No excuses. It is a deeply ingrained part of Ange Postecoglou’s management style. Just keep fighting. And remember to be grateful. Anyone who plays football professionally is living the dream.
And yet there have to be times when the Tottenham manager wants to reach for something, a little context. Now, as he navigates his first Christmas and new year programme in the Premier League, with his team feeling the burn, is one of those times.
Spurs looked shattered for most of the first 80 minutes at Brighton on Thursday, second best in all areas, 4-0 down, staring at humiliation. Which is what made the late rally to 4-2 so remarkable, why Postecoglou was keen to praise his players to the hilt. Spurs went close to a third goal; they hinted at the wildest of comebacks.
Last Saturday, Postecoglou had been amazed at the physical data from the 2-1 home win over Everton, when his team scored their goals early and hung on with increasing grimness. He said he had players feeling sore in the period leading up to Brighton.
The last thing he needed was to lose one of them to a knock in training – Oliver Skipp with a badly bruised foot – but that is what is happening at the moment. Postecoglou was without seven others through injury, plus the suspended Yves Bissouma. And now comes the visit of red-hot Bournemouth on Sunday.
Skipp could be available again. That is Postecoglou’s hope. Although there was a darkness about his comment that Skipp could be “the only fresh legs we’ll have to contribute to what we’re doing”. Maybe he was brooding about the loss of Dejan Kulusevski to a one-match ban for collecting a fifth yellow card of the season at Brighton. What Postecoglou gains on the one hand has tended to be taken away pretty quickly by the other.
The problem is linked to the physical demands that Postecoglou places on the players. With the high defensive line, the flooding forward of players at pace and the aggressive press, they know that they have to run. And run. As an aside, it is fair to wonder whether it has been a contributing factor to the number of muscular injuries.
With squad numbers stretched, Postecoglou has had less scope to rotate from game to game and to make changes within them. The demands, though, remain the same, the pressure on the players increasing almost exponentially and, at some point, things will go bang. So, no excuses. But, well, maybe it depends on how you define them.
It was certainly interesting to hear Postecoglou in soul-searching mode as he looked ahead to Bournemouth, his team’s seventh and final league game of December. It is quirky, at the very least, that they will play only twice in the competition in January, plus one or two FA Cup ties, depending on whether they beat Burnley at home in the third round next Friday.
“I know I say don’t and I don’t make excuses …” Postecoglou said at one point. “It’s easy for me to say: ‘Don’t make excuses.’ But the sheer effort of some of our players over the last eight or nine weeks has been enormous. I’ve got to make sure they’re protected. It’s not through lack of effort that we’re not consistently playing the football we want to. It’s just we’re asking it of too few.”
Postecoglou’s timeline broadly tracks the period from the Chelsea defeat at the beginning of November, when Micky van de Ven and James Maddison suffered serious injuries. They are due back around the middle of January. Cristian Romero was a huge miss when he was suspended for his red card against Chelsea and now again as he rehabilitates from a hamstring strain that will keep him out for a month or so. Ditto Rodrigo Bentancur, who has barely played all season. Then there are the long-term injured squad players like Ivan Perisic, Ryan Sessegnon and Manor Solomon.
“The way we play takes a fairly hefty physical toll – more than the way other clubs play,” Postecoglou said. “For us to sustain and maintain that and be a team, it’s no secret we need a strong squad. We’re nowhere near that at the moment, understandably so. We’ve only had one [transfer] window [last summer]. It was never going to happen [in one window]. We’re still at the beginnings.”
Nowhere near. They are big words. And it is easy to see how they might frame the January window, when Postecoglou wants to see incoming business done early, especially for a centre-half.
“We are where we are,” Postecoglou said. “Nothing magical is going to happen in January. What we need to do is just keep building. We’ve had one window with this team to change it around, to do things differently. The fact that we’re in the position we are is a credit to the players. We’ll see what we can do in January but ultimately it’s about building a side that will get us to where we want to be.”
First for Bournemouth. Postecoglou has talked repeatedly of his love of multi-functional players, those who can cover positions they are not used to and there will doubtless be more of that – Ben Davies in a central defensive pair, for example; Emerson Royal alongside him, perhaps, as he was at Brighton.
Postecoglou could look to Giovani Lo Celso to step in for Kulusevski, who was playing in a new central attacking midfield role. And afterwards the manager will lose Son Heung-min to Asian Cup duty, with Pape Sarr and Bissouma primed to depart for the Africa Cup of Nations, albeit the latter is banned for Bournemouth and Burnley. For those still standing, it is a time to dig ever deeper.
