Ange Postecoglou at least showed more front than his Tottenham team did. It was certainly hard to know what was more brazen in his post-game press conference at Chelsea.
Was it the attempt to move the discussion onto another excoriation of VAR, which is crowd-pleasing, but felt an obvious and irrelevant deflection? Or, was it the insistence that his ear-cupping of the Tottenham Hotspur end after Pape Sarr’s ultimately disallowed goal was actually an invite to “cheer”… and not a goading response to their previous chant of “you don’t know what you’re doing” over Sarr’s introduction.
His answer is worth reading in full.
“Jesus mate, it's incredible how things get interpreted,” the Australian brazenly insisted. “We'd just scored, I just wanted to hear them cheer. Because we'd been through a tough time, and I thought it was a cracking goal. I wanted them to get really excited.
“I felt at that point we could potentially go on and win the game. I just felt momentum was on our [side]. It doesn't bother me, it's not the first time they've booed my substitutions or my decisions, that's fine, they're allowed to do that. But we'd just scored a goal, just scored an equaliser, I was just hoping we could get some excitement.
“If people want to read into that, that somehow I'm trying to make a point about something, like I said, we'd been through a tough time, but I just felt there was a bit of a momentum shift there. If they get really behind the lads, I thought we had the momentum to finish on top of them.”
Is anyone really buying this? The fans don’t seem to be, in the same way there are now very few backers for his managerial tenure.
The remarkable thing about that is that it wasn't too long ago that there was immense sympathy for Postecoglou. Everyone could see the extent of the injuries. Everyone could see the restrictions at Tottenham, where the wage bill has dropped well below Aston Villa’s.
This was fair context.
And yet, if Postecoglou’s results have taken a real downward turn since those angelic first ...
