ANGE POSTECOGLOU faces a repair job at Spurs – more than 30 years on from fixing the broken-down banger he used to ferry about football icon Ferenc Puskas by the roadside.
Tottenham’s new boss acted as unofficial interpreter and chauffeur for Puskas when he played under the Hungarian legend at South Melbourne Hellas in the late ‘80s.
GettyAnge Postecoglou is the new manager of Tottenham Hotspur[/caption]
GettyFerenc Puskas was renowned for his goal scoring and bagged 156 goals in 180 games for Real Madrid[/caption]
Puskas spoke passable Greek but no English, so captain Postecoglou – who was born in Athens but moved to Australia aged five – translated for his manager for three years.
Postecoglou was blown away by how humble the Magyar magician was.
Though Puskas did amusingly lean into his superstar status on one occasion when his young defender’s clapped-out Datson 200 ran into some problems en route to the airport.
Postecoglou, now 57 but 23 at the time, recalled: “I had the s***tiest old car, because I was on hardly any money.
“It was worth 500 quid at the time, didn’t have a window winder because my mate had broken it the year before, and I’m driving one of the world’s greatest players around in this car that’s bloody embarrassing.
“We went to one game, I was driving him to the airport and I got a flat tyre on the freeway and had to pull over to the side.
“I’m in the club tracksuit, and I’ve got the jack and I’m on the middle of the highway. He didn’t get out of the car. He stayed in the car.
“I’m going, ‘Boss, d’ya mind just…’ – because he was a big guy at the time – ‘d’ya mind getting out?’ And he goes, ‘No, I’m not going anywhere.’
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“I think about it now and think, ‘Man, I would have done things differently, I would have paid for a taxi for the man.’”
Postecoglou rounded off the funny tale by confirming the pair did manage to catch their flight and had a knowing smile as he did it.
Puskas was a huge influence on the Australian, with all that time spent in the car, in dressing rooms and on the training pitch going a long way to shaping the attacking philosophy Postecoglou now swears by.
Though his approach today does not go quite as far as Puskas’ Kevin Keegan on steroids, we’ll outscore the opposition, gung-ho strategy.
Holding court in Perth’s swish The Crown hotel, Postecoglou explained: “His teams just wanted to outscore the opposition, that’s all he wanted to do. He goes, ‘we will win 5-4 every week and I’ll enjoy it’.
“I was a defender, so we copped four goals and I was like ‘s***’, but he was buzzing because, what a game. They scored great goals, we scored great goals. You know, that’s just not right!
Postecoglou has already started work in pre-season with the playersRex
GettySpurs lost their first pre-season friendly 3-2 to West Ham[/caption]
“But it was right because what it did was, for us as players, it released us of that fear of ‘Oh we’ve just conceded a goal, what a tragedy’. (It became,) ‘Oh we’ve conceded a goal, let’s go up and score two, it doesn’t matter, it’s all right’.
“He provided that security blanket. We ended up being champions that year.”
If Postecoglou provides half the entertainment Puskas served up he will be on to a winner with Spurs fans who grew bored with the defensive fare of the last four years.
The ex-Celtic chief has plenty to mend from the wreckage left by predecessor Antonio Conte, with a bloated squad and the Harry Kane conundrum.
Just having the chance to rebuild Tottenham is a success in itself though for Postecoglou, after years where it seemed snobbery towards his nationality would forever hold him back.
The 57-year-old, who managed in Australia, Japan and north of the border before landing the Spurs job, said: “I remember going to London five years ago and people representing me wanted me to meet and greet all these people.
“This was after winning the Asian Cup with Australia, going to a World Cup, coaching in Japan and having success.
Getty Images – GettyPostecoglou won the Ericsson Cup in 1999 as South Melbourne FC manager[/caption]
“I walked into a lot of corporate boxes, met a lot of CEOs of English Premier League clubs and Championship clubs. They had no idea who I was, mate. It was a waste of time.
“I used to tell them (his representatives) ‘mate, it’s like you’re taking me for auditions in Hollywood and I’m getting rejected all the time’.
“It’s the hardest thing to overcome when people make a presumption about you based purely upon your nationality or where you’ve come from. I detest that.
“Treat people by just looking at them and what they’ve done. We’ve all got a body of work. We’ve all got a record of what we say and who we are. Judge us on that rather than some preconceived notion of what they have in their heads.
“What I think now is that all of those people I was introduced to, it was their missed opportunity, not mine.
“I’m still here now and maybe if they had been a little bit more open-minded I could have brought success to their football club.
“That’s where hopefully some of them are thinking ‘maybe next time a guy walks in and he’s from Japan or he’s English or whatever, maybe I’ll pay a little more attention to him’.”
