Ange Postecoglou is waiting for his moment.
It is why he is here: to give his speech, to sell himself, to put his name in the frame for his first ever managerial job. Bitter and sweet smoke, from the meat cooking on the nearby barbecue and the cigarettes held between the fingers of those around him, mingle in the air. And he waits.
Postecoglou has found himself here, at a gathering hosted by South Melbourne’s general manager Peter Filopoulos, after tentatively enquiring about the job. It is summer 1996 and manager Frank Arok’s time at the club is coming to an end.
Postecoglou was considered a legendary player at South Melbourne – a marauding wing-back with a mullet and facial hair questionable by today’s fashions, captain aged 21, a serial trophy winner – and is Arok’s assistant, but his name has not come up when South Melbourne’s board meet to discuss potential replacements.
One afternoon, Postecoglou entered Filopoulos’s office and asked what was happening with Arok. Filopoulos said a few names were being discussed but he wasn’t sure in which direction they were heading.
“Has my name been mentioned at all?” Postecoglou asked.
“I can’t say your name’s been mentioned, Ange,” Filopoulos replied. “But I should’ve asked you this earlier: are you interested in the role?”
“I absolutely am,” Postecoglou said, before giving a small spiel outlining his credentials. It got Filopoulos thinking.
“I organised a barbecue at my house for the younger contingent of the board and I invited Ange,” Filopoulos tells i now. “I said to Ange, come along with your wife and I’m sure we’ll end up talking amongst the boys and there might be an opportunity for you to share your vision and what your thoughts are for the coaching position. You might want to put your name forward. He didn’t say much.”
So there Postecoglou is, standing in his general manager’s garden, waiting. The board members start chucking around names. South Melbourne was the country’s biggest club and had its pick of coaches. Postecoglou had played under Ferenc Puskas, one of the game’s most famous players.
Then someone asked, “What do you think Ange?” And Postecoglou had his chance to make a pitch for the position that would launch his managerial career and, almost two decades later via the most unconventional of routes, lead to him taking over at Tottenham Hotspur.
Postecoglou talked and talked. He had plenty of ideas, much to say. “And he just went on for about 20 minutes. It was so compelling,” Filopoulos recalls.
“There was a pause and the vice president at the time looked at him and said, ‘Ange, you’re our next coach, mate.’”
“What he did at South Melbourne was the embryonic version of Ange Postecoglou which has evolved progressively in every job he’s had to what you see at Tottenham today,” Filopoulos says.
Within that evolution is a remarkable story about perseverance, overcoming adversity, close calls, near misses, furious rows, great highs and bitter lows.
But back then, in 1996, Filopoulos would bear witness to the bold moves that would come to define Postecoglou’s career, working closely with this young head coach – retired early due to injury, still in his early 30s and younger than some of the players – telling everyone what they were doing wrong.
After lobbying from the board members at the barbecue, the club president was convinced that Postecoglou was the next manager and Filopoulos travelled up the road to the National Australia Bank branch on Clarendon Street, where Postecoglou worked as a teller to supplement his small salary.
Filopoulos waited for Postecoglou’s morning break and went inside. “Ange I need to see you, we’ve relieved Frank Arok of his duties and the board’s decided you’ve got the reins for the next three games,” Filopoulos said.
Filopoulos laughs remembering the occasion now. “As we know Ange, he showed no emotion whatsoever. And he pretty much went into business mode. He said to me, ‘That’s great, I want you to ring every player. I want to have a meeting with every single player tonight at 6pm.’”
At 6pm, everyone convened in a room at the club’s training ground. Arok spoke first, saying his farewells. Postecoglou stood waiting for his moment, again. Then stepped in front of the group.
“Frank’s the one who’s fallen on his sword but each and every member of this dressing room tonight has failed, it wasn’t just Frank,” Postecoglou said. “We, as a collective, have failed.
“One person has fallen victim to that, but you need to all look at yourselves, you need to look in the mirror, you need to look at each other. Me too – I was assistant coach. We have failed. And we’ve got the next three games to win back credibility and do things differently for yourselves, your families and the fans, and the jersey and the emblem you represent.”
