Some thoughts to share, starting back at the eve of Ange's first season, offering bullet points reasons behind what has been going on (from my perspective anyway) and concluding with why it is 'Ange In' for me...
1. He lost Harry Kane on the eve of his first Prem match in charge. I will spare you the goal stats; you can look them up and see what that immediately took away.
2. He was not given a replacement/time to sign one.
3. He was given a remit to be part of a CLUB-ORCHESRATED cultural change in both attitude and operation, which included bringing in new people above him to work between him and Levy.
4. The Chelsea match saw some bad luck. It also saw him take a stand; whether you liked that stand is personal choice.
5. The combination of World Cup hangover fatigue merged with pre-season and international tournaments meant that as we got into the New Year 2024, fatigue was starting to bed in.
6. NEVER forget, elements of our support base were so obsessed with allowing City to beat us so as to ensure the goons did not win the title. Postecoglu was visibly taken aback by it. Toxic vibes everywhere. Those three points cost us CL football.
7. Postecoglu and the staff/club made some mistakes coming into this season, both in terms of recruitment and planning. He has been very open about how pre-season should've been conducted differently in hindsight. Players such as Romero, off the back of yet another grueling summer tournament, needed a softer early season landing.
8. Despite trying early season rotation, the accumulation of overall football for several years led to an increase in injuries.
9. Once 'packs' of injuries happened, combined with the inexperience of our squad overall, the transfer window was vital. That injury crisis, BTW, was unique and unlike anything we will see again IMO.
10. Nobody expected a Vicario injury, and Forster was not the right backup. This was a major mistake made in the summer (not signing the right sort of backup), who knows exactly who was at fault there, but it cost us (to my mind) at least 9 points.
11. We only partially addressed our issues in January. Kinsky? Excellent signing. Tel? Potentially great but never going to be a short term bail out. We stuck with our remit as a club from summer 2023.
12. Once Postecoglu saw what the state of play was in the window, and once we lost to Liverpool in the CC, he has explained what some of us assumed, that he made a decision to focus on one tournament which would deliver both a trophy and CL football.
13. Some have questioned why he couldn't fight on two fronts from Feb onwards. I'm sure the reasons will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead, but put simply, between long-lay off players coming back and being rusty, to rotating in players who had not spent much time training with each other for some time due to said-injuries, to trying to protect the blue-chip players who he could absolutely rely on, he made the decision to focus on one competition.
14. Most teams in our pitiful league position would've seen mutiny within the dressing room by March. Indeed, the much venerated 'winner' Jose Mourinho managed to explode the dressing room so badly that he got sacked before a Final (yes, he really f-uc-king DID). Our dressing room went the opposite way, with players closing ranks despite the best efforts of pundits and journos to drag bits of gossip and back-talking out of them.
15. Postecoglu had been quietly tweaking his 'Angeball' for a few months from February; the media were so obsessed with how 'out of control' we were that they refused to acknowledge it.
16. Make no mistake; league performances were largely sloppy and (in a few specific cases) absolutely unacceptable with regards to the players. For the most part, we paid the price for silly individual errors, and lost the vast majority of our games by a single goal margin. again, there were certainly some awful performance in there, no argument.
17. You sensed by the time we played Frankfurt that the players buy-in with Postecoglu was pretty big. And as we've seen in the last two months, it has grown into something, well, historic for us.
18. We have seen that Postecoglu took an incredibly ballsy gamble, asked the players to buy-in, got their buy-in, and in doing so, both got rewarded for their efforts by winning the Europa League and getting into the CL. In doing so, and in taking THIS specific path with this group of players, it is hard not to assume that there has been a fortification and establishment of something very special in terms of belief. The buy-in will remain total in whatever he wants them to do. Providing we back him as HE wants to be backed, we should IMO persevere next season.
Ange in.
p.s. Ferguson was on the verge of the sack when he won the cup with Utd in 89/90. They finished their league season 13th, just 5 points above the relegation zone.
