Ange's Declining Main Character Energy 📉

If you promise not to tell anyone, I have a confession to make: I quite like the international break. More than that, in fact. As frustrating as the club season grinding to a sudden halt can be, I find the staccato rhythm of these first three months quite useful. Each segment of four games, plus a couple of European weeks, offers a window into what is to come; we glimpse the season that is about to unfold in sections, rather than having to understand its form all at once.

So: what have we seen? We mentioned the vibe shift at the summit last week. More pertinent still, I think, is what seems to be a pretty significant and fairly widespread shift in style. The Premier League, in particular, is now a place of set pieces, of set presses, of strength and power and a more direct style than has been popular for the last decade or more.

The explanation for this is, as far as I can tell, wondrously layered and beautifully complex. It touches on technology and on culture. It is connected to ownership – the Premier League is an increasingly American place – but it is also rooted in the growing prominence of analysts. It is a result of football knowing more about itself than it has before. It is to do with competition, and the spread of best practice, and the need to find whatever edge is available in an increasingly finely-balanced world. There are beneficiaries of that shift, and there are victims. This week, I’ve been thinking about someone who might fall into the latter camp.

Perhaps, in time, we will come to realize that Ange Postecoglou’s fatal flaw was believing in himself too much. It is exactly a month since the Australian agreed to take charge at Nottingham Forest, and yet there is already an inescapable sense that the curtain is falling. In public, some sections of the club’s fanbase have already called for change. In private, prospective replacements are starting to maneuver. When it ends, how it ends remains unclear. That it will, and soon, seems inevitable.

Results, needless to say, have not been great. Postecoglou has overseen seven games since succeeding Nuno Espírito Santo. He has won none of them. He has only drawn two: a creditable point away at Real Betis in the Europa League, and a less creditable one at newly-promoted Burnley in the Premier League. There was a humiliating defeat in the Carabao Cup, and a bitterly disappointing one in the club’s first home game in Europe for a generation. Forest’s squad is very obviously too deep, too good to be worrying about relegation. Forest’s form, and its position in the nascent Premier League table, say otherwise.

It was not exactly difficult to see this coming. It is hard to think of two more diametrically-opposed managers than Postecoglou, an attacking ideologue, and Nuno, an unapologetic counter-puncher. Quite why Evangelos Marinakis, Forest’s bombastic owner, thought swapping one for the other with the season already underway was a good idea is anyone’s guess. 

Responsibility for what has unfolded since, then, should lie squarely with everyone’s favorite Greek shipping magnate. He is the one who has had a throne installed at the City Ground, in order to allow him to watch games in the style to which he is accustomed. He is the one who took credit for the club’s rise from the Championship to the cusp of the Champions League. He is the one, then, who should take the blame for setting Forest on precisely the opposite journey.

It is striking, then, how so much of the reaction to Forest’s sudden demise has focused on Postecoglou, both among the club’s fans and the hot take industrial complex. He must take personal responsibility for accepting a hospital pass, of course; he can be legitimately criticized for ignoring the very obvious pitfalls in Marinakis’ offer last month. He is, though, far more a consequence of Forest’s problems than a cause. He did not force Marinakis to fall out with Nuno. He simply took a job he believed he could do.

That he has not been presented as such is instructive. Somehow, it is only two years since Postecoglou was the bright, hopeful, thoroughly modern face of the Premier League. He was, in his early days at Tottenham, almost a voice of moral authority: humble, grounded, emotionally intelligent. He stood for something: not just his playing principles, but a clear-eyed perspective on the Premier League’s hype and nonsense, too.

The difference, now, is stark. That Forest’s fans have not welcomed him is probably not hard to explain; lots of people might find it hard to bond with their large Australian stepdad. That there should be at least a little group chat glee about his travails is a little harder to understand. At some point over the last two years, Postecoglou went from a figure of general acclaim to an object of scorn.

There are a few possible explanations as to why. One is the extreme wattage exposure that comes with a high-profile role in the Premier League drama: two years in its intense glare is enough not just to pick out but to amplify every single one of an individual’s flaws. Another is that the league, as noted above, has undergone a silent but significant shift: English football seems to have turned against ideologues. We are in a post-principle age. Postecoglou’s way of playing belongs to a different, if not distant, era.

It is worth considering, too, whether Postecoglou is not quite the same character he was. The openness that characterized his early days at Spurs has been absent for a while; he has tended for some time to engage with the media, at least, with his eyes cast to the floor and a very obvious disdain for the whole exercise. People hate journalists, of course, and that’s fine. But it is in those interactions that the public form an impression of a manager. Their body language speaks volumes.

But my personal theory is slightly different. Even by the standards of a manager of one of the traditional Big Six, Postecoglou was a headline act. He was intriguing, not just because of his circuitous career and his avowed beliefs of how the game should be played, but because he was Australian. He was compelling, unusually willing to make himself a hostage to fortune, a sort of rolling experiment into how football worked. He was volatile, enigmatic, always on the edge of something. 

He was, regardless of what was happening, a Main Character in a way that some of his peers – Arne Slot, Enzo Maresca, Unai Emery – were not. 

