Something on Ange that I don’t see get discussed much (and that I think does him a disservice) is this idea that he should have adjusted more. But that is to misunderstand what exactly was ever going to make him successful to the extent that he wanted to be.
The thing with Ange, is that he has such unwavering belief in a system and principles of play, that he was never going to compromise completely on them. Nick Montgomery talks about this in an interview with an Aussie paper last week. He did adjust, but he could have adjusted more at the risk to the long term belief in the system and principles that he was building around, and that he hoped to get back to properly in his third season.
It’s like this: his system requires immense bravery and immense belief in it to carry off. The benefit is once everyone is locked in with it, it can lead to outsized results way beyond expectations. It requires doing something that no other team would be willing to dare to do, in order to get greater results than they thought possible. This is why players joined after speaking to him, and this is why they stayed behind him. It was belief in a bigger idea and something they were working towards.
If he compromised on that even more, it calls into question everything he was building towards. He absolutely did adjust the system for most of the last season, but as Montgomery says they didn’t fully adjust the principles. The reason being if you abandon them to be more pragmatic, just to fight your way back up to maybe 12th position, then it’s very difficult to go back there. You can’t ask the players to be braver than they’ve ever been as a non negotiable, and you can’t build a spirit around this idea that you are brave, if you are shown you are willing to abandon those principles yourself.
It’s this third prong that I don’t see talked about enough in discussion about our league form. It’s injuries, which lead to a focus on the Europa as the only way we can win something out of the season. But then it’s also caring about the long term plan he has with the team, and not wanting to abandon that. I have no doubt he could have been more pragmatic, and won a few more league games, but getting the players to adhere to extreme bravery in the next season would have then been the question. ETH abandoned a lot of his principles to be more pragmatic with United, and they looked bereft of identity. I see a lot of people saying Frank’s mix of ‘nice football most of the time, but pragmatic when he needs to be’ is the perfect mix for us at Spurs, as if it’s some cheat code that Ange or anyone else hasn’t thought of. It’s not a cheat code, it’s just another coaching choice with its own trade offs. We’ll have plenty of games where we don’t break teams down, but we’ll almost certainly be back in the top six at a minimum.
I was massively in favour of Ange because I liked his idea. That we were going to stand toe to toe with the biggest teams and try to win. That once he could have a settled side, with a deep enough experienced squad that knew how to play this way, we could really push beyond our place in the food chain in the same way we did with Poch. But we gave up on that. And it seems to me because either ENIC didn’t understand what Ange’s goal was with his decision making. Or that he was too much of a risk taker for them. They want the near certainty of top six money, not the riskier decisions that might ultimately lead us to getting more than that.
