Ange Postecoglou's rigid thinking as Tottenham boss beginning to be exposed

By Alex Keble

08:10 · TUE September 17, 2024

Nobody has done more to define modern football than Pep Guardiola but there are a couple of popular myths about his influence that need debunking.

Guardiola is not an idealist, nor has he brought to English football a dogmatic possession game and its subsequent variations.

The two points are interwoven. People still talk about Guardiola as if his first Barcelona team is a template he has followed everywhere else and as if he is to blame for those managers who seek to play the ‘right’ way.

Neither is true. Try to picture a typical Man City move or a hallmark goal and you’ll realise they don’t have one, because despite a total absence of mainstream analysis about it Guardiola’s Man City change all the time, from season to season and from game to game.

Indeed it is this very unpredictability that has denied it attention; there aren’t enough obvious patterns to form a strong narrative arc and so the numerous tweaks and evolutions slip through our fingers.

Manchester City with the Premier League trophy

Yet it is the bedrock of his success at Man City, without a doubt the reason why they keep winning title after title. Nobody can work them out. Nobody can find a solution to the system because there isn’t a consistent one to prep for. Even the broad principles aren’t really in place anymore. Man City don’t really press, for example, which makes them a very weird outlier among elite clubs.

They don’t even move the ball in predictable ways, but again, we don’t notice. Certainly nobody seemed to find it strange, or noteworthy, that City’s winning goal against Brentford on Saturday was a long punt from Ederson up to Erling Haaland: a unique plan, but - being a one-off – a plan too odd and unexpected to pass comment on. Guardiola’s City can’t be put in a simple tactical box, so most choose to ignore them altogether.

All of which is a longwinded way of saying Guardiola is not to blame for Ange Postecoglou, and that Postecoglou’s incessant Plan-A-ing has no precedent for success in England. It’s something Guardiola's disciple Mikel Arteta knows all too well, as he proved to an almost sarcastic degree in Sunday’s 1-0 victory over Tottenham Hotspur.

Next Premier League Manager to Leave (odds via Sky Bet)

Sean Dyche - 2/1
Erik ten Hag - 5/1
Russell Martin, Steve Cooper - 7/1
Enzo Maresca - 8/1
Gary O'Neil - 12/1
Oliver Glasner - 14/1
Eddie Howe, Ange Postecoglou, Julen Lopetegui - 18/1
Marco Silva, Nuno Espirito Santo - 20/1
25/1 - bar

Odds correct at 1600 BST (16/09/24)

Arteta went full Jose Mourinho. It was snarling, ugly stuff, replete with endless time-wasting, frustrating fouls, and a deep defensive blockade that refused to yield.

In that sense it could not have been further away from the supposed Guardiola vision, and yet as a showcase of flexibility and diligent tactical preparation it was very much inspired by the Man City manager.

And it felt like a pointed comment on Postecoglou’s rigid thinking. If you want to beat Tottenham, just look back at what worked last time and do it again.

Another set-piece goal (there were two in the 3-2 win in April) and the same low block inevitably stunted Spurs because Spurs truly only have one way of playing.

Unlike Man City you can easily picture one of Tottenham’s moves because they all look so alike: the full-backs marauding into the middle; James Maddison looking for the threaded pass into them; the ball shunted out to a winger to run at the full-back; the cut back into the box. Repeat ad nauseam.

Arsenal won’t be the last team to shut them down. They certainly weren’t the first. We saw Newcastle United counter-attack against the Spurs high line in the same fashion and we will no doubt see Brentford pull off a similar trick next weekend.

They’ll of course focus on set-pieces, too, because we know Postecoglou looks down on them as inelegant, impure: “eventually I will create a team that has success and it won't be because of working on set-pieces.”

Arteta would never dream of saying that. Arsenal are the best set-piece scorers in the Premier League because the manager does not cling to a lofty ideal of how the sport should be played.

Why Postecoglou does is hard to answer, but the most likely reason is that his career has never been at anything like an elite level. The relative financial poverty of football in Australia, Japan, and Scotland means there isn’t the same scrutiny from opposition scouts, video analysts and number crunches.

The quality and resources just aren’t there, and so one very good idea – a Plan A perfected by thousands of hours of work on that, and only that – can take you a long way, whereas in the Premier League, as Arteta and Guardiola know, there is too much scrutiny to succeed without endless invention.

We already have the data to pinpoint exactly how long your first idea lasts. Spurs won eight and drew two of their first ten games under Postecoglou. Then the Premier League caught up. Tottenham have won 44 points from the 32 games since, a record that when extended over a 38-game season would have got you ninth last year, level with West Ham.

Spurs are in the bottom half with four points from four games, a sign that Postecoglou needs to learn from Arteta; that he needs to look at Arsenal’s flexibility and see a strength, not a weakness.

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