‘Look at the footballers this club has’ – Ange rubbishes claim that Spurs job is ‘impossible’

Ange Postecoglou has dismissed suggestions that the Tottenham Hotspur job was an impossible one, remarking that the club has everything in place to be successful. Tottenham have undoubtedly been the biggest underachievers in European football over the last two decades, having won only one League Cup since the turn of the millennium, which is a […]

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Ange Postecoglou has dismissed suggestions that the Tottenham Hotspur job was an impossible one, remarking that the club has everything in place to be successful.

Tottenham have undoubtedly been the biggest underachievers in European football over the last two decades, having won only one League Cup since the turn of the millennium, which is a shocking record for a club of that size.

While the Lilywhites have undoubtedly improved during that time, as evidenced by their league positions over the last decade and a half, they have failed time and again at the final hurdle in their pursuit of silverware.

Daniel Levy has tried to change that by appointing the likes of Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, who arrived at the club with glittering CVs, but neither were able to guide Spurs to trophies.

That has led to suggestions that the Tottenham job is a poisoned chalice but Postecoglou has dismissed those claims, insisting that the club have the infrastructure, resources and players to be successful.

(Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

Ange Postecoglou is ready for Spurs challenge

When asked if the Spurs job is an impossible one, he told Football.London: “The biggest enticement for me to come here was the fact that it seems like a real difficult challenge. I wouldn’t say impossible because it can’t be impossible – when you look at the facilities, you look at the resources this club has, you look at the footballers this club has, it can’t be impossible.

“Is it difficult? Yes. You can’t just then roll up and not change things and not be different and expect different outcomes. So my role within that is to say: ‘Okay, well, I’ve taken on this challenge. So I’m going to do it in a way that hasn’t been done before and take it down a different road now’.

“That may end up on the road again where we don’t get anywhere, and that’s on me, but I really don’t think it’s impossible. There’d be managers out there with clubs who have got a hell of a lot more challenges than this football club has. They’d be looking at me saying ‘I wish I had his job with the facilities we have, the football we have and the resources I have’.

“So it’s all a matter of perspective. Do I believe it’s a difficult challenge? Yeah, because when a big football club doesn’t win something for a long period of time, there’s obviously things that need to be done differently, but I think it’s far from impossible and I enjoy the fact that the harder it is, I love being in that space.”

Postecoglou explained that he has had some really tough challenges over the course of his unique coaching career, which helps him retain perspective about the challenges that he faces at Spurs.

He continued: “In my first job 1997, I took over South Melbourne, the first club I played for. I was 30 years old, I quit my job at the bank. I was a bank teller. What a bad job. If you ever want perspective, like, that’s the only thing that’s driven in my whole career, something I never wanted to go back to.

“It was our fifth game and I remember waking up that morning knowing if we’d lost that game we would have been last on the ladder. The club I took over was the biggest club at the time. We won that game, a scrappy game, 1-0.

“Somebody tells a story that there was supposed to be a board meeting that night, but our president who’s a pretty smart cookie said he was sick and there was going to be a vote of confidence in me apparently, and they didn’t have it. We went on the rest of the year and we finished well.

“At Brisbane in my first year, same thing. Yokohama, we just avoided relegation in my first year there. Now all these things you can look at and say ‘geez, you’re a lucky bugger because people stuck by you’, but I’d like to think that people didn’t stick by me because I was lucky.

“They stuck by me because they saw something there that they didn’t want to miss out on, and every one of those clubs – Celtic the same – they’ll get rewarded for that show of faith. So all the beginnings have been difficult. I haven’t had one that’s been smooth, but when I reflect on it, they’re the stories I tell.”

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The one thing both Conte and Mourinho had in common is that they enjoyed quite a bit of success early in their coaching careers, which meant that they struggled to cope with any disappointment.

In contrast, Postecoglou (like Mauricio Pochettino when he took the Spurs job), has had to work his way up to the top, having had ups and downs in his career, and is thus in a better position to deal with adversity.

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