
Bullshit.
This is an Australian manager who is going to take charge in the English Premier League. That is all that needs to be said.
Thirty years ago he was managing South Melbourne Football Club, and now he’s going to play his home games at the largest club stadium in London. Spurs might be delusional in their expectations but honestly, a bit of delusion is a good thing.
If Ange Postecoglou wasn’t delusional, he would not have this opportunity. Delusion, for people like Ange, is just ambition that we normals can’t comprehend.
Saying that he is picking the wrong big six EPL club to manage would be like telling your friend he’s picked the wrong supermodel to date.
The fact that he is even there is an accomplishment in and of itself. But he won’t see it that way.
This is a nation that should stop and consider what it has said about Angle Postecoglou when he was coach of the national team. We derided his style of play, saying that we didn’t have the horses. He responded by saying that he has a philosophy and scolded us for our lack of ambition.
He told us that the Australian football infrastructure was good enough to support his style of play and he pointed to his trophy, our only trophy, as proof.
He got the same criticism when the little-known Greek-Australian kid got the job at Celtic. He himself has said that he was a “joke”.
Contrast that to when he completed the Scottish treble earlier this week. Celtic’s principal owner was dejected. He was dejected not at having won the treble and returning Celtic to its former glory, but at having lost his golden goose.
So, Tottenham fans and Australian football fans alike might deride Ange’s decision to take the biggest job any person in the history of Australian football has ever even been in contention to take.
But just based on history, that is miscalculated. He usually wins where he goes. At the very least, Tottenham will be appointment viewing.
Ange’s teams always are.
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