Ange’s rise from the failed dream of the NSL to European glory

Source : ABC NEWS

There can’t have been too many occasions in the history of European club football finals when former Australian prime minister Paul Keating is quoted by a victorious manager.

But this wasn’t any ordinary final.

And Ange Postecoglou is not an ordinary manager.

“After a particularly unlikely [election] victory, he [Keating] said, ‘this is one for the true believers’,” Postecoglou told reporters in Bilbao’s San Mamés stadium, moments after the Europa League final on Thursday.

While Postecoglou was, typically, talking about everyone side from himself when he referenced the believers.

But he may well have equally been talking about himself.

On Thursday, Postecoglou became the first Australian — indeed, the first man from an AFC confederation country — to win a major European club trophy when his Tottenham side beat Manchester United in Bilbao on Thursday.

For football fans in Australia, the sheer outlandishness of that statement is enough to restore confidence in a game forced onto the back foot from attacks by the major football codes while being simultaneously hell-bent on destroying itself through petty squabbles and grievances.

“I can’t put it into words,” former Socceroo John Aloisi told ABC News Breakfast after the match. 

“It’s just an amazing achievement, not only for Ange, but Australian football in general.

“We know how much he did for our game back here and now [he’s doing it] on the world stage.

“Ange has coached for 26 years. He’s got from the bottom to the very top and he deserves all the credit he gets.

“It’s an incredible achievement and fair play to Ange, he backs himself and he has won something major in Europe.”

Postecoglou sure has backed himself. To be honest, he’s had to.

From unemployable to Europa League glory

“Mate, I’m a winner,” Postecoglou said on Thursday, almost three decades later in his unique, deadpan way in that post-match press conference in the San Mamés stadium.

“I’ve been a serial winner my whole career.”

In recent years that statement is true, but early on in his managerial journey, Postecoglou felt his race may have already been run.

“Back in 2008 … I was sat on a commentary team with Ange Postecoglou at Fox Sports and he’d just been rejected by Melbourne Heart, who are now Melbourne City, to be the number two assistant,” former Socceroo goalkeeper Mark Bosnich told ABC News.

This was soon after Postecoglou had moved from South Melbourne into international management with the under age Socceroos squads.

Postecoglou was with the youth teams for seven years, winning several under age OFC tournaments at Under 17 and Under 20 level but, crucially, failed to qualify for the U20 World Cup in 2007.

That led to a furious exchange on SBS’s The World Game with Craig Foster and, subsequently, the loss of his job and an enormous hit to his confidence.

Postecoglou felt himself unemployable as a coach, dropping into lower league Greek and Victorian state football with Panachaiki and Whittlesea Zebras respectively, supplementing his income as a coach in local parks — a world away from the ticker tape and celebrations of San Mamés stadium some 19 years later.

“In terms of achievements for Australian managers, head coaches in football, it’s the greatest achievement,” Bosnich said.

“When you think about greatest achievements with Tony Popovic and Graham Arnold, the late Rale Rasic with a group of part-timers for the 1974 World Cup, but this eclipsed it all and quite easily.

“It is absolutely huge. It is career-defining, life-defining.

“To make that journey, to go all that way, is an absolutely fantastic achievement.”

From South Melbourne to the Maracanã

It’s quite hard to imagine a scene further removed from the heights of European football than the failed dream that was the old National Soccer League (NSL) of the late 1990s.

“Playing football in this country hasn’t really looked upon as mainstream,” Bosnich, who started his football journey at Sydney Croatia before moving to Aston Villa and Manchester United in the Premier League, said.

“It was a little bit looked down upon. So he’s had to put up with quite a lot.”

Small crowds in small stadiums and a distinctly semi-professional set up is what Postecoglou, who played his entire senior career with South Melbourne, was used to as a player.

An aggressive, attacking left back, Postecoglou won two NSL titles with Hellas but more importantly was given an unexpected bonus that would shape his philosophy for the rest of his career — the mind of Ferenc Puskás.

The Hungarian maestro — one of the greatest players in history — managed South Melbourne from 1989 to 1992 and, with Postecoglou as his captain, won the NSL, among other things, in 1991.

Postecoglou used to drive Puskás to and from training and, as an added bonus, got to pick the great three-time European Cup winner’s attack-minded brain.

With this attacking mindset firmly entrenched from his experiences under Puskás, Postecoglou took over at South Melbourne in 1996 after a knee injury prematurely ended his playing career aged 27.

Almost instantly he became that winner he speaks of now.

Postecoglou led Hellas to the NSL Premiership/Championship double in 1997/98, his second season in charge incidentally, and backed up to win the Championship again in 1998/99.

He then went on to win the 1999 Oceania Club Championship too, his first continental title as a manager.

Those victories led Postecoglou into his first tactical battles with some of the giants of the game, including Sir Alex Ferguson’s treble-winning Manchester United team at the 2000 FIFA Club World Championship in Brazil.

“We were a semi-pro team, playing against the great Manchester United, who’d won the treble, at the Maracanã,” Postecoglou recalled earlier this year on British TV.

“We ended up losing 2-0 on the day but we gave a decent account of ourselves considering the difference.

“Some of my players, who were semi-pro but good footballers, probably played the games of their lives that day.” 

