Spurs' Ange Postecoglou is a good call for England next manager - but he could well hang up the phone

Ange Postecoglou clearly didn’t want to be drawn when asked about a Daily Telegraph report linking him with the vacant England manager’s position, but in an age when even the faintest whiff of interest in another job is viewed as teetering towards the treasonous, his response to media questions was hardly the flattest denial imaginable.

“I was having a nap this afternoon, I have no idea,” the Spurs coach quipped when asked if he’d seen the report. “I’m the Tottenham manager and I’m determined to bring success to this club. That’s where my focus is, totally.”

It’s the sort of response that, although hardly encouraging The FA to get in touch, didn’t exactly sound like a complete rejection of the concept. That said, the gruff and avuncular Australian usually seems to say precisely what he means, and reading between the lines is usually a waste of time with him – and his past experiences with international management back-up the face-value assertion that he would be sticking with his club.

Postecoglou managed the Australian national team for four years between 2013 and 2017, coaching them at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil (when they lost all three matches), winning his country’s first Asian Cup in 2015 and then earning qualification for the 2018 World Cup – only to step away just two weeks after booking Australia’s place in Russia.

“All this… has taken a toll on me both personally and professionally. I have invested all I can,” he told a press conference called following his resignation. “To coach your own country is the greatest privilege but it also has enormous responsibility. I feel now is the right time to pass on that responsibility to someone who will have the energy it requires.”

Describing the job of Australia head coach as “all-encompassing”, he suggested that he would take a break and spend some time with his family before returning to management – although in the end, he waited only a month before agreeing to take charge of Japanese side Yokohama F. Marinos. Either way, it appeared that the relentless pressure and scrutiny of international management had been hard for him to handle, as it has been for so many coaches.

Comments made in interviews since 2017, however, suggest there may have been more to it, and he has claimed more recently that his desire to change Australian football on a broader level met with resistance from the FFA and led to issues which soured his relationship with both his paymasters and the fans. A 2019 interview with The Herald Sun sheds some more light.

"What was driving me was trying to create something,” he said. “I knew it was going to be a tough ask to marry this idyllic view of how I wanted us to play football with the harsh reality of results. But I was confident I could do it. In the end I was the only one thinking that way. FFA weren’t, the board wasn’t... They thought, great fantastic, nice words, but we just want to qualify for the World Cup because if we don’t it’s a disaster for the game.

"Things happened behind the scenes, some issues around budgeting, we started taking money here and there, had some internal conflicts. Usual discussions about prioritising funds. Then a couple of results didn’t go our way, the public turns because of the commentary.”

His decision to leave the Australian role just months ahead of a second World Cup is important context for the idea of Postecoglou taking over from Gareth Southgate. It presents a question over whether he would want to make himself the subject of endless, often unhelpful national scrutiny again - and also asks The FA whether they want a manager who may want to enforce his own footballing vision for the English game, a job mostly undertaken by the technical director (currently John McDermott whose admiration for Postecoglou is supposedly the reason he is of interest to The FA) rather than by Southgate over the last eight years. Postecoglou is the kind of manager who seems to enjoy a certain degree of control that he may not be afforded with England.

Further context, of course, comes from the quality of the work he did in that job – earning Australia their first ever silverware outside of Oceania, winning 22 of his 49 matches, many of which were against teams with greater resources, and convincing many Australian pundits that they were on the cusp of a something of a golden generation thanks to the work he did developing their younger players. That promise didn’t come to fruition, but Postecoglou made a modestly-talented squad look better than it was for large parts of his tenure.

There is no doubt that Postecoglou is a fine manager. His work at home, in Japan and in Scotland with Celtic was largely beyond reproach and while his Spurs side may have seen their top four charge fall short amid weak form in the second half of the season, he still made the team fiercer, more aggressive and more competitive than they had been since the first months of José Mourinho’s tenure.

Would he make a good England manager? Why not? He likes to play adventurous, direct, compact football. He asks his team to play with a certain freedom and doesn’t want them bound to excessively disciplined positional strictures, which is the kind of football most of Southgate’s detractors were demanding throughout the European Championship. He has won four league titles on three different continents as well as winning the Asian Cup.

And it would help that he is, to put it in the most straightforward terms, not a d**khead. One of Southgate’s greatest achievements was detoxifying England’s atmospheric conditions, both in training camps and when around the media. The players seem to be having fun for the first time in living memory. Postecoglou’s directness probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he is personable, his players tend to love him and he is a fundamentally decent person. In a key area, he could offer a form of continuity.

He's also one of relatively few managers in top-level club football who wouldn’t necessarily have to take a pay cut to join England, something all too few people seem to think about when discussing possible future managers. Postecoglou earns a reported £5m per year at Spurs, which is roughly the maximum The FA could pay their next head coach. Jürgen Klopp, to pick an example of another ‘candidate’ whose names has been bandied about, earned four times that at Liverpool.

There is, when it comes down to it, just one good reason not to appoint Postecoglou as the next England manager – he probably doesn’t want to do it. For all that Southgate has made ‘The Impossible Job’ rather more manageable, the pressure and incessant scrutiny remain, as does the potential for the position to intrude upon every area of its incumbent’s personal life. Even if his frustration with a failure to push Australian football forward on an institutional level was a factor that was left unspoken at the time, it’s reasonable to assume that personal concerns still played an important role in his decision to step away. After all, he usually says what he means, even if he doesn’t necessarily say everything that he’s thinking.

Still, if for whatever reason he has a change of heart, he would be a fine addition to what looks likely to be a very strong shortlist for the job. If The FA judge that was this England team needs to reach its obvious potential is an injection of directness and an attacking mindset at the helm, then Postecoglou’s phone number is worth finding. Just don’t be surprised if he hangs up.