A short time in to his first season at Tottenham, Ange Postecoglou was asked whether supporters were getting a little carried away with a ten-game unbeaten run that briefly took the club to the top of the Premier League.

‘Let them get excited,’ the Spurs manager said.

‘Let them get ahead of themselves.’

The problem for Postecoglou is that many Tottenham fans took him at his word and they did. So when things grew a little harder, a little more challenging, in the second half of the season, some of them started to grumble. A percentage ultimately viewed a fifth place finish – and no Champions League football – as a bit of a disappointment.

It is this, at least in part, that Postecoglou will carry with him into what already feels like the most important Tottenham season for many years.

Ange Postecoglou joined Tottenham in July 2023 and has made his team very exciting to watch

From the charismatic and talented Australian, much of the rhetoric remains the same. The 58-year-old’s public personal remains as bullish as his front-foot style of football.

‘Why was I brought in?’ asked Postecoglou during a pre-season interview with the .

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‘Because there was a real need at this football club to play a certain way. Here, success comes after that. We have to stay on course.’

It is not only Tottenham supporters who remember the way Postecoglou’s team started last season. The football was thrilling. Pace, energy, ambition. After years of entertainment famine at Spurs under Antonio Conte, Jose Mourinho and, briefly, Nuno Espirito Santo, it was like somebody had opened the curtains and let the light in. Postecoglou cast a spell not just on Tottenham’s enclave in north London but across the footballing landscape.

But clubs that don’t move forwards in football eventually go backwards and towards the end of last season, Postecoglou’s team were treading water. A fifth place finish represented a successful first opening from the former Celtic manager. Postecoglou exceeded expectations over the course of the year.

But what does progress look like this time around? Already it feels as though, much as he rails against it a little, results and the sense of style he values so highly simply must sit side by side.

For all the romantic echoes of its ‘To Dare is to Do’ motto, Tottenham is a modern, commercially clinically football club that is changing fundamentally. Its stadium turns over a small fortune each year. Its approach to scouting has switched from feet on the ground and eyes on the players to a greater emphasis on data and analysis. They are not alone in that but at Tottenham that represents a sea change.

At first team level, meanwhile, Postecoglou’s challenge is to embrace and nurture a footballing creed that openly points to glamour and glory while at the same time making his team a little cuter and a little smarter and harder to beat than they were last season.

With a young squad that has only been together for one season, it is this that will in all likelihood make the difference between the modern Tottenham being a team that dazzled brightly and briefly before being sucked back in to the pack and one that can make a home for itself in and around the top four positions for years to come.

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The club’s most eye-catching transfers have been those of two English players, centre forward Dominic Solanke, recruited from Bournemouth, and the young midfielder Archie Gray, brought in from Leeds. From the club’s own academy, meanwhile, has emerged teenage prodigy Mikey Moore, who was courted by Chelsea, Manchester City and clubs on the continent before signing with his boyhood club earlier this month.

Slowly, Postecoglou continues to shape his squad in to one that can play the aggressive, high defensive line football he has always coached in previous spells in Scotland, Japan and Australia. Good players such as Eric Dier and Pierre Emile Hojbjerg have been moved on simply because Postecoglou deemed them to be too slow. He is, in many ways, an all or nothing coach.

Postecoglou recognises some of the things that went against his team in the second half of last season. Some poor discipline and an occasional lack of maturity. Equally, he knows he made mistakes. 

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For example he misjudged the complications surrounding the home game with City in the last week of the campaign. A City victory would have ended Arsenal’s involvement in the title race but Postecoglou didn’t seem to understand why some Spurs fans came to the game ready to root for the opposition. But he gets it now and has said so. That reflects well on him. He has humility.

Postecoglou is good for our league without a doubt. While he is in charge, a Tottenham ticket will always be a hot ticket. But last season only provides conflicting clues as to how this one will go. Style first and results second sounds nice on a podcast but it doesn’t work like that and Postecoglou knows it.

‘Let the fans be the dreamers and I will be the realist,’ he told Men in Blazers.

More than anything, Tottenham supporters must hope he really means that.

Are United starting to look like their old selves? 

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Standards are everything in football and maybe at Manchester United they are finally starting to change.

Aaron Wan-Bissaka has played 130 Premier League games for United and was a terrific and committed nuts and bolts defender.

But the 26-year-old is nowhere near good enough when in possession for a top club. He never has been and never will be.

So instead of making do for yet another season, United’s new-look football operation have sold him to West Ham.

This is what big clubs do and United haven’t behaved like one for years.

Learnings from Southgate

Gareth Southgate taught us many things during his time as England manager and it seems lessons have been learned from his tenure by those at the FA too.

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It was presumed the FA would throw everything they had at installing a replacement for Southgate ahead of the Nations League game against Ireland in Dublin next month and years ago they would have. Back then it would been a case of picking the shiniest foreign parcel off the shelf.

But the Southgate years have underlined the value of an English head coach and have also shown us that sometimes the best man for the job isn’t always immediately apparent.

Southgate was an interim before getting the big job and now Lee Carsley has the reigns for the short-term after stepping up from the U21s. If this feels like an audition for the 50-year-old then it should do. We wish him well.

Man City shirts the new trend  

A week in the south-west at Center Parcs in Longleat yielded two surprises. Fine weather and a proliferation of Manchester City shirts on the backs of kids with southern accents.

For a year it was Manchester United and Liverpool. Maybe a bit of Chelsea and Arsenal. But City said they would make inroads and it seems they have. 

Strange what winning a heap of football matches can do for a brand.

New season, new rules 

More meddling with the interpretation of the laws of the game by the Premier League and two things caught my eye.

Players are now allowed to enter the area as a penalty kick is being taken as long as they don’t interfere with the play. Surely anything that catches the peripheral vision of either taker or goalkeeper crosses that threshold? What a pointless piece of tinkering.

Meanwhile referees are now instructed to allow players 30 seconds to celebrate a goal before adding on time. The aim is to reduce the amount of extra minutes at the end of games.

The onus should be on players to get on with things but this just indulges them. The Premier League say this is progressive. It’s not. It’s weak.