Listening to Ange Postecoglou describe the noise around Tottenham Hotspur’s season can feel like living in a world of extremes. The highs of Frankfurt and the lows of any number of recent Premier League games are just the part on the football pitch. The Spurs head coach used the word hysteria at one point, when describing the external voices passing comment on his side.
Within the football department we’ve tried to maintain a discipline about how we behave and keep the noise on the outside away from us, he reveals.
We came back from Frankfurt on a high and everyone was buzzing, then it was another disappointing game in the week [a 2-1 home defeat to Nottingham Forest] and that flips 180 degrees. From our perspective it’s really important we cocoon ourselves from it.
Easier said than done, surely? It’s not easy because as much as I can say to the players ‘block out the noise’, we all live in the outside world. If I could keep them locked up in here for the next month I’d be OK. What you look at is the behaviour of the players; the way they are training, the way they are talking. For the most part they are handling it pretty well.
What does irk Postecoglou is the idea that Spurs have reached this point where they could achieve European success, without meticulously building and preparing over the course of many weeks and months. He talks to the players about ‘The Stonecutter’s Credo’. It is an allegory from the Danish writer and photographer Jacob Riis:
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Sometimes people look at success and look at the tail end of it and don’t realise what’s gone into it, Postecoglou explains.
A lot of it is work that is unseen or seems like you are not really progressing. For us, as difficult as the season has been, a lot of it has been good for us in terms of building resilience and staying united.
I know that for us to break through and bring a trophy we are going to need bundles of that. We just need to keep banging away at the rock and hopefully on the 101st blow we will crack it.
That final blow represents a possible Europa League Final triumph.
It’s been a tough season, but if we can come out on top in Europe, it will all have been worth it. Success doesn’t always come easy, but it’s about staying consistent and doing the right things. That’s what I believe in, and that’s what I’ll continue to do.
Postecoglou’s journey has been a long one, filled with ups and downs, but he remains focused on the task at hand. With a sense of perspective and a determination to succeed, he is ready to see his mission through to the end.