Ange Postecoglou tried to brush off talk of a return to Tottenham as Spurs interim boss Igor Tudor’s days appear to be numbered.
Postecoglou joined TNT Sports’ coverage of the PSG v Chelsea Champions League clash on Thursday morning AEDT while in Paris as part of his role on UEFA’s Technical Observer Panel, and took the chance to speak about his former club’s current predicament.
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Tottenham were battered 5-2 by Atletico Madrid in the Spanish capital the day prior with Tudor under the pump after conceding four goals in the opening 22 minutes and substituting debutant goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky after only 17 minutes.
Speculation is abound that the Croatian manager will be sacked after just four games in charge, but Postecoglou attempted to downplay a potential return to north London.
The Australian was asked if he would ever “return to an ex” and he replied “no comment”.
During his recent interview on The Overlap podcast, when talking about his former club Celtic, Postecoglou said going back is not something he has ever done.
That stance is unlikely to change as he takes time away from the touchline after a chaotic 2025 with Tottenham and Nottingham Forest.
Postecoglou, who won the Europa League with Spurs last season, clearly still feels a strong connection to the Tottenham players and maintains belief in their abilities despite a disastrous night in Madrid as well as being on the brink of relegation from the Premier League.
“It’s hard for me to say and me speaking about it, kind of, tends to skew the argument,” he told TNT Sports.
“What’s really important now – there is no way that anyone objectively would say that these players are performing at the levels they’re capable of.
“You’ve just got to try and ease the pressure somehow on them. Even last night, I thought if anything it was a tremendous opportunity for them.
“They’ve done really well in the Champions League. They’re on the good side of the draw. Yeah Atletico away is tough, but you still got to take them back to Tottenham.”
Postecoglou turned heads in the podcast interview with the likes of Manchester United greats Roy Keane and Gary Neville as well as Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher, with his comments about Tottenham not behaving like a big club.
He was asked by Chelsea great Joe Cole about Spurs’ lack of spending and the Australian reiterated his comments as well as stressing where Tottenham’s focus needs to be right now.
“That’s a broader argument but the reality of it is they’ve got to deal with it now, that’s the most important thing,” Postecoglou said.
“The football club, I said it a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t behaving to me like a big football club in terms of the kind of players it was attracting.
“But it is a big football club, we saw that last year, there was a couple of hundred thousand people in London going nuts there and I felt it, how big a club it is.
“But in the Premier League it’s a slippery slope once you take your eye off the ball with certain things.
“But all that is not important right now. What’s important now is where they are in the league, they need to maintain their Premier League status which is obviously paramount to what they want to build.
“Those kind of questions you kind of go, ‘okay, we want some real direction here’. I think it’s pretty clear what Tottenham fans want – they want the team to play a certain way, they want success, every team wants success.”
Meanwhile, multiple reports coming out of England have suggested that Tottenham’s players have completing lost faith in Tudor after the defeat in Madrid.
The former Juventus boss’ behaviour following the substitution of Kinsky did not go down well inside and outside of the club.
Tudor gave the cold shoulder to the 22-year-old goalkeeper, who he thrust into the starting side for his Champions League debut at the expense of usual No.1 Guglielmo Vicario, as he left the pitch in tears after two howlers with the ball at his feet gifted Atletico goals.
Manchester United great Peter Schmeichel said Tudor had “killed Kinsky’s career”.
While former Manchester City shot stopper Joe Hart said of Kinsky: “My heart is absolutely broken for him.”
Consoling the youngster was left to his teammates on the bench at the time and in the dressing room at half time as well as post-match.
“It’s a difficult situation but we as a team will definitely get around him,” Tottenham defender Kevin Danso said.
“These things happen. Unfortunately it happened to him, but he’s a great goalkeeper and he’s definitely going to bounce back.”
Kinsky won himself more fans by taking to social media in the aftermath of the toughest outing of his fledging career.
“Thanks for the messages,” he posted on Instagram. “From dream to nightmare to dream again. See you.”
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Tudor, meanwhile, did himself no favours with a heartless post-match interview.
“We don’t need to comment, it’s not the moment to speak too much,” he said.
Tudor’s behaviour has created a clear rift between players and manager after just four games – all of which have been losses – at the helm.
“While players accept their roles in Tottenham’s demise, they have been shocked by Tudor’s approach and decisions since he replaced Frank on a deal until the end of the season,” The Telegraph’s football news correspondent Matt Law wrote.
“Well-placed sources viewed the events in Madrid – where Antonin Kinsky was substituted after 17 minutes, with Tudor failing to acknowledge the goalkeeper as he left the field – as the final straw between the manager and his unhappy players. A source said: “There is hardly anybody, if anybody at all, in that dressing room who has any faith in him.
“Telegraph Sport has been told that Tudor has tried to strike up a relationship with captain Cristian Romero, but he has done little to lift the morale of the group or instil confidence in individuals.”
It is management 101 for a coach to strike up a rapport with their players.
It is also crucial to pick the moments when to provide the carrot or the stick.
Most successful coaches in any sport have stuck by the philosophy of whacking their players in private, but throwing their arms around them in public during the tough times.
“Tudor might reasonably claim that he is not here to make friends,” The Telegraph’s chief sports writer Oliver Brown wrote.
“Every truncated chapter of his career, whether at Lazio, Juventus or Hellas Verona, suggests a man who is only ever passing through. But his apparent disdain for even the basics of man-management should prove terminal for him at Tottenham. When goalkeepers are at their nadir, the finest managers offer at least some expression of public support.
“When Loris Karius committed his fateful howlers for Liverpool against Real Madrid in the 2018 Champions League final, Jurgen Klopp was, in the fraught weeks and months that followed, steadfast in his backing. Tudor, an uninspiring stop-gap appointment in the first place, is incapable of offering the same compassion. It is a grim reflection on a club who risk losing their soul.”
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Sitting just one point above the relegation places, Tottenham face the very real risk of being a Championship side next season.
Even the most ardent Spurs haters would not have predicted that scenario at the beginning of the season.
But they will be revelling in it, with Postecoglou’s words from the Europa League victory open top bus parade ringing in their ears.
“As the cameras scanned across the Tottenham bench in the final moments of their 5-2 defeat, showing the players wearing thousand-yard stares, it confirmed an impression that Tudor had already lost every member of the dressing room,” Brown wrote.
“When Ange Postecoglou tried to protect his job by claiming that in “all the best TV series, season three is better than season two”, he later tempered that verdict, cautioning that “sometimes, they kill off the main character”.
“Nobody, not even the most fatalistic Tottenham fans, could surely have expected this character to be the club itself.
“But the place now appears to be caught in a death spiral, led by an interim manager with few credentials and seemingly no clue as to how to stop it.
“Worse, he cannot even be bothered to offer coherent explanations, parachuting a rusty goalkeeper into one of the most daunting Champions League crucibles of all and then withdrawing that confidence after barely a quarter of an hour.”
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Tudor is a ticking time bomb and that would certainly follow the script.
For every great television series has those characters who step into the spotlight for only a few episodes before being killed off.
But in reality, Tottenham is more of a soap opera than a classic television drama.
And in soap operas, they always bring a former main character back from the dead.
There is almost certainly many more twists in the tale before this season is done.