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Big Ange thread

zimbos05 said:
Spurs fans cheering Ange's bad run of things piss me off. He won them their first trophy in such a long time. Yes, league form was not ideal, but the delusion among the fans is on a whole new level.
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They’ve also gone super early on Frank. A handful of games in and he’s Pep 2.0

I’m convinced Spurs fans care more about being part of the Top 4 aristocracy than they do about winning silverware.
 
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zimbos05 said:
Spurs fans cheering Ange's bad run of things piss me off. He won them their first trophy in such a long time. Yes, league form was not ideal, but the delusion among the fans is on a whole new level.
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Spurs fans are victims and perpetual losers. They should be build a Colossus of Rhodes statue outside of their ground of Ange because it's the last time they're winning anything.
 
onedaywinners... said:
I mean these are the exact same fans that were drooling all over Ange and his football when he went the first 10 games unbeaten in the league.

I’ll say it again the best thing about Ange being sacked by Spurs is I will never cheer them to another win again. Shitful football club.
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Agreed, except of course Ill cheer them on against Forrest.... great football club, shit owner :)
 
Yeah owner appears to be a dodgy prick, but what is good for Ange is ultimately good for Australian football so I say Go Ange!
 

From Friday's Times


Ange-ball trumps Parker’s clean sheets in era of entertainment


James Gheerbrant


Ferenc Puskas, the great forward for Hungary and Real Madrid, contributed to some of the monumental scorelines of football’s early modern era: the 6-3 humbling of England at Wembley in 1953, the 7-3 triumph against Eintracht Frankfurt in the 1960 European Cup final, the 8-3 victory over West Germany at the 1954 World Cup.

When, in later life, he went to Australia and assumed the management of an awestruck South Melbourne team, he was not about to spread a gospel of caution and denial. “His outlook on football [was] to outscore the opposition,” Ange Postecoglou later remembered, “[to] win 5-4 every week and enjoy it.”

Whether Postecoglou’s carrying-on of this philosophy is a matter of deliberate emulation or unconscious osmosis, it is a statistical fact that no manager of the Premier League era has presided over such riotous matches. As he begins his second spell in English football, his 77 league games have had an average of 3.47 goals, comfortably ahead of any other manager. Last season Tottenham Hotspur scored 64 league goals and let in 65: no team in the English top flight had scored and conceded as many as 64 goals since Southampton in 1986-87, when the season was 42 games long.

When Tottenham beat Manchester United 4-3 in the Carabao Cup quarter-final last December and Postecoglou crowed “Are you not entertained?”, he did not, as most managers would have done, disown the looseness of the defensive performance, but instead, with an encompassing sweep of his ringmaster’s arm, claimed authorship of the whole, and came thrillingly and almost transgressively close to admitting a perverse pride that his team had shipped three.

After being sacked by Tottenham in the summer, it has not taken long for Postecoglou to fall into new employment. He was the first choice of the club who finished ten places above Spurs last season. Which raises the question: is it better, all other things being equal, to be a manager whose teams score lots and concede lots, than one whose teams tend to produce few goals at either end? As Nottingham Forest prepare to face Scott Parker’s Burnley tomorrow, it feels a timely question to ask.

Parker’s promotion campaign with Burnley last season was extraordinary for the opposite reason. With 69 goals scored and just 16 conceded, their 46 Championship games averaged only 1.85 goals per game, the thirdlowest figure for any club in the past 20 secondtier seasons. The announcer on Final Score, reading out Burnley’s results, uttered the word “nil” 44 times. Understandably, they have not been able to keep a lid on things to quite the same extent in the Premier League, but Sunday’s 1-0 defeat by Liverpool, in which Burnley touched the ball once in the attacking box but came within seconds of winning a point, showed the tilt of their priorities.

Rather than inviting fire with fire, like Postecoglou, Parker has tapped into a much more old-school way of management: a defence-first mentality that places pride in the job well done of a clean sheet above all else. He has spoken about instilling “defensive values”: the collective responsibility to suppress chances and how it “gives you a foundation and a platform”.

Yet the response to what he wrought at Burnley last season was fascinating. In February, midway through a season in which they were promoted with 100 points and broke several historic defensive records, BBC Sport published a selection of opinions from Burnley fans. Some were fully behind Parker’s MO — “I love it, it’s like watching Football Italia”, “Going to every game believing you’re not going to concede is amazing” — but there were plenty who felt the end did not justify the means: “Worst style of football I’ve seen under any manager, leads to no atmosphere at Turf Moor”, “It’s made me want to watch paint dry”, “I’ve never been so happy to give up my season ticket”.

It is not easy, these days, to be one of those managers who hero the zero. Fair play to the Football Italia-loving Burnley fan, but tastes and expectations have changed significantly since Fabio Capello won AC Milan the Scudetto in 1994 with a goal difference, in 34 games, of 36-15, and walked into the Real Madrid job two years later.

Sean Dyche, for my money one of the best pound-for-pound managers in English football in the past 15 years, left Everton in January with by far the lowest combined goals for/against in the Premier League, and unlike Postecoglou has not bounced back. Graham Potter also seems to be running out of lives as a top-flight manager, and although there are very legitimate grounds for discontent at West Ham United, it’s fair to wonder if the reserve of goodwill towards him might not have run so dry if his matches weren’t, from a goals point of view, among the least exciting of any coach in the Premier League era.

