As Ange Postecoglou’s face gazed down at him from the MCG scoreboard screen and 300 business folk hung on his every slightly jet-lagged word, he ruminated on how it was to be serenaded by Rod Stewart in Glasgow and Robbie Williams at Tottenham Hotspur . “It’s fair to say my life has changed a bit,” he said with characteristic dry humour. “I used to go to the pub and watch Cold Chisel play when I was here.
” Ange Postecoglou coaching Spurs against Liverpool this month. Credit: Getty Images Metamorphosis is true for him on the field as well as off. When his managerial odyssey began with South Melbourne in the now-defunct NSL in his early-30s, Postecoglou was answerable to his father, Jim – “a man of his generation, not too many kind words or cuddles” – and to a South Melbourne committee made up mostly of men from the Greek diaspora like his father.
“It’s fair to say the South Melbourne board was like 10 of my dads telling me every week what I’d done wrong,” he said. Jim died in 2018 and it should be noted that Postecoglou misses him every day. Now, having gone up the scales from Australia and the Socceroos through Japan and Celtic in Scotland’s famous Old Firm, he speaks to and for one of the world’s biggest clubs in arguably the world’s highest-profile football competition , the English Premier League.
He feels the eyeballs on him. “That the biggest difference,” he said. “To me, it’s still football.
The fundamentals are the same. But th.
