Inside the mind of Ange Postecoglou - Flat tyres with Ferenc Puskas, rejection and making a mark

football.london sat with others for a long chat with the new Tottenham boss about the club, his career and his life as well as a certain Hungarian football legend

When Ange Postecoglou speaks you listen, yet it is the Australian who has entered the world of Tottenham Hotspur with his ears primed to take it all in.

Spurs wanted to change the entire ethos within the club after the recent years of disconnect with the fans. They were lacking in direction with so many managers in a short space of time who arrived with very different ideologies to each other and ways of playing.

Postecoglou was brought in from Celtic because of his ability to transform and rebuild clubs from within, something he has done on continents across the world at teams beset by a range of different issues, circumstances and problems.

Tottenham could be his biggest challenge yet, taking on a group of players left dizzy by the demands of four different head coaches in as many months and becoming the public face of a club that had frittered away a lot of the good will from the fanbase.

So did Postecoglou arrive and deliver grand positive speeches to anyone who would listen about the new Spurs he was going to create? Certainly not at first because it was more important for him to do the opposite.

"You listen a lot, don't do a lot of talking. That’s important. I don’t go around with allies because that’s not always healthy. That can just disguise a lot of things. If I’ve got a group who come with me, three assistant coaches, a conditioning coach and a goalkeeping coach maybe I’m sitting here thinking we’re having a good time because there’s all these allies but the problems are still there," he said.

"Whatever you walk into, the problems are there. The reason I’ve gone by myself is that I enjoy the early stage, understanding what are the issues. There’s plenty of opinions about it. I’ve had plenty of people tell me what I need to do and what’s wrong with the club but there’s no better assessor of that than me. I’m the one who will have to make decisions about what we’re going to change.

"It’s just a matter of being really alert, having eyes and ears open to get a real picture and as quickly as possible fill the gaps and rectify things that need rectifying in my eyes, because it will be different from the previous managers, because we all work differently and that’s the most important thing.

"I’m still in that stage. I haven’t got a full picture of everything I need to have real clarity about what we need to do, but in the 12/13 days I’ve been at the club, the fog is lifting. I can see more of what needs to be done. The West Ham game revealed some things that you can't see unless you play that first game. That’s the main thing for me. I’m really alert at the moment about everything."

So what were the problems the 57-year-old first noticed when he stepped into his new job in north London?

"Not so much problems. I don’t see them as problems but people have different ways of working," he explained. "For me, when I came in, I have a certain way and if something doesn’t look familiar to me then I’ll question why.

"That might be something that’s working quite well so fair enough why should I change it, or they might say it works well but it doesn’t really fit my way of working and what I’m trying to do. When you’re dealing with people and the change the club's had in the last five years with different managers. Even longer, when Mauricio [Pochettino] was here. I guess that creates instability in people.

"That’s the bit you try to clamp down early on and say ‘listen, I’ll give you some security here about what we’re going to do, how we’re going to behave, how we’re going to work’. There’s no guarantee I'll be here but that’s my presumption and that’s the feeling I try to get across because then people relax and you see them as their true selves.

"Invariably at the start, they’re trying to impress but doing it with the anxiety of the past, so many changes and different ways of doing things. There are certain things you try to implement straight away and say ‘what we’re doing here will be here for as long as I'm here, that won’t change'. It’s fair to say there were a lot of people just seeking clarity which wasn't really a surprise to me or anyone, but it was one of the first things I thought I feel I need to provide."

That lack of talking and a preference to listen also extends to his players. Postecoglou has claimed before that the majority of his former players would say that they never had a conversation with him that lasted more than a minute.

The Australian has previously explained that it was borne from stepping up from player to manager during his South Melbourne Hellas days when he had to manage many of his friends and former team-mates. He soon realised he had to take the emotion out of his decisions if he was to make the best ones for the team.

Postecoglou explained to football.london that it's more than that though - or perhaps even simpler - he's just a man who doesn't enjoy small talk.

