The English football rumour mill grinds fast and grinds fine. This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has spent any time around this blog or reading the copious amount of transfer rumor mill articles that pop up like mushrooms from now until the end of summer, or whenever a particular head coach is on the hot seat.
And yes, you know where I’m going with this. Our new best friend in the media, Matt Law, writes with John Percy about the rumors swirling around Ange Postecoglou’s future, and suggests that both Bournemouth manager Adoni Iraola and Fulham’s Marco Silva are “leading candidates” to succeed Ange Postecoglou if he is let go.
And that’s the first thing I want to identify here — the “if he is let go” is doing an awful amount of work in this article, because everything coming out of Tottenham Hotspur publicly and through briefing suggests that the club are still backing Ange Postecoglou considering the context of the massive injury crisis and poor luck this season.
Now, you can interpret this in two ways — first, that this is the media spinning news stories out of speculation for the sake of discussion, and that imagining Ange gone has a lot more to do with projection (and maybe wishes) than anything grounded in reality. In fact, the Telegraph even kind of admits that, stating:
“There has been no suggestion from Tottenham that Postecoglou would be sacked if Spurs were to fail to win the Europa League or were knocked out in the quarter-finals by Eintracht Frankfurt.”
— Telegraph
LOL. Right then. That’s sorted, I guess.
But on the other hand, you can also make the argument, also without much evidence, that this is the club working through third parties about the possibility that Postecoglou could either be let go or decide to walk at some point if Spurs don’t win the Europa League.
The question of whether Ange is or is not actually on the hot seat is, at this point, a rather boring one. The real interest here are the tidbits that Iraola and Silva are potentially of interest to Spurs. Iraola in particular, as Percy and Law write that sources close to the Bournemouth manager say he’d be interested in taking over the Tottenham project should a change be made. That’s interesting, and it’s the first time we’ve gotten any kind of background info that a coach actually wants the job (something that was in dispute during Spurs’ last two coaching changes).
The Silva rumors, by contrast, seem to be based more on the suggestion that he and Fulham are set to part ways due to various reasons, and not any direct contact or suggestions of interest in taking the Spurs job. That one’s a bit more nebulous.
Now, say what you want about Iraola and Silva. Both have been mooted by pundits and supporters as possibilities should Ange be let go. Iraola in particular has been a popular choice since he has done very good things with the Cherries and plays an offensive style not that dissimilar to Ange-ball. But there are also whispered questions as to whether his high pressure style could scale from a club like Bournemouth to a club that wants to eventually challenge for titles. Maybe it would, maybe it would not. But he’d be an interesting hire.
Fans who only read headlines will, of course, overreact to both the spurious and interesting parts of this article. I’m still not convinced that Postecoglou won’t survive this season even if Spurs crash out of the Europa League in the coming weeks. But at bare minimum it does at least appear that the club is keeping their options open, even if the cards remain close to the club’s vest.