South Melbourne lost to Brazil’s defending Copa Libertadores winners Vasco de Gama and Mexico’s CONCACAF Champions Cup winners Club Necaxa 2-0 in Brazil.

Roarcelona, Socceroos success and Russian ruin

With Postecoglou scrabbling about in local parks and moonlighting as a pundit on Fox Sports, a chance opened up in the A-League after Frank Farina had his Brisbane Roar contract terminated following a drink-driving offence.

Brisbane Roar were in desperate straits off the field and required a complete rebuild on it but Postecoglou was eager to show what he could do, although even then he was looking and thinking bigger.

“I really want to build a football club, I want to build something like they have overseas. That was part of my discussions with the board,” Postecoglou said upon his appointment.

“When I picture myself coaching this football club I really want it to stand for something.”

Postecoglou took the reins in 2009. 

By 2010/11, his second season in Brisbane, the Roar won the Premiership/Championship double.

Not only that, but the Roar grew into arguably the best Australian club side in history as Postecoglou masterminded an Australian record 36-game unbeaten run and then a second Championship win in 2011/12.

A short stint with Melbourne Victory followed, but soon Australia’s top job came calling, the Socceroos.

There, Postecoglou had to battle enemies and critics within and without, the self-sabotaging monster that is Australian football rearing its many heads and striking out with impunity as Postecoglou’s attacking and ambitious style was alternately praise and lambasted in equal measure.

A home tournament success in the AFC Asian Cup in 2015 felt like the pinnacle of a well-made plan coming together and the development of a squad that could challenge at the latter stages of the World Cup in Russia.

But the frailties, which will be familiar to Spurs fans, were all to evident during the marathon AFC qualification phase.

Playing a possession-based attacking style that, at its best, was a joy to behold, yet also left his teams open to counter attacks and vulnerable to individual errors, leaving a highly-fancied side limping towards qualification for the World Cup in 2018.

Postecoglou maintained he was looking at the bigger picture, wanting not only to qualify but, when the Socceroos reached the World Cup, for them to challenge the best teams in the world.

The Socceroos eventually got to Russia.

Ange did not, emotionally resigning after achieving qualifying.

Japan, Scotland and more titles

Postecoglou craved a return back to club management: “I want to coach abroad. Part of me, you know, is pretty keen to get stuck back into club football, working day-to-day,” he said after resigning from the Socceroos.

It wasn’t long before he was back in club management, with Yokohama F. Marinos in Japan’s unforgiving J-League.

Marinos, a giant of Japanese domestic football, had not won the league since 2004 when Postecoglou was appointed.

A tough first season saw him finish 12th although he also guided the club to the final of the J-League Cup.

But as we all know, Postecoglou always wins in his second season, so in 2019 he lifted the trophy to end that drought.

It was his ninth trophy in senior football as a manager and yet, the Eurocentric football world was all too eager to overlook him.

“I know people dismiss my achievements because they didn’t happen on this side of the world,” Postecoglou said in his post-Europa League press conference.

“But for me they were all hard earned.”

That dismissive attitude towards Postecoglou was most clear when he was appointed as Celtic coach in 2021.

Postecoglou’s appointment was greeted with a staggering level of disrespect from British press, most notably former Scotland striker turned shock-jock Alan Brazil, whose embarrassing response to Postecoglou’s signing on TalkSport displayed an ignorance that did him little credit.

It is the same response that Postecoglou has faced almost everywhere he’s gone.

After failing to qualify for the group stage of the Champions League and then suffering three losses in their first six Premiership games, Celtic’s worst league start in 23 years, the knives were out and the naysayers were gathering their social media receipts.

But, as Postecoglou had done at every club he’s been to, he silenced those who would doubt him by winning.

Two titles in two seasons, plus two Scottish League Cups and a Scottish Cup, five trophies in two years bringing Postecoglou’s senior coaching medal haul up to 14. 

Postecoglou earns his Spurs, now what?

So on to the English Premier League, rightly or wrongly considered the pinnacle of the club game and Spurs, the wannabe big club whose lofty ambitions were unmatched by their barren trophy cabinet.

Unlike at many of his club stints, his time at Spurs started brilliantly, unbeaten in their first 10 league games and five points clear at the top of the Premier League table, the best start to a Premier League season by any new manager in the league’s history (since 1992) and Tottenham’s best start in the top flight since 1960-61.

The record since then has faltered.

The league form that sees Spurs sit 17th is, as Postecoglou says himself, not good enough.

And yet, in winning the Europa League title he has given Spurs fans a taste of glory they’ve not known in 17 years.

“I know our league form has been unacceptable, but coming third was not going to change this football club,”  Postecoglou told TNT Sport.

“Winning a trophy would, that was my ambition and I was prepared to wear it if it did not happen.”

Spurs could still part ways with Postecoglou, despite the trophy success.

Perhaps Postecoglou could commit the ultimate mic drop and walk away, although that would be unlikely given what awaits Tottenham next season.

Next year Spurs will be in the Champions League, with the big boys.

Postecolgou has unfinished business in that competition after two unsuccessful seasons at the top table with Celtic, where he went winless through eight games across two seasons.

Regardless of what happens next and where Postecoglou ends up, it will still be a hell of a long way from the old NSL.