"[The one minute thing] is exaggerated a little bit. I still interact with people, I think it’s important. It’s not just about taking out the emotion… it’s just me," he said. "I sat up there this morning [in a Q&A in front of 500 people] and spoke for three quarters of an hour and I’d like to think I was fairly eloquent and talked pretty comfortably.

"But the 20 minutes beforehand when I had to sit at a table next to somebody and do small talk, I was terrible! I couldn’t wait to leave. It’s just not me as a person. I'm not someone who is going to sit down with you and have a chat about things. It's not who I am. Even with my friends, they know me, I'm like that.

"I think the way you connect with people is if people know you and understand you and that’s you as a person, they’ll accept that."

He added: "Other managers are really engaging with players, I get that. If you look at it, that’s probably their personality. They walk into a room and everyone gravitates towards them. That’s not me.

"I just try to be me, but within that context, it doesn't mean I don’t talk to players. If a player has got an issue, I'll sit down and engage. It's really important for the players that they know that I have their back, that I care for them.

"But that doesn't always have to come by me sitting down with them at lunch and talking with them about how their day was. It's just not who I am."

If you want to get a sense of how Postecoglou became the manager and person he is, you need only look at two major influences in his life. One is his father Jim and the other is the legendary footballer Ferenc Puskas.

While that might strike most as an odd couple, few would have expected a Hungarian football icon to rock up in Australia and become the manager of South Melbourne Hellas, where a certain 24-year-old Ange Postecoglou was the club captain.

It was to be the start of a warm relationship that would have far reaching implications for the young Greek-born Australian's career for decades to come.

"It’s one of those bizarre things in life that one of the greatest footballers to ever grace the game is literally on your doorstep," remembered Postecoglou. "At the time you couldn’t rationalise it and even today I can’t. It's like you’re out in this country where they don’t play football and Diego Maradona ends up being your coach. How has this happened?

"It ended up being a real pivotal moment for me because he didn’t speak English. He had managed in Greece so his Greek was OK. How is he going to get his message across? He didn’t really have an interpreter at the time. I was the captain of the club. He would do his team talk and I would interpret for him.

"Not only was I playing, but I was actually half-coaching. I used to pick him up from his house, drive him to training, drive him to the games. For those three years, I was just blessed to be in his company.

"I just loved the way he thought about life. He was the most humble of people, which resonated with me. Just because you’ve achieved, if you can be kind to people, the effect it has can be unbelievable. The effect he had on me and the players at the time was incredible just because he was so humble.

"We really bonded with him strongly so I thought, well, that’s kind of important if you want people to do things for you. If they care about you or don’t want to let you down, that’s pretty important, and just his outlook on football.

"Anyone would say his teams just wanted to outscore the opposition, that’s all he wanted to do. He goes, ‘we will win 5-4 every week and I’ll enjoy it’.

"I was a defender, so we copped four goals and I was like ‘(insert swear word)’, but he was buzzing because 'what a game'. They scored great goals, we scored great goals. You know, that’s just not right! But it was right because what it did was, for us as players, it released us of that fear of ‘Oh we’ve just conceded a goal, what a tragedy'.

"[It became] ‘oh we’ve conceded a goal, let’s go up and score two, it doesn’t matter, it’s all right’. He provided that security blanket. We ended up being champions that year. We had a really young group and I think it only would have worked, and it planted a seed in my mind, because we were a young group.

"I think if we were an experienced group predominantly, they would have questioned him all the time saying ‘you can’t win things like that’."

Postecoglou remembered what it was like being a full-back in such an attack-minded set up.

"I'd get exposed all the time with three players attacking me because our wingers wouldn’t come back," he said. "We played with wingers back then. We’re talking the 80s, 4-4-2 was the game. You guys know it better than me in England. That filtered down to Australia because we had a lot of British expats and everyone was playing 4-4-2.

"[Puskas] goes, ‘No, no, we’re going to play with wingers’. No one had played with wingers for years, but that’s how we played. Our wingers were told not to come back. I think if we had experienced players, and they were getting exposed, especially defenders, they would be saying, ‘I’m not doing this’. There would have been real resistance.

