Daniel Levy is seemingly very reluctant to do the very obviously necessary and put Ange Postecoglou out of his and our misery. Spurs are bad and getting worse and the only really compelling argument against not sacking him now is that it should have been done weeks and weeks ago.
But Spurs continue to wait. We think we can sort of understand why they’re doing that, but we are very sure they’re wrong. Here are five reasons we’ve heard for why Spurs shouldn’t sack Postecoglou now, and why we think they’re bunk.
‘You can’t keep sacking managers every 18 months’
Obviously correct. And we strongly suspect Levy hasn’t pulled the pin on Postecoglou precisely because he desperately doesn’t want to have yet another manager chewed up and spat out inside two seasons.
It is, undeniably, a theme of Levy’s Spurs chairmanship. Spurs have appointed 12 new permanent managers under Levy’s watch, and of those only Martin Jol, Harry Redknapp and Mauricio Pochettino have managed to survive for two full years.
Spurs have become locked in a cycle of 18 months under one manager, a sacking, a caretaker stint (or two if you’re really lucky) and then another new manager, and then rinse and indeed repeat.
It is very obviously a strategy that is not working. Spurs have been sinking, with the odd misleading bob back to the surface, since the final 18 months under Pochettino.
So, yes, we get why there is reluctance and resistance towards doing the same thing again and expecting different results.
But that this is a negative overall trend that Levy and Spurs should absolutely look to reverse in general doesn’t automatically make it the wrong move right here, right now, in the very specific instance of them being catastrophically worse and at more immediate risk of actual disaster than at any point since the 1990s.
Even if all of those other managerial departures were wrong, the point is that Spurs now are worse than they were at any time under any of those managers.
Yes, you might well have been wrong to bin off Andre Villas-Boas at the first sign of trouble. But we are so very far beyond the first sign of trouble here. About 15 months beyond it.
TL;DR: It being wrong to sack every manager after 18 months doesn’t mean it’s automatically wrong to sack this one.
READ: Who will be the next manager of Tottenham after Ange Postecoglou?
‘Are you not entertained?’
We get it. Postecoglou is a decent guy and quite entertaining himself. His post-match interviews are always good value after big win, occasional draw or yet another harrowing defeat.
People like him. Specifically, people in the media like him and enjoy the daft and entertaining football his team plays. But as we’ve noted before, the problem with his ‘entertaining’ football is that it is only really entertaining if you don’t actually support Spurs.
There is no great desire to drum Postecoglou out of Our League. He might be a foreigner, but he’s the right sort of foreigner, isn’t he? A straightforward, plain-speaking foreigner and most importantly not a bloody nerd, mate.
England’s sporting relationship with Australia is always an interesting one. The rivalry is obvious, but deep down it’s one built on a grudging respect that for all their ghastly uncouth faults, Australia are really bloody good at sport. And they play it properly, don’t they?
It is somehow different to other sporting rivalries in this country. We frequently find ourselves wondering just how different the media coverage of Postecoglou and Spurs might be were the exact same results coming from more dour football played under an irritatingly chippy American who uses slightly different terminology to the rest of us, or a bespectacled German nerd with a laptop.
And what we suspect is that he’d be long, long gone. One reason Levy has been able to avoid sacking Postecoglou is that there really hasn’t been a concerted media effort to nudge him towards doing so. The outside noise has never become deafening, because everyone (else) has always found it entertaining.
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‘Can’t judge him during an injury crisis’
Postecoglou is the injury crisis.
It is paradoxically the most frequent mitigation for Postecoglou’s terrible results while simultaneously being largely his fault.
Postecoglou defenders using this line very rarely pause to consider just why Spurs have been in the midst of a catastrophic injury crisis for all but the first three months of his reign.
Some injuries really are bad luck. Contact injuries in a contact sport will happen and you do just have to cope with those as and when they arise.
But that all too often leads to a situation where all injuries are dismissed as rotten bad luck with no further investigation. Spurs have had a couple of those unlucky injuries – most notably and damagingly to goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario.
