Postecoglou Is Being Misrepresented Just So The Press Can Write An Anti-Celtic Story.

This is one of two stories I’m going to do on our former manager today; this is the angry one. I’m smarting over comments which were plastered all over the media yesterday and this morning about his calling Celtic no-hopers in the Champions League.

He made a comment which I thought was pretty daft and gave the media license to write these headlines but they know full well they are misrepresenting his views.

“Ange Postecoglou opens up on Celtic ‘zero hope’ Champions League factor” screams a typical headline, that one from The Evening Times. They know exactly how that headline reads, they know exactly what the connotations of it are, and they also know that when you look at his comments that is not at all what he was saying, even if he used those words.

“Champions League football is just unrelenting, it’s fantastic, it’s confronting,” he said to GOAL, in comments I am very sure he already regrets.

“It challenges you in every way. Sometimes you’re going in to the most hostile of environments, facing the best footballers on the planet with zero hope of achieving anything but believing that you can. It’s also very addictive. You want to go back and do it again and again. It is the pinnacle of club football.”

That single throwaway line about coming up against “the best footballers on the planet with zero hope” is all our media needed for another series of stinging headlines and stories about our European record.

But this is a classic example of someone using an exaggerated phrase to make a general point and having it blown out proportion.

All through this guy’s managerial career, he has talked about how he is looking for every advantage that he can get, that in the end a football match comes down to eleven players versus eleven players where anything can happen. He’s come out swinging against every club and team he’s ever faced, and he never believes, and never has, in “zero hope.”

He has gone from coaching football in Australia to the Premier League in England at a huge club, and he’s coached one of the smaller nations at a World Cup Finals.

This guy has laughed in the face of “zero hope”. He literally does not believe such a thing exists, and our media knows full well that he doesn’t believe such a thing exists.

He sat in front of them before every one of our Champions League games and told them straight that he was playing to win and that if we did our jobs we had a chance.

We rocked Madrid back on their heels at Celtic Park; was that the action of a team with “zero hope” or the actions of a manager who didn’t think we could do it? This is a joke.

The media is taking the piss with these stories.

These aren’t remotely serious. Ange Postecoglou is not going to sit in front of a media outlet and tell them, with a straight face, meaning it when he says that he considered his team incapable of getting any kind of result.

Those comments were probably not out of his mouth before he wished he could shove them back in there, and there isn’t a person who read those remarks who does not know that full well.

They got their anti-Celtic story, at his expense I might add. They have no shame.