Never Stop: How Ange Postecoglou Brought the Fire Back to Celtic by Hamish Carton (Pitch Publishing 2023)

 

Unsurprisingly, the most infamous case of sheer Postecoglou ignorance was found on talkSPORT. The radio station specialises in bold ill-informed claims that tempt listeners into phoning up or sharing their clips on social media. In the days after Postecoglou’s name was first mentioned, a clip showed footballer turned broadcaster Alan Brazil mocking his credentials. At the time, there had been reports of the Aussie not having the required licence to manage in Europe.

Is this a wind-up? Breaking news from Scotland as Celtic have applied for an exemption with UEFA for Yokohama Marinos boss Postacoogloo [sic] to manage in Europe. He does not hold the required UEFA Pro Licence. Oh, this has got to be a wind-up. Dear oh dear. He’ll be a great manager. Where do they come up with these guys from?

(talkSPORT)

The former Scotland international had played against Postecoglou’s South Melbourne years earlier, not that he’d be likely to recall. As with virtually everyone in this chapter, he was found apologising at some stage over the following 12 months. A similar story of reprieve occurred with another former footballer who enjoyed his heyday in the 1980s – Charlie Nicholas:

There’s nothing wrong with having a plan B – but this is not plan B. This is desperation. I will give Postecoglou a chance because I’m a supporter but is the former Australia boss really the height of the club’s ambitions? It has nothing to do with his lack of knowledge of the Scottish game or me looking down on football in the southern hemisphere. It scares me just how unambitious the club has become, going from a position of strength to where they find themselves now. Luring Postecoglou from Yokohama F. Marinos is not quite the same as when Arsène Wenger left Japanese football to join Arsenal in 1996.

(Daily Express)

Nicholas was at it again in late September. Celtic had just been held to a 1-1 draw at home by Dundee United and had three league wins from seven matches. The knives were out for Postecoglou, with many reaching some wild conclusions:

Ange Postecoglou looks to me to be the new Ronny Deila. I am not sure Postecoglou has realised how big Celtic really are before he came in. I believe he has missed a pitch. I think Ange thought he would just come in here, and his playing style would get him over the line, no problem. But it is not about style. It is about winning.

(Daily Express)

Nicholas and Postecoglou would meet by chance in Glasgow months later. By that stage the Aussie had won the former Celtic striker over. Just as well:

We had a wee five-minute conversation where I thanked him for the job he is doing and what he is building at Celtic.

(Daily Express)

Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party by Michael Cragg (Nine Eight Books 2023)

Spoken-word intro

I’m going to start with a confession. As a closeted teenager in the early ’00s I did some things I am ashamed of. I went to see the Libertines. I was a fan of post-Kid A Radiohead. I once went to Ireland to see Travis only to be hit on the head by warm beer and, at one point, an inflatable armchair. For a while, I thought hiding in indie music would help me keep my secret for a bit longer when in fact it just fed my covert obsession; glorious, shiny, ludicrous pop. I’d secretly gorge on the Latin flavours of ‘Spice Up Your Life’ or get a delicious sugar rush from ‘Don’t Stop Movin’’. Later I’d sit with my proudly pop-obsessed uni housemate and listen to ‘hard-edged’ ladband Five and the high street R&B of Blue, before hitting the local indie club. I’d carelessly align myself with the throng of NME readers trying to justify their love of Girls Aloud or the Sugababes via the prism of credibility (‘It’s pretty good for a pop song!!!’), when in fact I owned all their albums and distinctly remember singing along to the former’s pearlescent six-minute epic ‘Untouchable’ in a full-length mirror, willing myself to be who I was.

Perhaps because I only lived this UK pure pop boom – instigated by the Buffalo boot-stomping swagger of the Spice Girls in 1996, which is where this book starts – on the periphery, when I started writing about music as a journalist years later, I immersed myself fully. As pop shifted through the gears over the following two decades, taking in post-ironic synthpop, Lady Gaga, gloom wobble dubstep, drop-obsessed EDM and Billie Eilish-adjacent mope-pop before settling on a sort of generic streaming-friendly dance-pop sound, I often found myself harking back to the weightlessness of, say, Liberty X’s ‘Just a Little’ or Five’s ‘Keep On Movin’’ or A1’s ‘Caught in the Middle’. Like most people, this rose-tinted nostalgia – hey, this book is about the late ’90s and early ’00s, get used to it – ramped up as a pandemic-ravaged world went into lockdown. Gazed upon from a modern world seemingly on fire, this prelapsarian era suddenly represented even more of a refreshing change. A time before the threat of nuclear war, climate crisis, global financial collapse, social media, culture wars, Piers Morgan’s TV career, TikTok and, of course, the pandemic.