They won two of the season’s three remaining games and played better football. Then Filopoulos and Postecoglou set to work in the off-season. “He wanted to change everything, he had very strong ideas,” Filopoulos says.
Postecoglou changed training routines, schedules, challenged staff about their roles. If they stayed in one brand of hotels for away games, he switched it to another he felt was better. “Everybody was on notice,” Filopoulos says. “Even me as general manager.”
And then it started terribly. They won only one of his first seven games and the board had an itchy finger on the trigger ready to fire him. After that seventh game Postecoglou only survived because the president wasn’t available to attend the subsequent board meeting.
“There wasn’t enough quorum to conduct that meeting when some of the board members wanted to push forward for a motion for Ange’s axing,” Filopoulos recalls.
“It was that close. I remember I was getting phone calls from some board members suggesting that very closely following Ange would’ve been me because I was the one who orchestrated it all!”
It came down to the eighth game, away to Sydney. It was another slow performance. Then striker Paul Trimboli scored an awful last-minute goal to earn his manager a modicum of reprieve.
“I always go back to that moment,” Filopoulos says. “Had he not won that game, with his best mate Paul Trimboli scoring a very scrappy goal in the 89th minute, stealing three points, he would’ve gone.”
Results turned. After each game, Postecoglou and Filopoulos had to stand in front of the board’s 18 members, sat around a table, and explain what had happened.
“Ange started to build a narrative around his philosophy and his long-term goals,” Filopoulos explains. “He was desperately trying to move the narrative away from the week-to-week win, loss, draw scenarios. I look at his post-match press conferences now and I think his narrative building started a long time ago and he’s developed it very well.
“He was the first coach who started to talk beyond the game they had or the game approaching. He talked about the journey he was taking them on. He was trying to bring people along at every opportunity he had, every touch point.”
At Spurs he has already crafted the image of an extremely down-to-earth and likeable man that, combined with his entertaining genre of football, is winning fans from far and wide.
“For the rest of the season he started to win games,” Filopoulos adds. “The team started to gel, they started to adopt his very attacking style of football. The following two years after that we won the championship.”
Postecoglou wonders if he has blown it.
The cameras are no longer recording him and now the anger has subsided some uncertainty is setting in. He sits there in the TV studio, reflecting on what has just happened. Did he really spend 10 minutes having a row on national television?
A successful four years at South Melbourne led to Postecoglou becoming head coach of Australia’s youth teams, but pressure has intensified after successive failures to qualify for World Cups when he agrees to appear on The World Game, the country’s only dedicated football news show. From a PR perspective, it could barely have gone worse.
During the broadcast Postecoglou shared his view that young Australian footballers were not getting enough minutes in league games when chief football analyst Craig “Fozzy” Foster tore into him for not accepting responsibility.
In a spectacular 10 minutes, which is considered an iconic moment in sporting television in Australia, Postecoglou has a blazing argument with Foster, who repeatedly called for him to resign.
It may have made for great TV, but for Postecoglou it is disastrous. He is a man of few outward emotions, but he is concerned it could ruin his career.
While many Australians were impressed by the way Postecoglou dug in and fought back under a grilling, influential figures in Australian football disagreed. He was sacked three months later, and went from Australia’s golden coach to virtually unemployable.
Postecoglou was offered a lifeline back in Greece, at lower league side Panachaiki, but it lasted six months. “It was a disaster,” one person familiar with the move says.
So he moved back to Australia and, initially unable to find work at clubs, moved in with his mother-in-law for eight months, getting by as a TV pundit and coaching kids.
Then an opportunity arose at Brisbane Roar, in the new A-League formed after the national league disbanded, when head coach Frank Farina was sacked after being charged with drink-driving.
Postecoglou boarded a plane to Brisbane to meet with the owners. But though he was desperate for a route back he told them that if they didn’t want to change he wasn’t the coach for them. They decided they did want to change.
