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Congratulations on your well deserved award. We spoke to Matt O’Riley earlier, he’s only been here a few weeks yet already he’s proving to be integral in how your team plays within your system, the amount of chances he’s created so far and in how well he’s worked with Liel and Josip down the right hand side has the fans very excited. How do you feel he has settled in and what are your hopes for him this season?

He’s settled in outstandingly well and whenever I bring a player in I have a fair bit of confidence in what we are bringing in will fit what we’ve already got here. It is a little bit more difficult at the start because you are still putting it all together.

During the January window, I knew what we needed and the kind of player we needed in terms of the characteristics. When I looked at all the underlying stuff Matt was a standout candidate for us and the little bit of the unknown was how quickly was he going to adjust or settle in and if he was going to understand the environment he has gotten into.

That bit is a credit to him as he has walked in and embraced the challenge and loved the challenge and it says a lot about him as a person that he is loving it. He loves the fact that this is a different level and there is more expectation and he is at a club with big ambitions. His performance against theRangers was outstanding as he went into that game with an injury and to be fair to him I didn’t think he would play but again he just got on with it and got out there and was outstanding.

Monday was the first time in a very long time that many of us were able to go to bed at a reasonable hour at the end of the transfer window. We were very content in the signings that we’d brought in. Can you enlighten us on the recruitment process and how it has developed in a short time and how you can identify a talent like Matt?

It was a good transfer window for us and I said all along I kind of knew what we needed. Michael (Nicholson) and the board supported me in the vision I had for January and we were on it early. The key part for me was doing our business early. I did not want to bring players in on the last day of the window when they take a couple of weeks to get going and integrated. That’s four or five games for us. Coming out of the winter break, I still knew we were short of players so to get the guys in early from Japan after identifying them in the summer, I knew we could get them in January if we worked really hard on it.

Matt was a unique case where things fell into place and he was one that I was really keen to bring in the timing worked perfectly and we could move quickly and get the deal done in a couple of days as that was important to me. Any other deal that would have taken more than a couple of days I backed out of as it would not have served our purpose for what we need right now which is guys coming in and ready to play and contribute. We didn’t want players to take three games to get going as we had to perfect again from the restart.

Moving forward I am really confident that we will have a structure in place that will allow us to work through these windows and there will always be challenges that are not to say that at times on deadline day we will still be doing business but I just feel that we can work a bit more methodically in the transfer window to get our business right.

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Well done on the award and the Derby win. Many observers have been impressed by your work in the transfer market. A lot of the focus has been on the Japanese players but you have signed players from the Russian, Polish, Israeli, English and Irish leagues. What are the three key factors that make up an Ange Postecoglou signing?

It’s a hard one for me to define and not because I feel I will be giving away secrets. I often tell the story and I may bore people but I will tell it anyway. I went to Clairefontaine which is France’s academy of football where they produced some of their greatest players. I spent a week there in early 2000. They went through an identification process and I was really keen to understand what they saw in players and how they identified them. They had fifty or sixty 15 year-olds in the building and I was coming from Australia and I looked at them and I thought all of them were outstanding.

I thought how do you pick ten out of this it is ridiculous as I would have taken all of them. I kept asking questions as I really wanted defined parameters of what they were looking for. An exact science. There were some things in there that they spoke about skill, physical ability and benchmarks but I still wasn’t satisfied because they weren’t giving me what I wanted and finally there was a coach who had been there for the last 25 years and he was getting sick of me asking questions and he wanted me to shut up.

He leaned over and in his dismissive French way and he said in French and luckily I had an interpreter and he said: “Look, I just know”. What he was trying to say to me was that he had been doing the job for 25 years and he had seen enough of young talent coming through to know instinctively if they fit. There is a little bit of that in me and in the last 25 years, I have had a clear idea of how I want my football teams and players to play.

When I look at a player I probably look at them differently from everyone else. There are some physical stuff and football characteristics that you look for but there is something in me that when I look at a footballer and I analyse him I can see him playing in my team and that is always the biggest factor for me as you can imagine there is that many talented footballers around the world and they could give you 10 different players from different countries and they are all unbelievable footballers but I am looking for the one that will fit.

Can he play as a full-back in my team? Can he play as a centre-back in my team? That helps my process because I have a real clear idea of what I want. There is nothing to suggest that people will be satisfied and that we have a formula but it is something that works for me.

You were asked after theRangers game was it beyond your wildest dreams, your answer was ‘you don’t know what I dream of’. Can I ask you football-wise, what do you dream of?

I would have preferred if he had been more specific. It was why I enjoyed the other night. I love those experiences. I love what football does to people, players, supporters. I love what those special moments are. The more I can collect on the journey the more my dreams are fulfilled. These are little pockets of time where you go jeez that will still be with me forever and if it stays with me forever, it will stay with the people I share it with forever.

That’s where it is. I have never been one to say I want to have ‘x’ amount of titles or ‘x’ amount of achievements whether that be individual or collective. For me to stay in my role for as long as I have, I have had to be successful and it drives me every day because I love winning things and creating those special moments. You can find that just meeting a person and football brings you into that space where you meet someone that inspires you and you share a moment.

They are pretty simplistic dreams and they are non-defined which gets me up in the morning chasing the next one.