"But because we were a young group and he was Ferenc Puskas, we went, ‘OK, let’s do this’. We were champions, we ended up winning it, but we loved it. We loved playing like that because we weren't worried about making a mistake or conceding a goal. As long as we won, at the end of the day, he didn’t care about the rest of it."

He added: "I just thought to myself, what a fantastic outlook to have, because as a manager you're kind of bogged down by all these things as much as the players are of failure, of things not going right, of potentially getting the sack.

"All these things are there to stop you actually playing the football you want your team to play. That had an effect on me of, ‘OK, that’s the kind of manager I want to be’.

"That's all in theory, then you get in a job and you realise all these things, but I’ve tried to resist that as much as I can with all my teams. Play football the fans want to see, play football the players want to play and provide the structure that's going to make you successful."

As well as his interpreter and half-coach, Postecoglou ended up unwittingly becoming Puskas' chauffeur and that led to one very awkward roadside moment with one of the greatest players in the game in the Australian's rundown old Datsun 200.

"I was 23, 24. I was captain, because I'd grown up at the club and we had a really young group so they made me captain, and he wanted me to pick him up and drive him, and I had the crappiest old car, because I was on hardly any money," Postecoglou told football.london.

"So I'd be literally pulling up and putting a guy in my car, which was worth 500 quid at the time, didn't have a window winder because my mate had broken it the year before, so he couldn't even wind his window, and I'm driving one of the world's greatest players around in this car that's bloody embarrassing.

"We went to one game, I was driving him to the airport and I got a flat tyre on the freeway and had to pull over to the side. So here I am, in the club tracksuit, driving one of the world's greatest footballers to the airport so we don't miss our flight, I get a flat tyre, and I've got the jack and I'm on the middle of the highway.

"He didn't get out of the car! He stayed in the car. I'm going, 'Boss, d'ya mind just...', because he was a big guy at the time – 'd'ya mind getting out?'. And he goes, 'No, I'm not going anywhere.' I think about it now and think, 'Man, I would have done things differently, I would have paid for a taxi for the man.'"

Fear not, the exasperated young Hellas captain and the football icon still got to the game in time.

Postecoglou's initial love of attacking football was forged even earlier though, as a child during late night viewings of matches across the world with his father. It's perhaps fair to say that had he been alive today Jim Postecoglou might not have been the biggest fan of the football Tottenham played under Antonio Conte at times last season.

"That's how I fell in love with the game [back then in front of the TV]. I speak about my old man a lot, but he didn't love football, he hated Italian football - it was the era of Catenaccio," recalled Postecoglou Jr.

"Whenever it came on he would turn it off. ‘I'm not watching this', but if somebody exciting was playing - like Ajax or at that time, Liverpool were a fantastic passing team, an attacking team, or if there was a player in there that he really liked - like a Glenn Hoddle at Spurs - he would point him out and so that resonated.

"That's why he loved the game. He didn’t love the game in itself. He loved the entertainment of the game, and that resonated with me. Like I said, the influences I had after that, I naturally gravitated towards teams like... when we watched the 1974 World Cup together, he was desperate for Holland to win it just because of what [Johan] Cruyff was doing.

"They didn’t and he was heartbroken. He didn't like the Germans. He just thought they were too mechanical all the time. So all those kind of things, whether I realised it at the time were sort of playing in my head and then when I watched it, the influence it had after that was on the sort of teams and managers I naturally followed in that formative stage, when you think, ‘Well, this is what I want to do with my life’, they were always the ones that made me think when I get into it this is the way I want to coach.

"I immersed myself in how that happens, how did these teams become that way? How do these managers coach? How do these football clubs become these kind of football clubs? That gave me that clear idea that that's who I wanted to be and how I wanted to coach."

Postecoglou has spoken before about his father being someone he was always trying to impress, a tough man who was difficult to please. So what is the Spurs boss now like as a father himself to his three sons, aged 23, nine and seven?

"I'm totally different mate. My kids are soft. I tell them I love them and cuddle them every day. We have our own upbringing, and I talk about it, my generation, our fathers were different people, y'know, it was the school of hard knocks," he said.

