Defiant Postecoglou insists the Spurs storm will pass

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Listening to Ange Postecoglou describe the noise around Tottenham Hotspur’s season can feel like living in a world of extremes.

The highs of Frankfurt and the lows of any number of recent Premier League games are just the part on the football pitch. The Spurs head coach used the word “hysteria” at one point, when describing the external voices passing comment on his side.

“Within the football department we’ve tried to maintain a discipline about how we behave and keep the noise on the outside away from us,” he reveals.

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“We came back from Frankfurt on a high and everyone was buzzing, then it was another disappointing game in the week [a 2-1 home defeat to Nottingham Forest] and that flips 180 degrees. From our perspective it’s really important we cocoon ourselves from it.”

Easier said than done, surely? “It’s not easy because as much as I can say to the players ‘block out the noise’, we all live in the outside world. If I could keep them locked up in here for the next month I’d be OK. What you look at is the behaviour of the players; the way they are training, the way they are talking. For the most part they are handling it pretty well.”

What does irk Postecoglou is the idea that Spurs have reached this point where they could achieve European success, without meticulously building and preparing over the course of many weeks and months. He talks to the players about ‘The Stonecutter’s Credo’. It is an allegory from the Danish writer and photographer Jacob Riis:

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

“Sometimes people look at success and look at the tail end of it and don’t realise what’s gone into it,” Postecoglou explains.

“A lot of it is work that is unseen or seems like you are not really progressing. For us, as difficult as the season has been, a lot of it has been good for us in terms of building resilience and staying united.

“I know that for us to break through and bring a trophy we are going to need bundles of that. We just need to keep banging away at the rock and hopefully on the 101st blow we will crack it.”

That final blow represents a possible Europa League Final triumph. It could either be a hugely exciting or frustrating outcome depending on whether or not the stone cracks.

“It just depends on how it pans out,” Postecoglou continues. “That’s the reality of football. Sometimes you don’t get what you deserve. I always found that’s short-term. Over the long course you will succeed. It’s about getting back at the rock and doing the right things all the time, I really believe in that.

“All the success I’ve had in my career, none of it has been instant, none of it has been because of one thing or one answer to everything. It’s about consistently – over and over again – trying to do the right things. Eventually success comes and sometimes it comes at unexpected times, it doesn’t come when you think it should.”

Postecoglou is in his 60th year and retains a sense of perspective that comes with the wisdom he has gained over time. He was just half that age when starting out in management at South Melbourne and admits that his younger self would not have coped with the pressures he is under today.

“No probably not, that’s the reality of it. Invariably when you are younger you take things a lot more personally, you think things are very definite in terms of the outcomes. Over the course of time you realise none of that is true, everything is just a moment in time and the moments all pass.

“It’s not that I never had pressure when I was younger, you always do. For all young managers the first job is really important because if you don’t succeed you might not get another opportunity. The pressure is always there, it’s just the noise now and the way the world has changed as well. There are so many more platforms.

“When I first started, the media used to be journalists and that was it. Now every platform you can think of has an opinion and they all have the ability to voice that opinion and it can feel really overwhelming, and the younger me would have struggled to cope with that.”

If Spurs can prevail in Europe then Postecoglou’s mission will arguably have been completed. He was tasked with reducing the age profile of the squad, changing the direction on the pitch and bringing success. It has been a hugely challenging campaign but one that can end with each of those boxes being ticked.

“Yes, that was the brief, that was why I came,” he adds. “To change the way the club played its football, to regenerate a squad because it was coming to the end of a cycle, and to win trophies.

“I still feel like that’s the motivation and they were the objectives for me coming here and that’s what I’m determined to see out. I haven’t tried to change the initial mission which was to play football that excites the fans, to bring some exciting young talent to the club, and hopefully succeed.”

And as the noise builds ahead of Sunday’s trip to Liverpool and that Europa League semi-final first leg against Bodo/Glimt on Thursday, Postecoglou will not let any of it affect his preparations for the biggest test of his Spurs career.

“Provided you stay true to yourself, your head hits the pillow at night and you’re fine. In those moments if you change what you believe in, or your values, or who you are as a person, that’s where you do have those sleepless nights.

“That’s happened at times in my career but as you get older you realise that it’s like every other storm, they all pass.”

Watch Liverpool vs Tottenham on Sunday from 4pm, live on Sky Sports; Kick-off 4.30pm

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