Ange Postecoglou has reinvented Spurs. But the path forward is murky

TThe good news for Tottenham is that they did not concede a goal in a set match against Liverpool on Sunday. But there wasn’t much else. A 4-2 defeat meant they had lost four consecutive league games for the first time since 2004 and if Tottenham are to take fourth place from Aston Villa, they must win their remaining three games, one of which is against Manchester City. that Villa won neither.

A certain amount of perspective is essential. Spurs finished eighth last year and the season ended in rancor and recriminations. Antonio Conte had left at the end of March, and at that point he had made it clear that he did not particularly want to be at the club, with the fans fed up with his distressingly negative football; what can be tolerated when it produces results quickly fades when those results dry up.

Ange Postecoglou is different, not just for Conte, but for most coaches. He sounds like a human. He can be irritable, but he doesn’t like orchestrated tirades. At 58 years old, this is by far the highest level he has coached at; this could be the culmination of a life’s work that took him from Australia to Japan and Celtic. For Postecoglou, these are not just a few more years on the resume. This is his legacy. He desperately wants to be at Spurs. The attitude is refreshing, and that also applied to football initially. His Spurs have attacked, sometimes recklessly. He picked up 26 points from his first ten league games. No one really thought Spurs could win the title, but they were top for a quarter of the season.

There would always be a reset. That kind of form was never sustainable. After allowing 2.6 points per game through 10 games, they’ve managed 1.36 in the next 25. Newcastle, Chelsea and Manchester United feel ominously close. They achieved last season’s points total on April 7 and have not achieved any new ones since. Given the sale of Harry Kane last summer, a new manager, a revolution, Tottenham would surely have happily accepted 60 points at this stage with a restored sense of fun; the problem is the order. Everything since the end of October felt like drift.

The first grumbling against Postecoglou has begun. His stubbornness regarding set pieces seems bizarre. “I don’t see it as a problem,” he said after conceding twice from corners in last weekend’s north London derby, making it inevitable that Spurs would concede a header from a set-piece against Chelsea on Thursday. His team has now conceded sixteen goals this season; as a percentage of total goals conceded, only Nottingham Forest has a worse record.

What Postecoglou was certainly saying wasn’t that he didn’t think set-plays weren’t worth it, but rather that if Spurs wanted to close the gap to the Champions League qualifiers, it wouldn’t be by getting better at defending corners, but by getting better at defending corners. improving their general playing pattern. That’s a much more understandable position than pretending that set plays don’t matter, but imagine if the number of 16 setbacks could be halved: how many more points would that have yielded? Probably enough to make the race with Villa for the top four neck and neck.

However, the bigger problem, as Postecoglou said, is probably the other area where he is dogmatic, namely playing a game at a high pace and with a lot of possession. Liverpool remain the most aggressive side in the Premier League despite their recent stumble, while Tottenham have conceded more possession in their defensive third than any other team. That this patched-up, underconfident version of Tottenham would struggle at Anfield, a ground where their recent record has been abysmal, was predictable. In such circumstances, might it not be worth it for a coach to compromise a little on his principles by not simply insisting that this is the way we play, mate?

This is accompanied by a general openness – nine teams in the Premier League have conceded fewer goals than Spurs – raising concerns that Postecoglou has all too precisely given the fans their Tottenham back, that the best they can ever be under him is a sometimes exciting team. which are generally good to look at, but too open to really challenge for titles.

However, the improvement compared to a year ago should not be forgotten. There are caveats, but given the turmoil of last summer, it’s only fair to give Postecoglou at least one more chance before passing too harsh a judgment. The team still lacks a bit of depth and is not yet fully equipped for the type of football he wants to play. Postecoglou’s problem is that these caveats are magnified due to the recent recession. The season as a whole was promising, but the ending was disappointing. The issue now is to prove that he was the reason for the recovery at the start of the season, and not just for Conte’s absence.

This is an excerpt from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, the Guardian US’s weekly look at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Do you have a question for Jonathan? Email footballwithjw@theguardian.com and he will provide the best answer in a future edition