That challenging period out of work, when all anyone had wanted to talk to him about was an altercation on national television, had altered something inside Postecoglou.
He is made of strong stuff. It comes with relocating to a new country 8,500 miles away at age five with only your mum, dad, sister and a few suitcases. He watched his father lose a successful business in the 1967 Greek military coup. At nights his mother could be heard crying.
He was desperate to fit in at his new school – not easy when the other kids struggled to pronounce his surname. But he saw football as a way to earn respect, and the skinny blonde boy was good at it. It served the dual purpose of ingratiating him with his peers and affording him time with his dad. He cherished the half-hour drives to and from training when he joined the youth team at South Melbourne, a club formed by Greek migrants after World War II.
That toughness will serve him well at Tottenham where a brilliant unbeaten start to the season has turned into three straight defeats and the team struggling under the weight of mounting injuries.
Just as it served him well in the difficult years out of work, during which he had decided that when – if – he got back into the game he would coach and play football his way: aggressive, attacking, unrestrained, uncompromising. He wanted to make a mark on the game, not just coach footballers.
Postecoglou spent six months ripping Brisbane Roar apart. And, to begin with, it wasn’t pretty. “It wasn’t a great six months,” one former player says. Only, then it became more beautiful than anything anyone had ever seen in Australia.
“He turned that place upside down,” Filopoulos says. “They called his style of football Roar-celona. He played that attacking style, fast-paced, the ball moving quickly. He developed another vision and philosophy there and pulled it off.”
Passing team moves that swept up the pitch, stunning volleys, intricate set piece moves, long-range shots. At one stage they went 36 games undefeated.
If you’ve read in recent days about how the late Terry Venables reinvented the English game, in the same way Pep Guardiola has reimagined football since becoming a coach, this was the moment Postecoglou did that in Australia. He showed the country how enthralling “soccer” could be, how mesmeric it was, how enchanting.
Postecoglou once told The Age of Ange documentary that “no story is yet written, the ability to change where that goes is in your own hands”. Here was the master of his own destiny changing the narrative of Australian football, rewriting his own image on the pitch.
With his untethered approach he found success everywhere he subsequently went: Melbourne Victory; the Australia national team, which he lead to a first ever Asian Cup trophy and was hailed as “the man who’s taken Australian football from the forgotten game to unforgettable glory”; Yokohama F. Marinos in Japan; Celtic.
It has led to some questioning if he would have risen to this kind of prominence sooner had he not coached for so many years in the relative backwater of Australian football. Others have said he could be a successor to Pep Guardiola at Manchester City.
Indeed, City’s owners have been aware of his talents for many years, after he became part of the City Football Group network of clubs in 2018 at Marinos.
Guardiola first met Postecoglou in Tokyo, was impressed with his work and had kept an eye on his progress. In another lurch of fate, it was Guardiola who swung him the Celtic job in 2021. Guardiola had bumped into Dermot Desmond in a hotel and when, over lunch, the Celtic owner asked for his opinion on a new manager Guardiola recommended an underrated coach in Yokohama.
Regardless of where Postecoglou’s story takes him, his influence on the perception of football in Australia – and of Australia in football – has already had a greater impact than many of his contemporaries will ever have.
“He’s got a cult following back here,” Filopoulos says. “When he went to Celtic he had a huge following of people watching the games every week. Now with Tottenham, you’re finding Liverpool supporters, Manchester United supporters, Chelsea and Arsenal supporters watching Tottenham more than their club at the moment.
“It’s really invigorated the country. We’ve got a huge ambition as a football nation. We just want to impress in every way possible on a global stage. Whether it’s an individual coach like Ange, whether it’s our men or women’s national team, us putting on a women’s World Cup, we just want to show the world what we can do.
“There’s a big football community following Ange’s progress proudly, happily and intently. He represents the dreams of the whole nation. This is a golden era for Australian football and Ange is a big part of that.”
Postecoglou is no longer waiting for his moment. He is living in it.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/xDqWM5s
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