Tottenham Hotspur pulled the trigger and made the controversial decision to fire Ange Postecoglou on Friday night, hanging the historic Europa League-winning coach out to dry for weeks before finally deciding to give him the boot.
The decision was not met well by Spurs fans, who continued to direct their ire at chairman Daniel Levy, already the subject of a movement from many supporters to get him out of the club. Tottenham fans want to know why the club made the move that it did and what more Postecoglou could have done besides win the Europa League, which is seen as the ultimate prize.
There's a belief among fans that Levy would prefer to finish higher in the Premier League than win titles, whereas the objective of any player, coach, fan, or anyone who sees football as a sport and not as a money laundering vehicle is to win silverware.
But Postecoglou did finish a lowly 17th in the Premier League, which is the worst finish in club history. A lot of that was down to his tactics and errors that put Spurs behind the curve against competitive teams in their own league, whereas they admittedly had a relatively lighter load to winning the Europa Legaue - not that it was easy or any less of an achievement, by any means.
Ange Postecoglou had a fatal flaw as a coach
It's just that when predicting future results, perhaps emotions can cloud better judgment. Firing Postecoglou, especially in the way that it went down, may have been wrong, but Big Ange wasn't without his issues and there are valid reasons for wanting a switch.
What's especially interesting is hearing those reasons articulated by a rival manager. In an article published by The Athletic's Jack Pitt-Brooke in the immediate aftermath of Postecoglou's dismissal, a rival manager was quoted with some rather scatching remarks about the manager's tactics at Spurs:
“You can see what their ideas are very clearly. They play with a lot of players in their front line, they’re good at the high press, where they score a lot of goals. But when their full-backs are both up, leaving big spaces down the sides, you can kill them.”
All of this is very true, and even a Tottenham fan who fully backed Postecoglou to stay for another year has to 100 percent agree with this. While Postecoglou's attacking style and ideas were great on paper and easy to get behind, they could be disastrous.
Postecoglou led Spurs to a fifth-placed finish in his first season as part of a positive turnaround to get them back into Europe, even without Harry Kane, but his tactics were figured out and exposed badly by Premier League managers in year two - hence the ghastly finish in 17th.
His press was neutralized, his midfield carved wide open, and his defense left floundering to stop a barrage of attacks in matches that could get very ugly with the sheer number of goals allowed. Postecoglou was never going to change his fundamental ideas, and Tottenham, maybe like this rival manager, likely felt that they could no longer feel safe proceeding with his idea of football in the Premier League.
Now that is a valid reason for firing a coach, even if it's an unpopular one after he won the Europa League. Most supporters would want another year for a coach who reached that milestone, but still many others would want to look at the biggers sample size. Of course, none of this truly absolves Levy, because if this is indeed the case, he didn't have to wait this long and put Spurs so far behind on the transfer and managerial market.