Photo: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images
Ange Postecoglou turned to his father. "Get off the field," he said, "you will be arrested." It was 1991 and South Melbourne had just defeated Melbourne Croatia to win the NSL Grand Final. It had been an exhausting, ridiculous game. Melbourne Croatia had finished top of the regular season table, had been the better team on the day, had taken the lead and looked on their way to the title, but conceded in the 88th minute. South Melbourne had missed three penalties in the shootout.
Melbourne Croatia had two kicks for the match. Postecoglou had to convert the fifth penalty to keep his team in it. And by sudden death, South Melbourne had won.
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South Melbourne, Postecoglou said, "wasn't just a football club; it was a shrine." For people like his father, who fled Greece to Australia in the 1960s, it was a little piece of home where Greek was spoken and souvlaki was always on the grill. That's why his father joined the field invasion to jog alongside his son on the victory lap.
That was the pinnacle of Postecoglou's playing career and a moment of great pride. But that season was also something more. When Postecoglou lifted the trophy, he had not done so alone; he had done that with Ferenc Puskas. The story is told in an unreleased documentary by Australian journalist Tony Wilson. It contains remarkable footage of Puskas playing friendlies in Australia in the mid-1980s. He waddles around, his enormous belly straining for his shirt, and suddenly delivers perfect 50-yard passes to players who fail to control them. One moment the ball bounces hopelessly around a packed box on a hard and dusty surface, and then falls into the hands of Puskas, who, with the languor of his genius, caresses it with the outside of his left boot in the upper right corner.
Puskas, who had been away with Honved during a European Cup match, had decided not to return to Hungary after the Soviet invasion in 1956, and when political unrest forced him to leave Greece, where he had led Panathinaikos, he was in the aftermath of the homeless. He worked in Spain, Chile, Saudi Arabia and Paraguay, but it was in Australia that he seemed most comfortable. For a time he coached a youth team in the Melbourne suburb of Keysborough, before the reception he received from Greek fans when they went to watch South Melbourne convinced their president, George Vasilopoulos, to let him coach.
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Although Puskas spoke five languages well, including Greek, English was not one of them, so he relied on his assistant Jim Pyrgolios and Postecoglou, his captain, to translate. "In football there are three possibilities," Puskas said during his first team talk, as the players eagerly leaned forward, desperate to hear what wisdom this legend could impart. "Can win, can lose, can draw." There was widespread bewilderment. Was that it? "All he was trying to do," Postecoglou said, "was relax us."
It would be wrong to say Puskas didn't care - he cried after the grand final and once rowed with an entire stand barracking him - but he had a healthy sense of perspective. He didn't feel like training in the rain and Pyrgolios had to sneak in some fitness work. During the 1991 penalty shootout drama, as those around him grabbed their heads and punched the air, he sat alone on the bench, smiling kindly and chewing gum.
His football was attacking, his coaching style relaxed and based on technique. Each training session started with players pairing up and kicking the ball back and forth to each other for several minutes. His interventions were rare and gnomic. "A ball alone doesn't make the goal," he would say in his broken English. "Gotta shoot the ball."
Since Puskas was not driving, Postecoglou began to act not only as his interpreter, but also as his driver, giving him the opportunity for long conversations about football. The most important thing he learned, Postecoglou said, was that by "having a unified locker room, a locker room that cared about something beyond the outcome, you can create something special."
That seems like a fundamental point, but in a world obsessed with data, with passing lanes and half-spaces, with technocrats and analysts, it's worth repeating: a big part of a coach's job is human management. The humanity that Postecoglou projects is a central part of his approach. During the recent injury crisis he has been able to call on fringe players who would have been left out under previous regimes.
Puskas came from an era before pressing was universal and denounced attackers who retreated. How much Postecoglou could have learned from him tactically is debatable. Yet they clearly share an attacking ethos, and something even more nebulous but perhaps more important for Tottenham.
For England, the road to victory at the 1966 World Cup began in 1953 with the 6-3 defeat to Puskas' Hungary at Wembley. That forced the English game to reevaluate its tactical assumptions, leading to the radicalism of Bill Shankly, Don Revie and Alf Ramsey. Ramsey had played as a full-back in the 6-3 and always rejected the widespread claim that English football had been defeated by continental sophistication. Hungary, he pointed out, was simply practicing a variation of the push-and-run game used by the Tottenham side for whom he played.
Ramsey was never keen to say that anything good had come from abroad, but here he had a point: Arthur Rowe, who had guided Tottenham to the league title in 1950-51, would have taken a job in Hungary if he had not the start of the competition had begun. WWII. There was a philosophical congruence there that went back to Jimmy Hogan and Peter McWilliam and the spread of the Scottish passing game.
Football history is a mass of these overlapping threads. The idea that clubs have a unique style is often misleading. But there is a link. By turning to a manager from the other side of the world, Tottenham, through Rowe, Puskas and Ramsey, have reconnected with the philosophy that made them great seventy years ago. If there is such a thing as club DNA, Postecoglou could be the perfect coach for them.