"They felt like they had to be really hard on us and that was our upbringing and that made me the man I am, where whatever gets thrown at me, even from you guys, I can withstand because whatever gets thrown at me is going to be nothing like what my dad used to throw at me on a daily basis – not in a negative way, but I always could be better, 'that's not enough, you can do more'.

"Now, if he was alive, he would be saying 'great, you've done well, but you need to do even better, don't stand still.' So I'm a different dad, but it's a different world too, to be fair. You know that you need to spend more time with your kids than my father did.

"I hardly saw my dad, he was working all the time, he had no time to do things with me because his sole purpose was to provide for his family, so he didn't have time to take me to birthday parties and school functions and stuff like that. Nowadays, children need that.

"We were all left to our own devices when we were young. We could be outside for hours and they didn't even know where we were, there were no mobile phones, as long as it was daylight we could be outside. That doesn't happen any more. So it was a different upbringing, I'm a different dad because of that.

"I'd like to think my kids know I love them and I want the best for them and I'm trying to create a balance of both those worlds, because I also know that you do need to expose children to the realities of life. Life isn't all rainbows and sunshine. It's not all stormclouds either, which is what my dad seemed to think."

It's not just Postecoglou's sons who view him as a father figure. His players often do. Within just a couple of weeks of working with him, Tottenham midfielder Yves Bissouma has already likened the Australian to a dad or an uncle.

Postecoglou admitted that it's something that just seems to naturally happen with some players he's worked with.

"It's hard for me to talk about myself. I'm just me, but when I've heard players who I've managed before talk about me, they do talk about me in those kind of terms, that's the kind of relationship [that I have with my players], and maybe that's the influence that I had from my father," he explained.

"He got the best out of me like that, so maybe I think that's the way, but it's not something I consciously do, it's just me being me.

"It's funny, because whenever I've moved on from whatever club I've been at, and I bump into ex-players, they're always a little bit stand-offish and I tend to be a little bit more relaxed, and that unnerves them even more.

"They go, 'No, we liked the old you.' I say, 'Let's have a coffee,' and they go, 'No boss, I'm leaving.' It's not a conscious thing of this is how I want to be; I just try and be me. That's me, that's who I am as a person, and I think people respond to that better, because at least there's some certainty about my behaviour.

"I'm not doing something because I saw Sir Alex [Ferguson] managing that way and thought, 'I'm going to be like him,' or because that's how I should react after a good game or a bad game, I'm just going to react like me."

He did meet Sir Alex Ferguson 23 years ago when Manchester United controversially withdrew from the FA Cup in order to take part in the Club World Championship, where they came up against South Melbourne, then managed by Postecoglou.

Did he try to soak up some of the knowledge of one of the most successful managers on the planet?

"Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, anything I could get. It must only have been about 10 or 15 minutes, but again, he was kind with his time when he didn't have to be, and there are plenty I've come across that aren’t kind with their time," he said.

"That leaves an impression on you as well, because you go ' I don’t want to be like that'. You realise that and think, I don't want anyone to think that about me. So the fact that he spent 10, 15 minutes talking to a young manager, I was 34 at the time. It was significant.

"We were walking to a press conference, and he said ‘you're never going to like this stuff, I hate it'. So I hung on his every word, but more important was the impression he made on me that if you can do that to a person, that person then leaves thinking or feeling like you've given them that time of day, and that that has an unbelievable effect, because you're not just representing yourself. He's representing his football club at the time and all these other things. So yeah, those kinds of things leave a mark on you."

Again rather than talk away at Sir Alex, asking questions, Postecoglou chose to simply listen.

"I've learned lessons in life. I said about listening before, if you do get to meet someone, you want them to do all the talking," he said. "You don't want to meet somebody for 10 minutes and you're talking for nine of them, and you walk away going, ‘I found out nothing’.

"I say it to people about me all the time. They say they look forward to meeting me and spend 10 minutes talking about themselves and they haven't really met me. So I didn’t really say anything.

