Ange Postecoglou is not in any doubt that the best is yet to come from his Tottenham side and that they will be significantly better next season.
Given all the turmoil surrounding Spurs at the end of last season and Harry Kane‘s departure in the summer, the expectations at the club were quite low at the start of the campaign, with not many fans expecting the Lilywhites to fight for Champions League qualification.
However, Postecoglou could not have hoped for a better start, with the team having picked up ten points from four matches, and having scored 11 goals in the process.
The Australian was deservedly voted the Premier League Manager of the Month for August, but he is very much keeping his feet on the ground, remarking that he is more concerned at this stage about the football that his side are playing rather than the results.
(Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)
Postecoglou believes Spurs’ future can be bright
Postecoglou told Football.London: “Things have been going well my whole career, I’ve had a lot of success and through that all I’ve just focused on one thing and that’s ‘are my team playing the football I want, are we training in a way I want, is the environment the way I like it?’
“That’s what I’m constantly looking at, irrespective of the short-term, where there may be challenges where the results aren’t there, or when the results are there and I’m fairly even in my demeanour and temperament in dealing with it the same way.
“The radar’s always up because when things aren’t going well to see whether guys going to respond in the right way, is there something we’re missing here, and when things are going well, are we at the edge we need to be, are we sort of getting complacent? It doesn’t change, the scenario for me.
“If you have any longevity in the game you kind of know all these things you need to treat with equal measure in terms of not having too many extremes in your reactions to them one way or the other and if you do that then the people you’re working with and the people you’re around tend to follow that lead.”
In contrast to Spurs, Postecoglou had difficult starts at Celtic and Yokohama Marinos before things really started clicking into gear at those clubs, and he insisted that the processes he is putting in place have been no different in North London.
He continued: “I think people get swayed – and it’s only natural – by outcomes. At Celtic, I lost three of our first six. At Yokohama, we were battling relegation, but I can tell you the same sort of building stuff I did at those clubs, I’m doing here. The only difference is the results have been better. Encouraging, for sure, but I love this period because there is pretty much a day-to-day uncertainty about where we’re at. That will be here for the next six months to a year.
“Everywhere I’ve been, the second year is where I’ve felt like the team has really taken hold, but I also understand at this football club I can’t go three, four, five months without results because I won’t last. That’s the reality of it. It was the same at Celtic. I lost three of the first six. I kind of knew that if we were going to be champions, we couldn’t lose another game for the rest of the year. I knew that. We didn’t.
“But it didn’t make that easy. It doesn’t make this easier than the others. This has been just as challenging. You think about our pre-season. Some of you were on the trip, it wasn’t smooth, mate. You think about the players we’ve had to get in and out in this short period of time. It hasn’t been easy.
“A new start. A new way of training. A new way of playing, but I love it and because I love it, people seem to think that maybe it’s easy. It’s not, but that’s OK. That’s the challenge I took on. If you measure on outcomes, yes, this looks like this has been smoother than the others, but I can assure you this has been just as challenging, if not more challenging because of the stakes here in the Premier League.”
When asked if that means that Tottenham will be in an even better place next season, the 58-year-old responded: “Absolutely, it has to be. Otherwise there’s no point in me being here. It has to be,” he explained. “There’s probably five clubs in my career where I’ve had more than a year.
“The second years have been the years where everything [has improved] because then the players already know how we train, the staff are comfortable, we drive the environment, and you can see that me, as a manager, I slowly can allow people to take more and more responsibility and autonomy in the way we play.
“Then they drive it and then you know we can really accelerate. We’re still miles away from that. I’ve still firmly got my hands on the wheel, mate, I won’t let go for a while.”
Spurs Web Opinion
There is a lot for Spurs fans to be excited about as one would certainly expect the team to improve as the players become more acclimatised with the new system.
However, it is also worth noting that Ange is coming up against the best managers in the world in the Premier League, which means that there is a chance that his system will be worked out and that its weaknesses could be exploited.
So, the Australian will perhaps need to be a little more proactive in making tweaks and adjustments as the likes of Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp have.
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