But the overwhelming majority of the injuries are soft-tissue injuries. There can be bad luck here, but when you as a club find yourself having an unprecedented run of such ‘bad luck’ and it’s happening under a manager who prides himself on tactics that involve non-stop running and swapping of positions for 90 minutes twice a week and also replicating that workload in training, and also a lot of the injuries you have suffered have happened in training, then it does start to look like it might be worth at least considering that it might not just be bad luck after all.
But most importantly, when all that’s happening, the injury crisis becomes self-sustaining. The injuries mean you have to rely on a smaller pool of players at any given time, that pool of players is overworked and itself becomes more susceptible to injuries.
The specific names of unavailable players may change over time, but as some players return, all the evidence points to new ones getting injured in an endless doom-spiral of churn.
Postecoglou himself has taken to talking about ‘when we get the players back’ but this is a fantasy. Spurs will never have all their players back. They will never have a fully-fit squad. Angeball as a system breaks players.
Now you can decide for yourself how you want to divvy up the blame for Spurs’ injury crisis: Postecoglou himself for the brand of football, the medical staff for not coping better, and Levy for not realising that he was hiring a manager who would require a squad of at least 30 first-team-ready footballers which he was never, ever going to provide him.
But the options for Spurs are: sack Postecoglou and try something different, build an enormous squad capable of surviving the rigours of Angeball, or cope with a permanent state of injury crisis.
What they can’t do is keep pretending this state of affairs is unfortunate or mitigating.
MAILBOX: Ange Postecoglou should learn from Unai Emery on injury ‘moans’
‘He’s showing more willingness to adapt.’
He is, kind of. But it’s primitive. Even the new adaptable, versatile Spurs still only operate at one of two extremes. It’s double the number of plans they used to have, sure, but it’s still very basic
There’s the trusty old Plan A – the one where they all run around all the time in all directions and either win 4-0 or lose 4-3 – and the new Plan B – the Jose-lite low-block-and-counter where they sit six or seven men behind the ball and only the other three or four run about in all directions and they either win 2-0 or lose 4-0.
These are not the subtle tactical tweaks of an Andoni Iraola or situational adaptations of a Thomas Frank or Marco Silva. This is sledgehammer nut-cracking, an almost sarcastic response to criticism of witless all-out attacking by resorting instead to witless all-out defending.
‘He hasn’t been backed with the players he needs.’
This really has elements of all the previous three problems. He has been backed, and a lot more than some previous Spurs managers who were given less time and opportunity to make it work.
He hasn’t been given all the players he needs, but it’s become clear that this could never be. For reasons Spurs-specific and more general.
The Spurs-specific ones are that we know how Spurs operate. Now we have every sympathy with the Levy Out position but what we will keep saying is that the changes you want to see that might come about from Levy Out probably still won’t if it’s Ange In.
Spurs are never going to have a squad of 30 first-team-ready players to switch and rotate as the season unfolds. But do you know who does have that? Pretty much nobody. Chelsea at a push, and it does them at least as much harm as good because of the chaos and uncertainty it generates.
You know what you’ve got if you’ve got the dream squad of two equally good players ready to slot into every position? A bunch of unhappy underused players.
It really isn’t talked about enough just how demanding Angeball is on the players. They really do sprint harder and further than anyone else. And crucially they do this both in and out of possession; that’s what separates them from literally everybody else.
There are teams who play a high-intensity game in possession but low intensity when they don’t have the ball. Your Forests, your Fulhams.
There are teams who play a high-intensity game out of possession but low intensity when they have it. This is the classic Man City way, and the key change Arne Slot has made at Liverpool from the more hectic, Ange-adjacent (though never as extreme) stylings of Jurgen Klopp.
And then you have the middle ground where most teams live, for better (Arsenal) or worse (Southampton). And then right out on their own, you have Spurs.
This season Spurs players have spent more time sprinting when out of possession than anyone else in the league. But they are also third, behind only Newcastle and Fulham, for time spent sprinting when in possession.
Nobody else in the Premier League plays like this. It is fundamentally impossible to back that unsustainable system with the players it needs in a competitive league. There is a reason why it worked wonderfully well for 10 games and hasn’t worked since.