"I just let him talk. I just let the conversation go where it went, and he spoke to me about dealing with the press and things you have to be a little bit wary of. At the time they were copping a fair bit of heat - they’d pulled out of the FA Cup and it was the first time ever anyone had done that.

"They were playing with us and we were part-timers at the time. People were questioning everything [about them]. So they were under siege a bit, but he handled it really well, and he just said ‘look, it is an important part of the job, how you handle this aspect of it'.

"He won't remember any of it. Like I said it was only 10 minutes, and I remember I had his book as well, because one of my best mates is a massive Manchester United supporter and he said to me if you meet Fergie get him to sign this for me. I said 'I can't do that. I’m managing against them, that's pretty embarrassing'.

"To be fair he signed it for me, and I said to him 'it’s for my mate'. because he wrote 'To Nick'. He went, 'Yeah right it’s for your mate.' I went, 'Yeah it is'."

Postecoglou and his team were the unknown quantity back then and the Australian has previously admitted that is something he relishes, surprising people who know nothing about him or those who have underestimated what he can bring to the table.

Will it be more difficult to be that surprise package now though as the manager of one of Europe's well-known Premier League clubs?

"No, because I still think people will underestimate me," he told football.london. "People have underestimated me my whole career, and I don't want to change that – that's good for me. I still think people probably predict that I won't be able to cope and that things won't go well."

How does he know when those around him are underestimating him?

"Just the way people talk about you, or address you," he responded. "I'm pretty intuitive about these things and to be fair, I don't try to change that. I'm quite comfortable in that space. That's fine. I think the more people underestimate me, the better a chance I have of getting under their guard, because what I do, I'm always well prepared, I don't underestimate anybody."

Postecoglou got that distinct feeling during a trip to the UK half a decade ago when his agent brought him over to meet some of the chief decision-makers at English clubs to get his name around the leagues.

For someone like Postecoglou who rarely promotes himself - 'at all mate' he responds to that suggestion - his nationality was another obstacle he felt.

"I'm 57. Absolutely I think some of it has been my nationality for sure, where I've come from. I think if anyone else had my record they would have probably arrived here a lot earlier," he said.

"I've had success wherever I've been but apparently that success has been perceived as something not that credible because of where I've done it, whether it's in Australia, Japan or up in Scotland, but if I was doing it in a small European country. If I was winning the Belgian first division or the Dutch first division I would have gone up a lot quicker. So some of it has been that and that has held me back.

"I don't go around promoting myself. I remember going to London five years ago and people representing me wanted me to meet and greet all these people. This was off the back of winning the Asian Cup with Australia, going to a World Cup, coaching in Japan and having success.

"I walked into a lot of corporate boxes, met a lot of CEOs of English Premier League clubs and Championship clubs. They had no idea who I was mate. It was a waste of time.

"I used to tell [my agent] 'mate it's like you're taking me for auditions in Hollywood and I'm getting rejected all the time'. It was doing nothing for my self-esteem. It just didn't register with people and that's why I've moved on fairly quickly in my career.

"I've been in jobs where I could have stayed for a lot longer but I've just tried to go 'Ok I've had success, what's the next option?' and then go there and have success because I couldn't have any missteps along the way. It's definitely held me back for sure but that's why I'm here now."

He added: "It's the hardest thing to overcome when people make a presumption about you based purely upon your nationality or where you've come from. I hate that.

"I detest that. Treat people by just looking at them and what they've done. We've all got a body of work. We've all got a record of what we say and who we are. Judge us on that rather than some preconceived notion of what they have in their heads.

"What I think now is that all of those people I was introduced to, it was their missed opportunity not mine. I'm still here now and maybe if they had been a little bit more open-minded I could have brought success to their football club.

"That's where hopefully some of them are now thinking 'maybe next time a guy walks in and he's from Japan or he's English or whatever, maybe I'll pay a little more attention to him'."

Tottenham will be very glad indeed that those clubs did not pay more attention to Ange Postecoglou for it brought him eventually to their door instead.