Thiago Motta was briefly rated among the most promising managers in Europe for his work at Bologna, but when his Juventus team drew 0-0 with Club Bruges on a Champions League match day when the other eight matches had 33 goals (the ninth scoreless draw he had overseen in a span of 38 matches at Juventus and Bologna), one frustrated goalophile tweeted a screenshot of that day’s scores with the words “people have been sent to Siberian work camps for less than Motta”. Like Dyche, Motta hasn’t been seen since.

That football should endeavour to be entertaining is, I think, a truth more universally acknowledged now than at any point in the sport’s recent history. Since the Premier League adopted a 38-game calendar in 1995, there have been eight instances of a team scoring and conceding 60 or more goals; seven have occurred in the past three seasons. When Borussia Dortmund conceded two stoppagetime goals on Tuesday to draw 4-4 with Juventus, their sporting director, Sebastian Kehl, was not fuming, but sanguine. “Both teams played outstandingly well in the second half,” he said. “It was fantastic for the spectators.”

Ticket prices, of course, have risen and risen, and so perhaps it follows that the idea of what constitutes giving fans their money’s worth has moved too. There was once a link between the working-class-ness of football’s audience and the emphasis on work rate and defensive industry in the spectacle: Dyche, one of the few modern managers to come at the game from this angle, often spoke about wanting to imbue his sides with hard graft and discipline, so that the fans would see in their team values that they recognised.

But when I interviewed Julian Nagelsmann in 2017, he offered, by way of a mission statement, an interesting inversion of this logic: “In the current moment, where money is so important, where people have to work several jobs to make a living,” he said, “I always have the aspiration that spectators should go away from our games thinking, ‘That was a nice game to watch.’ I stand strongly for the fact that we take risks and play with courage.” Sometimes, though, on the tail of this desire to entertain, a certain slapdashness creeps in. For the really dominant teams in Europe’s more lopsided leagues, the truth is that they can basically afford it. The evolution of Bayern Munich’s goal difference in recent seasons offers a persuasive tracing of this trend. In the five Bundesliga seasons between 2011 and 2016, they averaged a goal difference of 86-20 in 34 games. In the four seasons between 2016 and 2020, it was 92-29. In the past five seasons (including two when Nagelsmann was in charge), it has been 96-39, and their last managerial hire was Parker’s Burnley predecessor Vincent Kompany, coming off a Premier League season in which they let in 2.1 goals a game.

We are in danger of losing the art of battening down a game — the art of Capello and Arrigo Sacchi and George Graham and José Mourinho in his pomp — because we no longer value it.

Ange-ball, with its licence to thrill, its virtual guarantee of goals, its centre backs in the centre circle, stands at the opposite extreme. But in the wider picture, I can’t help thinking that Parker is the one marooned on the halfway line, defending a swathe of football-thinking against a rushing tide, adrift in a centre that cannot hold.
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Read my "wet dream" bullshit out. Remember that powerball is a 1 in 134 million chance so there is always a miniscule chance.

Ange goes on a 10 game losing streak. Fat Vang chucks a flabby belly wobbly and fires the souvlaki Ange. Fat Vang thinks, well I did well with a Pork'n'cheese manager last time, so I'll find another one.

In a parallel football universe, the dispute between Palmeiras manager the Pork'n'cheese Abel Ferreira and owner Leila Pereira reaches a crescendo with the manager being shown the door after his contract expires in December. Fat Vang swoops in and signs the Pork'n'cheese Ferreira.

Ange with his two payouts in his pocket, reads through the G&G forum for shits and giggles and comes across my posts about Big Ange to Palmeiras. Ange thinks to himself, that "YdF malaka" is pretty left field but you never know if you don't go. Ange's agent contacts Leila who has a partial affinity for things Australian and Ange is signed as manager for Palmeiras.

Upon signing Ange takes Palmeiras to the Paulista undefeated, smashes Serie A 2026 by 30 points and rips apart those argentine midgets in the Libertadores.

I wake up, check my loins and remember Ive been married for 30 years so I know it was just a dream.
 
Some changes to the line up in Burnley. Bench is thin.
 
Very early goal for Forest. Just what they needed. I've got Esteve starting in fantasy...
 
Currently 1-1 between Forest and Burnley near the end of second half regulation time. As it stands Ange will earn his first point in the league as head coach but will still be winless.
 
Forest squad looks very thin. I think there are some injuries. About 18 months ago they had 40 or so players. I think regardless of manager teams like this can suffer post season success syndrome. Maybe they'll fare well in Europe but have a mediocre league season.

Ange with a few changes already so he may have identified one or two who've pissed him off.
 
I wouldn't be suprised if they beat Betis. I know recent form doesn't suggest so but often in early Ange tenures there is a game where everything clicks from the start and this fixture might be the one where the squad feels the pressure drop away slightly and they release the shackles.

Agree that a loss here puts immense pressure on the Sunderland game...something that history has shown almost always brings out the best in Ange.
 
Just watched the Burnley Forrest highlights. If not for Dubravka could have been 3/4-1 to Forrest in the end.

Burnley have been stubborn this season so far so a point on the road isn’t so bad early on.

I can see Ange’s fingerprints all over the attacking play already. On to Europe next.
 
riquelmes_laces said:
They’ve also gone super early on Frank. A handful of games in and he’s Pep 2.0

I’m convinced Spurs fans care more about being part of the Top 4 aristocracy than they do about winning silverware.
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Yeah, I don't think they are anywhere near as good as they think they are. They have had a relatively easy run of games so far. Wait til October where they have to play UCL games and deal with top 6 teams.
 
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