Tommy Martin: If it's not about winning, what's Big Ange all about?
LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU: Tottenham Hotspur manager Ange Postecoglou, with a Tottenham Hotspur fan banner saying 'We're loving Big Ange instead' in the background. Picture: John Walton/PA Wire.
As the great philosopher Jonathan Sexton once said, “We lost, but we won.” The Sextonian Paradox was all over Monday night’s madcap fare at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, where the home team went down 4-1 to bitter rivals Chelsea but were applauded off the field by their defiant supporters.
The Spurs fans had taken solace from the approach adopted by their team in response to having two players sent off. Rather than cowering in the traditional hedgehog formation, Ange Postecoglou had his team defend on the halfway line, giving them the precarious look of those 1930s New York construction workers eating their lunch on a steel beam atop a skyscraper.
It looked like Postecoglou, having worked in Japan, had been influenced by that country’s notorious gameshows, particularly the one where contestants test their fortitude by repeatedly getting kicked in the testicles. Chelsea kept swinging their boot at the Tottenham defensive line, but Big Ange’s boys just grimaced and shouted “Again! Again!”.
When his team eventually succumbed to the Nicholas Jackson goal that made it 2-1 – funnily enough, from a move in which Chelsea sprung the Tottenham high line – the initial roar from the away support was followed by the extraordinary sight of the Spurs faithful rising to their feet to clap the team who had just conceded the game’s crucial goal. It was as if Big Ange was Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society and the loyal Spurs fans were the spotty faced youths clambering onto their desks, blubbering “O Captain, My Captain!” “It was unbelievable, honestly,” Tottenham’s Dejan Kulusevski said of that moment later. “Some things are bigger than life, bigger than football, bigger than the wins. Honestly, I was really proud of that moment and the fans. I was grateful and it makes me want to give more back.” Bigger than football, bigger than life. We lost, but we won.
Of course, such lofty rhetoric is as much to do with the peculiar neuroses of Tottenham fans as any sense that Postecoglou is prompting a Corinthian reboot of the Premier League. Having disavowed the club’s traditional ethos in a forlorn trophy pursuit guided by two dark lords of sulphurous pragmatism, Spurs are now mainlining the glory game juice. In the giddy aftermath of the Jose and Conte eras, everything is awesome.
More sober analysts of Monday’s game, which Gary Neville described as “sheer madness…a game that you do not see once in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years” have seen the shortcomings of Angeball exposed and chickens coming home to roost for the freewheeling, erstwhile Premier League leaders. His tactics on Monday night were brave and laudable, yes, but they were also pretty stupid.
And they are right, in the sense that Tottenham will not win the league and the grinding wheel of injuries and suspensions and ruthless opponents will probably flatten them into the ground before the winter is out.
But does any of that matter? In a time when few people expect anyone other than Manchester City to actually win the league, isn’t it only natural that people might look for meaning elsewhere? City, having yawned and stretched and just about roused themselves through the opening months of the season, are once again on top of the table. Experience tells us they don’t tend to cock it up from here.
So, if it’s not about winning, what is the meaning of Big Ange? Who the hell is this guy?
Landed in the Premier League’s Sodom and Gomorrah to preach home truths, is he Jesus or Crocodile Dundee? Or a cross between the two? With his talk about the purity of the game, his commitment to all-out-attack and his disavowal of VAR, has he been sent by some angry deity to rage against the corruption of football’s soul?
56-years-old when he pitched up at Celtic, it seemed odd that a man of such capabilities had operated far from the game’s traditional epicentre for so long. But perhaps he had to wait until the time was right to make his entrance, like Obi Wan Kenobi mouldering in the desert, until the moment when football seemed utterly lost. In he ambled, hands in pockets, calling everyone mate, no coaching staff with him, just three chords and the truth.
He could be a shyster, of course, spotting an opportunity in the spiritually bereft Premier League to pose as a plain-speaking guru, a sort of twinkly Maharishi to the game’s forlorn Beatles. Celtic fans will remember his ability to slip into the messianic robes they like their manager to wear, before ditching them in a bin when Spurs came calling.
But it is what is, mate. Whether by happenstance or design, the Premier League has a man in its midst who seems to be there to point at all its flaws and foibles. You might think positioning Ange as some sort of moral conscience for the Prem is a bit much, but this is a league with a leading club whose owners chop people’s heads off on a regular basis. Honestly, you dance with the one who brought you.
And if you think the Tottenham manager’s homespun musings are a bit tiresome, especially when it comes to his luddite distaste for VAR in all its works and pomps, compare and contrast with the batshit lunacy of his North London rival last Saturday night. The notable thing about Mikel Arteta’s ludicrous rant about Premier League officialdom after Arsenal’s defeat at Newcastle was how in keeping it was with the partisan, outraged tone of football discourse in general.
Arteta’s carry-on dominated the headlines for a few days but was hardly out of keeping with the sort of rhetoric that led us down the current path marked by endless VAR nonsense and a gibbering cohort of utterly bewildered officials.
In that context, even if you find him the least convincing Aussie act since Barry Humphries in a ballgown, a bit more of ‘we lost but we won’ in the world is no harm at all, mate.
