It is fair to say that Ange Postecoglou has gone down a storm not only with Tottenham Hotspur fans but almost everyone involved in English football.
The Premier League has enjoyed managers who are passionate, arrogant, amusing, clever, foreign, tactical and avuncular, or merely out of their depth, but never before have we had a plain-speaking Australian who uses the word “mate” to convey such a variety of meanings. The 58-year-old can use it to add friendliness, a dash of honesty, a smear of sarcasm, or deliver it as if telling you to shut up and leave the premises.
He is, then, a bit different, but what is most impressive about him is that he has performed alchemy. Where Blackadder’s Lord Percy discovered a nugget of purest green, Postecoglou has somewhat miraculously found gold.
For decades, Spurs have suffered from an inbuilt flimsiness, an inability to convert fine players and attractive football into something tangible. They are a very long way off claiming silverware this time around, of course, but what their new head coach has achieved is a sense of endearing entitlement and momentum. These are not characteristics usually associated with the north London club.
You could once rely on Tottenham to wobble when under pressure, to lose from a winning position, to throw away a lead, to fail to back up a sumptuous victory with a win over limited opposition, to go limp at the final hurdle and, most significantly, to fall apart as soon as the plaudits arrive.
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Right now, however, they are revelling in their role as entertainers who lead the Premier League table. Their success has energised them where once it would have been the cue for a slow paralysis. It is terribly counterintuitive to watch players in Spurs colours display such warm arrogance and self-confidence.
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On Friday night I was briefly barred from entering the press room because the Spurs players were using the corridor to walk from their bus to their dressing room. This meant I stood and watched as each and every one of them strolled into Selhurst Park. This they did with varying degrees of swagger. They were not lost in the music of their headphones, nor aggrieved that they had been stuck in traffic. They were relaxed and their eyes sparkled. They were the league leaders. They were the hot ticket.
The game itself did not initially unfold as they may have hoped. Roy Hodgson’s Crystal Palace were the more threatening and cohesive team in the first half. And yet not once, I suspect, did a single travelling supporter think we were about to witness an upset. They have decided their team will find a way and that they will reward them for doing so with wholehearted adoration.
Postecoglou says he expects the players to find their own solutions when there are stumbling blocks and this indeed appeared to be exactly what was happening in the tunnel on Friday as Spurs prepared to emerge for the second half. We could see James Maddison talking animatedly, his arms waving, his fingers pointing at all the places he wanted the ball to be delivered.
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“We prep them for their exam on the weekend, but we don’t know what the questions are going to be,” Postecoglou said. “They’ve got to work it out for themselves.”
This can be a risky approach, but so far his players are relishing the freedom, not least because what it means is that their head coach has faith in them, has told them they are intelligent and that they should trust their gut.
This was most starkly illustrated by how Cristian Romero ditched the bold chaos that has been at the heart of Spurs under Postecoglou and instead became metronomic. He completed 141 passes, the most by a Tottenham player since such information began to be recorded in 2003, but most of them were deeply unambitious.
Back and forth went the ball between the defender and his goalkeeper. The home fans jeered and it was all about as far removed from the swashbuckling Spurs they had been promised. But this was the team biding their time, accepting their head coach’s invitation to solve the puzzle.
They had taken the lead through an unfortunate own goal but needed to find a route to impose their theoretical superiority. If maintaining dull possession at the back was the means, then they were prepared to do just that, and it worked beautifully. At last Pape Sarr unleashed a cross-field ball and in a flash the team became slick and aggressive. At the final whistle the players communed with the fans with body language that said “of course we won, that’s what we do”.
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Is this sustainable, with stern tests coming up against Chelsea, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Aston Villa and Manchester City? Right now Chelsea are the opposite of Spurs and play like a team with little faith in their ability to turn possession into points, but Wolves and Villa attack with optimism, while City have the trophies to prove they are superior.
Pep Guardiola, though, dislikes overt displays of arrogance and the City manager would probably discourage the way Maddison has become the poster boy for Spurs’ new swagger. For now it suits Postecoglou that he has a player who believes he represents the soul of the club so beautifully that Harry Kane now needs to score from the halfway line for Bayern Munich to become part of any Tottenham conversation.
