Postecoglou ready and waiting to confound expectations at Spurs

SYDNEY : Ange Postecoglou has spent his coaching life confounding those who underestimate him and the social media campaign against him becoming Tottenham Hotspur manager was unlikely to bother him too much.

The 57-year-old, who is expected to be confirmed as Tottenham boss, has enjoyed success pretty much wherever he has coached over the last 26 years.

Although raised in Australia where oval ball codes rule the roost, Greek-born Postecoglou is a passionate football man with firm, unchanging ideas of how the game should be played.

"My vision is I want to play football everyone talks about and with that, hopefully, we will have success as well," he said in 2020 when explaining how he built a championship-winning team at Yokohama F Marinos.

That 2019 success in the J.League, the toughest league in Asia, was by no means his first title but gave him enough credibility to land the job at Celtic in 2021.

His appointment at Parkhead was widely mocked, with former Scotland striker turned radio pundit Alan Brazil leading the charge when he scoffed that the news must be "a wind up".

Brazil was happy to eat humble pie 11 months later after Celtic won the League Cup and Scottish Premiership title, likening the move to Arsenal's appointment of the little-known Arsene Wenger in 1996.

Three more trophies followed this season at Celtic and the treble was wrapped up on Saturday when Inverness Caledonian Thistle were beaten 3-1 in the Scottish Cup final at Hampden Park.

"When I came here ... the opportunity for me was that the team had been dismantled so ... I could really build a team in the image of the football I wanted to play," Postecoglou said.

"The risk was, if I got it wrong, it would be a disaster. Fortunately, I got it right."

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