That comes at a cost, one that he has been paying in the month since he arrived in Nottingham. People take sides on the Premier League’s central figures, Postecoglou is no different. He is a magnet for strong opinions, ones that form, solidify and tend to grow harder with time. (In this, his closest parallel is one of his possible replacements, Rafa Benítez.)

At Spurs, every week seemed to bring a sort of referendum on Postecoglou, his ability, his ideas, his beliefs. That might, just about, have been fair. At Forest, it almost certainly is not; the club’s plight is not of his making. But that is not how it works. Postecoglou is a Main Character. The story, like it or not, is about him.

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Until last week, there were two glaring holes in my journalistic résumé. I have never been to a game at Forest. I’ve been to the City Ground, on the banks of the Trent, but I’ve never been inside it. It is, as things stand, the only Premier League stadium I’ve not visited at least once. Deep down, I feel this is essentially unacceptable for someone in my line of work.

The fact I’d never been to Wrexham had been starting to be a similar source of shame, given all that has happened at the Stōk Cae Ras in the last five years. (There are three other Championship grounds missing from my list: Bristol City, Portsmouth, Sheffield Wednesday. I feel bad about them, too.) Thankfully, I had the chance to put that right over the weekend, thanks to Britain’s Documentary Derby: Wrexham’s game with the team now rebadged as Tom Brady’s Birmingham. 

The modern Wrexham has an interesting dynamic. Outside the stadium, there are groups of smiling tourists – largely North American, but not exclusively – visibly excited at finding themselves on set (this must be how it feels, I think), mingling with more longstanding Wrexham fans, faces set against the wind and the rain, whose world has changed beyond recognition ever since Rob and Ryan appeared in their midst.

These two groups have come to fandom in markedly different ways. For the former, it is a romantic, almost deliberate choice. For the latter – as it does for most legacy fans – it will often feel like a form of punishment. To support a team for a long period of time is, in effect, to endure long periods of disappointment in the hope of brief spells of something that is close to but not quite joy.

The operating assumption, I think, has always been that there is a tension there, that at some point the interests of the two elements will diverge. Maybe the documentary will end, and the new arrivals will melt away, charmed by someone new; as always, the traditional fanbase will remain, left to pick up the pieces of what once was all alone.

Talking to those fans who had made the pilgrimage, though, I’m not sure that’s true. The affection for Wrexham will, I think, endure, at least for some. It does not feel like a passing fancy. And that is significant far beyond north Wales, as soccer wrestles with how to view its millions of relatively newly-formed global fans. Maybe how you come to support a team does not really matter, once the synapses have been fused together, the connection forged, the bond sealed.

Rog and Rory break down a huge week in Premier League football that saw Liverpool lose back-to-back league games for the first time under Arne Slot. They discuss Arsenal’s undramatic win over West Ham and what that signals for their title chase, wonder how far Thomas Frank can take Tottenham, and ask if Manchester United are FINALLY on the right track. Plus, Rog wonders if Jack Grealish is actually an angel sent down to lead Everton to glory. Watch on YouTube or listen here.

Thanks to all of those of you who have shared your many and varied journeys into fandom: some of the explanations are delightful, and make my decision to support teams who wear maroon seem like a monument to cool-headed logic.

My favorite, I think, is Paul Brooks, who has nursed a soft spot for Feyenoord because “a girl I had a crush on in college was from Rotterdam, and Ajax seemed too obvious.” Grant Downes’ explanation for selecting Nottingham Forest was great, too. “I like the idea of the Midlands,” he wrote. “Someplace that’s just known for being in-between.” Maybe that’s what Evangelos Marinakis thought. Please keep them coming, though. It is sociologically fascinating.

On another subject: I really cannot express my gratitude to Tim Mason enough. I’ve had an uneasy feeling around set-pieces for a while that I haven’t quite been brave enough to put into words. Partly because it applies largely to Arsenal, and I wasn’t sure if I was just being partisan. And partly because I wondered if perhaps I was just being naive, and had not brushed up on my Laws of the Game sufficiently.

My suspicion was that what we now call ‘blocking’ – attacking players obstructing defenders while having no obvious intention of playing the ball – is actually a foul. You will be able to guess from the fact I am now mentioning it that Tim has found evidence to suggest I am right. “When did obstruction go the way of traveling in the NBA,” he asked.

The rules, he writes, forbid “moving into the opponent’s path to obstruct, block, slow down or force a change in direction when the ball is not within playing distance of either player.” And yet lots of teams, but admittedly principally Arsenal, now seem to deploy these methods so often that it seems a reasonable assumption it is a deliberate, trained tactic. “Is the rule simply no longer enforced, or is the chaos in the box on set pieces too much for the referee, two assistants and the multiple sets of eyes at Stockley Park to detect?”

It is, Tim, a great question. It’s one I can’t answer, but it is an important one. I don’t want to sound too puritanical, but it’s not a coincidence that soccer grew exponentially popular around the world at a time when its emphasis was on open, attacking play. I’m not convinced the focus on set-pieces is necessarily in the game’s best interests, and blocking is a significant tool in that.

That’s all for this week. As ever, please do get in touch at [email protected] if you have a question, an idea, a quibble or find yourself reliving the lost romances of your youth through Anderlecht or Brondby or CSKA Sofia or someone and wish to let the world know. Also if you are Paul’s Dutch college crush, let us know.

Enjoy your weekend,
Rory