Ange Postecoglou has been linked with a potential vacancies at Everton and the Japan national team post World Cup over the last 24 hours. It’s really no more than an indication of of the impact that the Australian has made at Celtic and while his success so far has been limited to domestic football, if and when he starts to make an impact at Champions League level – which appears to be his priority – then the speculation is only going to intensify.
Front page of the Tokyo edition of Nikkan Sports: Japan’s national team head coach for the next cycle will either be Hajime Moriyasu reprising his role or a foreign coach, with Ange Postecoglou considered the frontrunner and tech director Sorimachi already having reached out. pic.twitter.com/KwJWIQC26G
— Dan Orlowitz (@aishiterutokyo) November 15, 2022
So we should get used to it and annoying as it is it’s clearly better than the position over at the other side of the city where Giovanni van Bronckhorst is hanging on desperately apparently it’s got something to do with the funds needed to pay him and his coaching staff off, but who knows, or cares?
Ange Postecoglou has made it clear that he wants to establish Celtic as a top Champions League side and knows that he’s going to have to chip away at that over a number of seasons. He’s already experienced football in Japan yet craved something that Celtic could give him and he’s already been to a World Cup with Australia so the idea of twiddling his thumbs after a tournament as Japan’s next manager would be unappealing.
Then there’s the link to Everton, where the shelf-life of their managers seem to reduce all the time and where to have any prospect of getting into the Champions League on a regular basis he’d have to get past so many clubs with that experience already, just to get into the competition once. Then he’d have to do it again.
Ange isn’t the youngest football manager out there and will know he’s got maybe a decade at the most to achieve his ambitions and he can do that at Celtic. So it’s maybe time for Celtic to pause for thought, look at his contract situation and give him a bumper new long-term deal that will benefit all parties – the Postecoglou family, Celtic Football club, the players and the supporters – and would in turn make to very expensive if (or when) a top Champions League club comes calling looking for Ange to move to them. That’s when we should be worried, not by Brighton, Wolves, Everton or the Japan national team managers job.
There are some quotes from Ange Postecoglou in today’s Daily Record where he talks about Celtic dominating the game in Scotland and compares that to the situation in Australia where there’s equality in resources and he explains why that frustrates him. He also talks about the Champions League campaign, losing in Madrid and the frustration of that Josip Juranovic missed penalty that was potentially the way back into the game that he was looking for.
It’s a decent insight into the way Ange thinks about his football and the Celtic are clearly lucky to have him as our manager. At the post match media conference on Saturday after the 2-1 win over Ross County, Matt Corr was present representing The Celtic Star. Matt gave Ange a copy of our new book The Celtic Rising ~ 1965: The Year Jock Stein Changed Everything and suggested it might make be something he’d enjoy reading on the long flight back to Australia. Ange was delighted at the gesture from Matt and it’s worth noting the similarities with Jock Stein taking over a shambles at Celtic and Ange doing the same all this years later.
Here’s some of what Ange has been saying in that piece in Daily Record this morning:
“If your goal is just to be the best house in your street but you live in a neighbourhood of thousands, you have to look beyond that. That’s not to disrespect the local competition. If anything, you hope that it raises the level.
“If we want to raise the level of Scottish football then our best clubs need to get bigger and stronger and hopefully that drags others up. Instead of just keeping the big clubs down and hope that it makes it better.
“I come from Australia where we love equalising sports. People here talk a lot about the disparity of budgets and how it is unfair and all that. In Australia, they go the opposite way, where everyone has the same salary cap, the same resources and the same way of recruiting everyone through a draft.
“Every team and supporter thinks they can win it and you know what? I got frustrated with that. Because if you want to get better you can’t. There are rules stopping you.
“What they do is bring the best down to an equilibrium. The way I am as a person is ‘Let’s make the best better and try to drag everyone else up’. The way that is going to happen in Scotland is for a club like ours to have their sights set on being a top Champions League club. If that means we dominate local competition then it challenges everyone else to be better. That has to be our goal.
“My responsibility is to this club. We have 60,000 fans here every week and millions around the world. Why shouldn’t they have success at Champions League level? That has to be my goal. If not then I am doing this job a disservice.”
On losing 5-1 in the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium: “I never doubted myself. I didn’t enjoy the experience, I was disappointed. How can you enjoy it? People say, ‘It’s Real Madrid, it’s the Bernabeu’ – but we lost 5-1.
“Within me, there was still a determination. We took some blows but we had to have determination to go again and be better next time. I was at the World Cup in 2014 and we were 2-0 down to Chile after 10 minutes in the opening game of our group.
“The whole world is watching and I am thinking, ‘This could be a long World Cup… you are totally exposed’. I learnt through that time that I didn’t lack self-belief. It wasn’t arrogance but I knew we could dig in. We lost 3-1 but it was a cracking game. Then we took on Holland, who had beaten Spain 5-0, and we lost 3-2.
“They are losses but at no stage did I think, ‘I wish I was somewhere else, this could end up embarrassing.’ At 2-0 against Real, I was thinking we had to get a way back into the game. We get the penalty and miss. That was frustrating and we were disappointed but I never had doubts.”
