Tottenham Hotspur has lost 21 times this season and is 17th in the Premier League – unimaginable table for a club of its size and resources. While trying to play the progressive attack game mandated by their second season manager Ange Postcoglou – an enigmatic style called Angelball – Spurs players often seemed to have forgotten, and perhaps never know how to pass at all. Against Chelsea in April, Tottenham’s own fans have chanted “You don’t know what you are doing” at the manager. For months, experts have shouted a common chorus: “Why has Angel have not already been dismissed?”
And Wednesday, when Tottenham plays Manchester United in the Europa League final, Angel has a chance to save everything. A victory would be the club’s first trophy in 17 years, its first European trophy since 1984, and would spend a return to the Champions League. This is a ridiculous situation even more made by the reference of the manager at the start of the season to his history: in each team he has ever succeeded for several years – the Australian clubs South Melbourne and Brisbane Roar, the Australian national team, the Japanese Yokohama F. Marinos, and the Celtic of Scotland – he won something in his second year. To the last hardcore defenders of Angelball still among the Fandom Spurs, among them, it would be a sweet redemption.
Did Angel do a good job? Objectively, no! (Although Tottenham has played better in Europe than in England this season, their success can also be attributed to the fact that in the Europa League, they play clubs with much smaller budgets.) So why I think? Because what Ange has brought from the start is an idea … a philosophy … a hope … OK, a fuck atmosphere.
He speaks with eloquence to play the kind of optimistic and optimistic football his beloved father – a gruff and overworked carpenter who moved his family from Athens to Melbourne after the 1967 military coup in Greece – was referred. His father would wake up a young angel in the middle of the night to watch English football, his favorites being “the artists”, especially Liverpool by Bob Paisley.
At the national level, Angel and his father supported South Melbourne, a club created by and for the local Greek community. “This Sunday in football has become something special for me,” said Angel. “My father, whom I knew as a certain type of individual during the week … has just come to life. He traveled these doors, socialized with everyone, became really animated … and I would not leave his side. ”
Angel then played for South Melbourne, mainly as a left back. Angel again: “I really had trouble in my player career because I could not be the player who would excite my father. I was a defender and quite limited in my technical capacity.” His father died a few years ago, before starting in Tottenham, but Ange still imagines him in the stands, looking at his son’s coach. “Could he appreciate looking at this team? It has always been the source of everything I have done. I cannot change, because where it all started is more powerful than all the challenges I will get outside, owners or media or supporters questioning my beliefs. They are so deeply rooted that they will never change.”
OK, SO: Angel puts his teams attack Even when it doesn’t work clearly Because this is what his late father would like? I’m sorry to be a sentimental moron, but I love it.
Angel’s criticism often comes down to the idea that he was “discovered” – that his tactics GUNG -HO operated fairly well in the nations of lower football where he is trained in the past, but that in Englandin the Best League in the worldManagers and opposing players are too good and too well documented to fall for that. All this can be true. I don’t really have an opinion on the tactics themselves. What I am here is, again, the vibrations behind them. Despite the losses – so many losses, many of them so bad – I always make joy by watching someone try to chase a dream that may be impossible.
And unless you generally emphasize that everyone seems to be at the top of the field all the time and then completely out of position defensively, I can’t really tell you what angel East. I’m not the only one. In his angel biography, the correctly entitled AngelThe Australian journalist Vince Rugari writes: “Angelball is not a training or a structure or system or a particular game model. It can be all or part of these elements, but it is much larger than any of them. This is one of these things; You know it when you see it. mindset. “Italic mine.
Rugari also writes that angel teams always go through a period of disarray and despair, which includes “pressing and bad passes. But SO– Obviously, inevitably – “SMOG begins to clear up. The team is starting to get into the habit of scoring late equalizations or winners. Some players who were considered to be waste starts finding performance levels previously unimaginable. At this point, players no longer perform tactics. It is not a logic; It is faith.
By coincidence, I recently finished another relevant book for the Angelball conversation: Yepoka Yeebo Anansi’s goldWho tells the fascinating story of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a conman who spent decades to keep investors away from millions of millions of people by telling them a story on a nonexistent entity, the Ghana Oman fiduciary fund. The fund was created by the first head of state of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and was trapped in bureaucratic banking hell, Blay-Miezah told People. He needed money to unlock the fund how much he would reward his investors with incredible yields and enrich Ghana.
Over the years, without payment, investors have become their own autonomous community, traveling together in packs to meet Blay-Miezah in bizarre hotels in luxurious places to say once again that their payments would be delayed due to new unforeseen procedural hiccups. Why did investors continue to believe in the Ghana Oman trust fund despite all the obvious indications that it was an illusion? After a while, it seems clear, it would simply have been too terrible to believe the opposite. Likewise, did I go too far to admit that Angeball might not work in England? Absolutely, fortunately, yes.
From the start, Ange sold a story to fans. This story was better encapsulated by another match against Chelsea, this one in November 2023. Reduced to nine men not even an hour in what was, at the time of the second red card, a 1-1 match, Tottenham nevertheless maintained a scandalously high defensive line and continued to attack. The Spurs finally collapsed in a 4-1 defeat, but for about 20 minutes, it seemed that it could work. My son had three days at the time, so maybe it was my state of mind, but I was riveted by this game. While Dejan Kulusevski of the Spurs put him in melodramatically in the players’ gallery, “Yes, we had lost a match. But we won in life.” At first glance, it is a ridiculous thing to say. But it is a sincerely ridiculous thing. While the loss of the league have accumulated, Tottenham players have constantly said a version of “Yes, we know that it is wild, and we do not understand it quite ourselves, but we always have confidence in Angel.”
A few months after this chelsea game “We have won in life”, I had a cap that reads “angel” stylized in the Hardcore legends logo of the 90s Madball. I ordered him in a strange part of the internet and he came much smaller than announced and the head of my son is very large, therefore, at one point in winter, it became his hat. I would put him on his beautiful Big Noggin and we were going to the tundra of the East Coast and I would have had the impression that we were other travelers in a sports cult. Win or lose against Manchester United, whether Angel is dismissed or if it comes back (even victory is not sure to remain its execution), I will always be happy to have known Angeli from the first hand. Because we should allow ourselves to believe in something irrational, something – I say it – Romantic. Otherwise, all we have, are victories and losses.
