Melbourne is a sporting city. Olympic Boulevard houses multiple stadiums, from the MCG to the Rod Laver Arena, to AAMI Park, while Marvel Stadium is not too far down the road, among others. There are sports clubs galore across the place, and Ange Postecoglou is one of the city’s favourite sons, for his journey as a child immigrant from Greece to the top of the game in the world famous Premier League has captured the imagination.
Football still remains below AFL – their football – as well as cricket in the food chain – yet on Wednesday, throughout the city’s streets, restaurants, and coffee shops, there were Spurs and Newcastle shirts aplenty.
This was their chance to have their day, and the question marks back in the UK about the trip meant precious little to them as they gathered around the remarkable bowl of the MCG to watch their teams come together on the huge cricket pitch.
For Postecoglou, it was life coming full circle as he returned to the city where he grew up in south Melbourne in the district of Prahran as a child, and now he was leading his world famous team out inside its most famous stadium.
“It is [fitting]. I guess the last few years have kind of moved along; it seems pretty rapidly to where I am today, but yeah, it was nice today because it wasn’t that long ago, in an alternate universe, I would have been on the other side of the fence watching the game because that was my kind of existence for a very long time,” he said.
“To be in charge of one of the biggest clubs in the world, bringing them back to my home town in front of 80,000, it’s pretty special, and I feel pretty blessed to be in that position.”
The game itself was mostly what you would expect from a group of jetlagged players taken to the other side of the world just hours after having competed in the intensity of the Premier League’s final weekend. It was disjointed for long periods and lacking in intensity.
Most of that came from Newcastle, though, to Tottenham’s credit, they still mostly played the energetic football Postecoglou asks of them. They pressed high up the pitch, and the scoreline should have been well in their favour before the game went to a penalty shoot-out that completely surprised their head coach, who had already shaken hands with his opposite number, Eddie Howe, before the two men shared a chuckle.
For what it’s worth from a post-game friendly, the stats show how much Spurs dominated the encounter with 63% of the possession and 18 shots to Newcastle’s four, forcing Howe’s men into making 12 clearances to their four. The key stat, as has perhaps been too often the case in the regular season, is that only three of Spurs’ 18 efforts on goal were sent on target.
There’s not too much you can take from the performances of the senior players. Son Heung-min put on a determined show for the many Korean fans that had made the trip to watch him in action.
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