6 hours ago
2
Well, the Chelsea fans were wrong anyway. Ange Postecoglou was not sacked in the morning. Instead he was sacked in the afternoon. So, another small win there for Ange, even in defeat. Not to mention further proof of the notion to which he has always seemed so fatally in thrall, that he is at any given moment the smartest guy in the room. Even when, as of Saturday afternoon, he’s no longer in the room at all.
The official version seems to be that Postecoglou was fired 18 minutes after his final defeat at the City Ground. In reality he was fired in real time, a live-action televised touchline sacking, gone from the moment Evangelos Marinakis disappeared from his seat midway through the second half with the look of a gamekeeper required now to the wring the neck of a dying pheasant.
Watching Postecoglou delay the moment after the final whistle, out there looking hollow-eyed in front of the near-empty stands, it felt entirely apt that the final image of a manager who projected himself always as a wised-up straight shooter should instead be a moment of touching naivety.
No Ange, don’t wander over there. Don’t let yourself to be framed all alone beneath the words “Trent End”, a photographer’s dream, and the perfect shot of a man who always gave the impression of being able to see it all. Apart, that is, from all the things everyone else could see happening to him.
This is not meant to be harsh on Postecoglou, who has been a successful coach for a very long time in various places around the world. Those who know him say he is a genuinely nice man, that it is just awkwardness that makes him conduct his press conferences in the manner of a longsuffering vice cop forced against his will to address a room full of convicted perverts, that makes him condescending in public, often to young journalists.
But it is also true that Ange to Forest was always a terrible appointment. Mainly because it involved getting rid of a successful, popular and settled predecessor, bookended now by a sacking at the end of an international break.
Not all mistakes have to be fatal. Postecoglou made this one into a disaster by never at any stage seeming to understand the assignment.
There was always something odd about the suggestion he kicked things off by saying, in effect: “Give me time and we can rebuild this project.” Forest were coming off a brilliant season. The current one had already started. Why make the job into a rebuild? Naivety, perhaps. The fatal inflexibility of the systems man. Or just not being very good at the job, paddling out of your depth at this most brutally unforgiving level.
In this sense Postecoglou’s sacking seems like a double departure. He has now been fired twice in four months. Is there a league rule similar to the loan regulations that state you can’t be sacked by three clubs in a year? Sadly for Postecoglou this is unlikely to be an issue.
He won’t be back here now, not without serious remedial work. And not just because of a record that reads lost 31 and won 13 of his last 50 Premier League games. There is an interesting point of order here. Postecoglou did win the Europa League. Although, some real talk: Spurs had the largest budget in the competition. The default option was winning it. The job there was in a sense not to get in the way.
Outside that glorious high, Postecoglou has a fair claim, at least in those final 50 games, on the title of least effective Premier League manager ever. Yes, there have been worse win ratios than his 26% (context: 10% below Ruben Amorim). But not in charge of players of this quality. It is even incorrect to say Ange went down firing shots, that he never abandoned his principles. He often tried to play differently. It didn’t work. His teams became not just unsuccessful, but run-of-the-mill unsuccessful. By the end, the most entertaining element was his own apparently unshakable conviction that this was all somehow someone else’s fault, that he, Ange, stood alone on the heath surrounded by fools.
after newsletter promotion
So much so that at times this could feel like a comedy of awkwardness, football management as reimagined by prime Ricky Gervais. What was your favourite Ange episode? How about saying it’s not all about set pieces, don’t be so ridiculous, mate, before losing your next match to a set piece? How about taking the lead in five consecutive games and losing all of them? Maybe it’s the obvious one, going to Nottingham Forest and outdoing Brian Clough at Leeds by taking 40 not 44 days to get the sack, like Johnson in Peep Show being so good at his 30-minute office tai chi routine that he can do it in 10.
There are also poignant lessons from Ange in England. The dealings with the media may be irrelevant, but they gave a glimpse into the source of his wider struggles, not least the need to accept that, even with a track record of success elsewhere, there may actually be things to learn still, and that this place that will swarm all over any weakness, however minor.
It always seemed deeply naive to snort and snark and deconstruct the questions he was being asked. A note to Ange. Everyone else also knows press conferences are mundane. Often those asking the questions are just being polite, giving you some soft-ball as opposed to, say, asking you why your record is so appalling.
Forest will surely survive from here. Marinakis will hire a Dyche or similar. The players are good enough, the legacy of the last manager but one still strong.
As for Ange, he has been fun, hard-working and gracious to opponents in defeat or victory, at least in so far as it is possible to remember that far back.
In the end it was the Premier League itself that did a number on Postecoglou, both in its relentlessness and the excellence of those he was matched against. This thing will stretch you thin, will contort you into impossible shapes. If, by the end, even his struggles had become just meat in the grinder, another strand of public entertainment, this is in its own way testament to the strength, purity, and basic viciousness of the product.
