Ange Postecoglou was pleased to see that Spurs were trying to play out from the back under pressure against West Ham, admitting that he is trying to give them the freedom to make mistakes.
Despite Tottenham falling to a 3-2 defeat against West Ham at the Optus Stadium, Spurs fans have a lot to be excited about on the back of the team’s performance in Postecoglou’s first game in charge.
One of the most noticeable aspects of the Lilywhites’ play was the fact that they tried to play through West Ham’s press without resorting to hoofing the ball up the pitch, even when they were surrounded by multiple opposition players.
Even the likes of Davinson Sanchez, who is not known for his technical ability, successfully managed to play out from tight situations, which often opened up space for Spurs to launch attacks.
Postecoglou wants Tottenham to play risky
Postecoglou admitted that he is trying to remove any fear of failure from the Spurs squad and is encouraging them to take risks.
When asked about his side successfully playing out from the back from several dangerous situations, the Spurs head coach told Football.London: “You know there are consequences if we don’t get that right but I’m trying to provide security and a structure to the players to encourage them to release that fear and play that kind of football.
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“That’s the kind of team we want to be. At the moment there will be missteps along the way – that’s only natural. But I’m trying to make sure the players understand that veering away or shying away from that will mean us playing the kind of football that I don’t want us to play.
“So we have to be all in on this stuff. For the most part, I think they were trying to be that, but obviously, at times it didn’t flow as well because we weren’t really sure about what position to take up, but the good thing is that at least we’ve got moments there where we can show them that under extreme pressure, you can get these kind of outcomes, which allows us then to work on it.”
Postecoglou insisted that he would not have been happy had the players decided to play safe and emerged from the game with a 1-0 win.
The Australian coach added: “There’s enough in that game for me to show back to the players and give us a foundation to work on. We could have played this game and won 1-0 and not shown any of that.
“That would be hard for me, because that means we haven’t made any impression as a coaching staff in the first 10 days.
“The fact that we’re seeing some of it is what I was hoping for tonight. We’ll sit down with the boys, we’ll show them where there could have been even more moments like that, opportunities we missed, we’ll work on aspects of the game where we weren’t as strong as we needed to be.
“But all that comes from the evidence of the fact that they were trying to play our football, so that’s the main thing for me.”
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I have to admit that I did not expect to change such sweeping changes to our style of play in our first pre-season game of the season, given that a safety-first approach had been drilled into the players under Mourinho and Conte.
This is certainly a very encouraging start to Postecoglou’s reign and the combination play will only get better as the players get more accustomed to the system over the coming weeks.
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