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It’s not surprising to anyone with a passing knowledge of Australian football that Ange Postecoglou is really, really good at management. In fact, you can chuck the Japanese and the Scots in there as well, given his success in their leagues, and probably the Greeks too.
In England, you don’t count unless you’ve done it on their turf – can Leo Messi do it on a wet Wednesday night in Stoke, etc etc – so it’s taken them a while to realise that they have something special on their hands.
Beyond the ‘mate’ in press conferences (we wait in anticipation for his first champing) and the idea that somehow us colonials don’t know who Robbie Williams is, it turns out that bloke knows a thing or two about football, too.
On the face of it, a thumping 5-2 win over Burnley shouldn’t be too much to write home about, but there are mitigating factors here.
For one, this is Burnleycelona, the side who brained the Championship last year, lead by high priest of jeugo de posicion and Pep disciple Vincent Kompany, very much a company man to the City Football Group. Ange, ex-Vuck as he is, absolutely wiped the floor with him.
It’s an interesting jumping off point for what Postecoglou is doing at Spurs. He’s a rare breed of a football manager in that he so rarely makes concessions to the opposing side, and especially not in early phases with a playing group where the point is as much embedding the style as it is winning.
Yet, despite knowing pretty much exactly what Spurs are going to do, teams don’t adapt at all. The only side that has is Brentford, who got a pretty decent 1-1 draw and probably should have won. Burnley tried to play the same style that worked in the Champo and got thrashed as a result.
It’s one thing when you’re the big dogs, like Guardiola is at Man City and Ange was at Celtic, but Spurs are only moderately-sized. Others could and should have more of a crack, if only to change the argument. Sit back, go direct, absorb and strike. See: Chelsea 0-1 Nottingham Forest
One of the advantages of Ange’s system is that it looks imposing and tires teams out both physically and mentally. Again, when you’re an elite club with 80% of the ball regardless, that’s by the by, but Spurs aren’t that.
Now they get 14 days off and a home game to Sheffield United to warm up for the North London derby. It’s been a great four weeks.
Optus viewers are as much victims to the whims of the Premier League scheduling squad as anyone else, meaning that our Saturday night 9pm offering wasn’t Liverpool v Aston Villa, as it might have been, or Spurs, or even Manchester City.
No, we got Everton’s trip to Sheffield United, and boy, was it an advertisement for the Premier League.
That’s not entirely sarcastic: it was a 2-2 draw between two bang average teams and, in fairness, rarely slowed down from the first minute onwards. If it was chaos you were looking for, you found it.
The big winners, as is usually the case, were the Premier League marketing folks. In truth, it was two bad teams playing largely bad football against each other, with the upshot that they werer closely matched enough that it passed muster as weekend evening fun for those flicking over after the NRL had finished.
There’s a nasty little streak in the Premier League, both implied by the marketing and echoed online through legions of fans, that everything that isn’t their product is rubbish.
Aussies know this well enough: our own football is often denigrarted in comparison to the likes of Sheffield United v Everton.
Your columnist was at Sydney FC’s 2-0 Australia Cup victory over APIA Leichhardt last Wednesday gone, and can assure that, despite a monsoon, more attempt at constructive, on the deck football was made than either the Blades or Toffees put in.
The close of the transfer window is as much to do with this, and it links back to the idea above that people aren’t respected until they play in England.
The Premier League pays ridiculous amounts of cash for players – Forest signed seven players on the same day for over $100m combined – and therefore they must be good, because money=success.
But football, as anyone knows, is so much about the collective and the system. West Ham are in the top four and Brighton, Crystal Palace and Brentford occupy 6th, 7th and 8th, with coherent ideas trumping throwing cash at the problem.
It’s reductive, of course, but where there is a lot of dumb money there are expanses of space to be taken by smart people with different ideas. Long may it continue.
Chelsea losing at home to Nottingham Forest was undeniably hilarious. They are the worst culpriits for throwing money at a problem and every defeat, even one to a the similarly profligate Forest, is soaked in hubris.
Manchester United played Arsenal which should probably be bigger news than it is given the size of the clubs, but is so routine these days that nobody cares. There was a VAR call that got everyone very angry, but VAR will do that.
West Ham won, again, with two headers, again. Imagine how long they spent in a recruitment meeting before wondering if they shouldn’t just sign someone who was really good at corners, at the exact time that the best set piece deliver in the league, James Ward-Prowse, came onto the market.
Citeh remain excellent, Erling Haaland remains excellent.
There’s an opus in why Aston Villa tried to play the world’s highest defensive line against Liverpool, thus inviting Trent Alexander-Arnold to play right over the top of them, but the short answer is that they (kind of) think it will work against most teams.
They also lost 5-1 to Newcastle for similar reasons, but now sit well about the Toon thanks to their failures in recent weeks.
Evan Ferguson scored a (fairly lucky) hat trick for Brighton in their 3-1 win, sending the away fans back home unhappy on the longest journey in this year’s Premier League.
Fun fact: the distance between the AMEX and St James’ Park is 581km, or roughly the distance from Sydney to Griffith. England is small.