Ange Postecoglou clearly goaded Spurs fans and his ludicrous denial just hides the real issue | OneFootball

Ange Postecoglou at least showed more front than his Tottenham team did. It was certainly hard to know what was more brazen in his post-game press conference at Chelsea.

Was it the attempt to move the discussion onto another excoriation of VAR, which is crowd-pleasing, but felt an obvious and irrelevant deflection? Or, was it the insistence that his ear-cupping of the Tottenham Hotspur end after Pape Sarr’s ultimately disallowed goal was actually an invite to “cheer”… and not a goading response to their previous chant of “you don’t know what you’re doing” over Sarr’s introduction.

His answer is worth reading in full.

“Jesus mate, it's incredible how things get interpreted,” the Australian brazenly insisted. “We'd just scored, I just wanted to hear them cheer. Because we'd been through a tough time, and I thought it was a cracking goal. I wanted them to get really excited.

“I felt at that point we could potentially go on and win the game. I just felt momentum was on our [side]. It doesn't bother me, it's not the first time they've booed my substitutions or my decisions, that's fine, they're allowed to do that. But we'd just scored a goal, just scored an equaliser, I was just hoping we could get some excitement.

“If people want to read into that, that somehow I'm trying to make a point about something, like I said, we'd been through a tough time, but I just felt there was a bit of a momentum shift there. If they get really behind the lads, I thought we had the momentum to finish on top of them.”

Is anyone really buying this? The fans don’t seem to be, in the same way there are now very few backers for his managerial tenure.

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Ange Postecoglou appeared to goad the Spurs fans after Pape Sarr’s disallowed equaliser but insists he was just encouraging them to cheer (Getty Images)

The remarkable thing about that is that it wasn't too long ago that there was immense sympathy for Postecoglou. Everyone could see the extent of the injuries. Everyone could see the restrictions at Tottenham, where the wage bill has dropped well below Aston Villa’s.

This was fair context.

And yet, if Postecoglou’s results have taken a real downward turn since those angelic first months in the job, so has his demeanour and relationship with the media. He is no longer cast as a plain-talking Aussie bringing a breath of fresh air. His media interactions instead have a passive-aggressive tone.

The press conference after the Chelsea defeat the most extreme example so far of Postecoglou acting like it was an affront to even ask him about any of this, as if it was somehow betraying the true spirit of football.

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Postecoglou has gone from eminently quotable media darling to passive-aggressive in his dealings with the press (Ben Whitley/PA Wire)

This is, of course, despite him bringing it on. You can’t do something like that gesture, in that context, and think it won't be a talking point. It was literally all Spurs fans were talking about.

More importantly, the football has inevitably become just as confused and contradictory as the off-field persona. So much for the purity of Postecoglou’s tactical vision. His Spurs team couldn’t look further away from it. The attack barely creates, the midfield can almost be walked through, and the defence is porous.

And this almost two years into his Spurs project. Again, there were initially much bigger reasons for this, but Postecoglou has gradually contributed more and more to his own downfall.

The situation has so many parallels with Erik ten Hag last season. He had similar injury issues, but the problem was that it got no better when he had all his major players back. The team were still as bad. Something deeper was obviously wrong. He couldn't adapt.

This season may yet force Spurs into a similar decision that Manchester United faced with Ten Hag.

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Erik ten Hag surprisingly won the FA Cup to keep his Man Utd job, only to then lose it a few months later as other results continued to decline (Getty Images)

It isn’t impossible that Postecoglou ends the season with Spurs’ first trophy for 17 years. They are just four games from the Europa League final and there is much greater unpredictability in knock-out competitions. To get that far, though, Spurs are going to have to rally in some way. Does that look likely right now?

Postecoglou is going to have to restore some clarity to the team, but it’s hard not to think the uncertainty around his future has started to affect that; to cause a drift. And that’s a point worth making.

What we are seeing is a man under pressure. It is one of the brutal things about management, no matter how much coaches are paid. It doesn’t just lead to professional criticism but a feeling that an individual is having everything about them torn apart. That can be a lonely place and it's hard not to feel some sympathy.

Many other managers have lashed out in such situations. It must be so tempting. But the better recourse is always to take the high road. Instead, this is far from the first such interaction that Postecoglou has got involved in.

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Ange Postecoglou was frustrated on the sidelines at London Bridge (AP)

That’s only ever going to make things worse. It makes an erosion of supporter goodwill much more likely, especially when you are losing a greater proportion of league games than any Spurs manager ever has. Managerial authority starts to go.

After again insisting that he just wanted to hear the supporters cheer, Postecoglou was directly asked about the danger of alienating the fans through such gestures.

"You know what, I am at such a disconnect with the world these days, that who knows, maybe you're right. I don't know,” he shrugged. “But that's not what my intention was.”

He was clearly fed up with discussing it.

“What I focus on are the things I can control. I can control our football, the way we play and the way we conduct ourselves and that’s what I concentrate on.”

Many might say the last point has been the real problem.