It’s never a great sign when a manager starts publicly calling out players for underperforming, but it’s a particularly galling thing to hear from a Premier League head coach so regularly frustrated by journalists criticising his players.
“People can judge me. They can say I've done a bad job, I'm not up to it or whatever. That's fine,” Ange Postecoglou said last month. “What I'm saying is you can't be critical of our players' performances at this time.”
The sheer scale of Tottenham's injury crisis and the resulting fatigue meant criticism of the players was off limits. Until now.
“I just feel Biss can sometimes let the game drift by him,” Postecoglou said after the 2-0 defeat at Fulham on Sunday. “It's fair to say, Biss and a few others are probably lacking a bit of confidence.
“That's affecting him, but we're at the point of the season now where we need guys to get out there and put those things to one side and perform.”
Next Premier League manager to leave odds (via Sky Bet)
- Ruud van Nistelrooy - 4/6
- Ange Postecoglou - 3/1
- No Manager to Leave - 4/1
- Ivan Juric - 6/1
- Ruben Amorim - 18/1
- Enzo Maresca, Vitor Pereira - 25/1
- Pep Guardiola - 331/
- 25/1 - Bar
Odds correct at 0900 GMT (18/3/25)
One minute the players are understandably tired, drained by a season under the cosh. The next, they are fair game to be called out publicly. It isn’t a good look, and it’s one of the reasons why there’s been renewed talk this week about Postecoglou’s long-term viability at Spurs.
Then again Postecoglou’s Yves Bissouma comments aren’t necessarily hypocritical. In fact, they might even serve as evidence that now is the right time to be questioning the manager’s future.
Injuries have cleared up. That means criticism – of the players, and of the head coach – is no longer off limits.
If that’s the case, well, the worrying thing for Postecoglou is that his detractors throughout the injury crisis have been proved right.
Tottenham are playing in exactly the same way as they did when the treatment table was piled with bodies. They look passive and confused, as if the manager’s gung-ho instructions have lost all meaning as a disappointing campaign peters out.
But that is not a good enough reason to sack him now.
Tottenham’s season rests entirely on their Europa League campaign, and the theory goes that if Daniel Levy was to bring in a caretaker during the international break then Spurs could get the new-manager boost they need to win that tournament and qualify for the Champions League.
What that analysis misses is that Postecoglou deserves the chance to see through his cup competitions, not out of goodwill or sporting kindness, but because European competition should be viewed as intertwined with the Premier League season rather than running adjacent to it.
Premier League performances have been worse because Europa League performances have been better. The two affect and infect each other, so to blame the manager for one part while overlooking success in the other part frankly makes no sense.
They must be viewed as a whole - which means Postecoglou must be given the chance to go all the way.
Should Spurs win the Europa League then all will be forgiven and the Premier League campaign would be rightly deemed irrelevant. It goes without saying, to win their first trophy since 2008 while qualifying for the Champions League would be Spurs’ best season this century.
Denying Postecoglou the opportunity to finish what he started wouldn’t just be cruel, it would be rejecting the very process that got them to this point, however wonky or unconventional it might have been.
Levy did something similar to Jose Mourinho, sacked in April 2021 just days before an EFL Cup final against Manchester City. The theory was that a less toxic caretaker would have a better chance of winning that final, but Levy’s calculation overlooked Mourinho’s Machiavellian nature.
The ends always justify the means, and the end was right there, just hours away.
Had Mourinho won that final he would have completed his mission, plain and simple.
That he didn’t even get the chance to lose it shows Levy misunderstood the interconnectedness of a team’s various competitions; bad results in Premier League games aren’t automatically justified by League Cup wins littered around them, but if you go on to win the latter competition, then they absolutely are.
Sacking Mourinho before the ending nullified everything that came before; meant declaring defeat before the results were counted; meant failure that no longer belonged to Mourinho but to Levy.
It would be the same story repeated should Postecoglou go before his Europa League campaign reaches a conclusion one way or the other.
Ange was hired to bring back fun, to entertain, and to make memories, and although things have turned sour over the last seven months lifting the Europa League in May would erase all of the bad stuff.
It would make his tenure an unqualified success: victory on his own terms and on the terms laid out when the job was first offered.
The most likely outcome is Spurs knocked out of Europe, in this round or the next.
But that really isn’t the point. Until it happens, until the future unfolds, judging Postecoglou in March is like judging Spurs during an injury crisis: an incomplete picture, a story half told.
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