Football needs idealists like Ange Postecoglou. His Tottenham side are the most captivating in the Premier League era since Newcastle under Kevin Keegan, writes IAN HERBERT
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It is never a good sign when a football manager displays an iciness about his own team’s supporters. Roy Hodgson’s passive-aggressive reference to ‘the famous Anfield support’, which he was not experiencing during his unhappy time as Liverpool manager, was ominous.
Ange Postecoglou did not seem entirely aligned, either, when asked about Spurs shipping 13 goals in three consecutive home games. ‘If people can’t see the obvious, I’m not going to point it out,’ he said after Sunday’s 6-3 home defeat by Liverpool. ‘If people want me to change my approach, it’s not going to change.’.
Postecoglou cut a highly sensitive figure and found himself depicted on Sunday as a middle-aged Australian man who does not take the notion of winning games seriously. Yet there is something joyous about the attacking creed to which he adheres — his ‘religion’ as he has called it — at a time when football is narrowing into a data-driven homogeneity.
Premier League football is a world of grey pragmatism now, everyone clinging on for dear life. On Sunday, we witnessed an individual clinging to a philosophy and an aesthetic, regardless of the gathering storm. Ange Postecoglou has refused to deviate from his patented brand of all-action football at Spurs.
His commitment to attacking football has made Tottenham must-see TV throughout his tenure. But their defensive fragility will continue to cost them against the Premier League's best teams. How football needs that. Graeme Souness wrote in these pages two weeks ago about the hard watch that Premier League football has become at times — ‘too much playing in your own half and too much passing from side to side’ and often shorn of ‘unpredictability’.