‘They are all united’ – Journalist explains how mood at Spurs has changed behind the scenes

Writing in The Athletic, Jack Pitt-Brooke has reminded Spurs fans of the the complete disillusionment around the club just a matter of months ago, in order to press home the point about Ange Postecoglou’s impact. Last season, Spurs had slumped to their lowest Premier League finish since 2008, with the Antonio Conte experiment backfiring quite spectacularly. […]

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Writing in The Athletic, Jack Pitt-Brooke has reminded Spurs fans of the the complete disillusionment around the club just a matter of months ago, in order to press home the point about Ange Postecoglou’s impact.

Last season, Spurs had slumped to their lowest Premier League finish since 2008, with the Antonio Conte experiment backfiring quite spectacularly.

The disconnect between the club’s owners and the fan base was greater than it had ever been and it was difficult to see how the club were going to win the supporters over this time round.

How has Postecoglou changed things at Tottenham?

Pitt-Brooke has now painted a picture of the mood around the club during the last Spurs game that he covered back in May.

The journalist wrote: “My last Tottenham game was the defeat to Brentford on May 20th. The mood was toxic and bleak.

“A chastened Daniel Levy admitted in his ‘Chairman’s Message’ in the matchday programme that it had been an ‘immensely difficult season’ and that some recent football decisions had ‘not delivered what we hoped’.

“Before the game, a video was played on the big screen showing some of Spurs’ moments from the year. Some fans decided to boo all the way through it. Spurs went 1-0 up early on — Harry Kane’s last goal at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium — before inevitably collapsing in the second half and losing 3-1.

“It was another miserable day in another miserable season. And entirely in keeping with the trend of the last few years, the team circling the drain, the players having largely given up, and the fans having understandably given up on them too.

“The whole club had been drained of energy and goodwill by the failed Antonio Conte experiment. (This, quite remarkably, had turned out to be even more misguided, dispiriting and expensive than the failed Jose Mourinho experiment two years before.)

“Happier days felt very far away, a distant dream for a club that had lost its way. This was still during Tottenham’s long pursuit of their next head coach.”

Pitt-Brooke opined that Postecoglou’s biggest achievement at Tottenham has not been the turnaround in the team’s results but rather the fact that he has been able to instil his ideas so quickly and get buy-in from everyone at the club.

He added: “Everything that has happened at Tottenham since the summer has vindicated the logic of the Postecoglou appointment. Not just the results, although they have been good, but the transformation in mood. 

“Everyone — players, staff and fans — has bought into the Postecoglou approach. They are all united behind him and his ideas. (This is why the plan with nine men against Chelsea was right, because the key strategic goal of this season is not to squeeze out every potential point in the Premier League but to establish an ethos. Which is the underpinning of every successful managerial tenure.)

“Before I went away, I wrote that the mood for the Ange era was “patient optimism” and that all people wanted to see was “a sense that the team is steadily heading in the right direction, that they know what the manager wants them to do, and that they are happy and motivated to make his ideas real on the pitch.

“Nobody could dispute that Spurs have shown precisely these qualities in the first half of this season. And, in fact, they showed them faster than many would have expected. Which is what makes the second half of the season such an exciting prospect. Time to get up to speed.”

Spurs Web Opinion

Some Spurs fans are starting to take the football that the team is now producing for granted and this piece from Pitt-Brooke is a timely reminder of just how dark the times were a few months ago, and the transformative effect that Postescoglou has had despite losing Tottenham’s best player in Harry Kane.

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