The journey from Athens to Melbourne took 30 days by boat, and it changed Angelos Postecoglou’s life.
Three years earlier, when Postecoglou was 20 months old, Greece had been turned upside down. Born in the Nea Filadelfeia suburb – home to AEK Athens, the team his father Dimitris supported – Ange was too young to understand what was going on when tanks appeared on the streets of the capital in 1967, weeks before planned elections. A right-wing military coup had taken place, and everything was about to change.
Under the new rule, Greece became a police state, protests were outlawed and businesses were nationalised, among them the Postecoglou family furniture making firm. Fearing for the future, Dimitris and wife Voula made the decision to get out, for the sake of their children – joining an exodus to Australia, a migration route taken by 180,000 people in the years since the end of World War Two.
Such was his age, Postecoglou has no real first-hand memory of the month-long trip to the other side of the world, accompanied by his parents and his elder sister Liz. “Not really,” he tells FourFourTwo now, thinking back to those formative years of his life. “We left Greece when I was five, and most of my memories are stories that were passed on, that kind of became images in my mind. My clear recollections of childhood begin when I started school at six or seven, but I’ve been told the story of our journey, the difficulties, and settling in Australia.
“Being young, I was shielded from all of it. My parents made the ultimate sacrifice. For all intents and purposes, we were refugees. We knew no one in Australia and my parents didn’t know the language, but they chose to give the opportunity of a better life to their kids rather than themselves, because it was a tough life for my parents.
“That stays with you, that resonates with you, you take that along with you in your life. I understood that to make good the sacrifice that my parents made, I needed to live a life that they wanted me to live.
“Football was the one thing that glued the whole family together. My journey in football allowed us to navigate the difficulties of being immigrants in a new country. I don’t know if that opportunity would have been afforded to me if we’d decided to stay in Greece or move somewhere else. I’ve always tried to honour the opportunity I was given by my parents.”
During nearly four decades in the game as a player and coach, honour that opportunity he certainly has. Underestimated, overlooked, even blacklisted at one point, he’s never had it easy. Finally though, he’s getting serious recognition on the biggest stage – first with Celtic and now at Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League. It’s taken 27 long years of serious hard work in management to make Ange Postecoglou an overnight success.
“I WAS PUSKAS’ CHAUFFEUR”
Postecoglou is the epitome of calm when he meets FFT inside the media auditorium at Tottenham’s plush training ground in Enfield – a training complex whose top-of-the-range facilities even include a putting green, which must have been in use 24/7 while Gareth Bale was back at the club.
Once a week, this auditorium is packed with journalists for Postecoglou’s pre-match press briefing, but today we’ve been granted an exclusive meeting with the 58-year-old, two days after the club’s dramatic comeback win over Sheffield United which continued Spurs’ fine start to life under their new boss.
Refreshingly, the man known as ‘Big Ange’ has actually arrived early for our rendezvous. He’s immediately friendly, if understated as he serenely poses for photos – he’s previously admitted that he doesn’t always feel at ease making small
