Ange Postecoglou thought he conquered the language barrier in Japan, where almost every conversation he was involved in necessitated the presence of a third party, a translator, to make sense of it.

In Scotland, he confronted a similar challenge, although there it was more of an accent barrier: deciphering the various grunts, noises and intonations made via the impossibly thick Glaswegian brogue into words, sentences, and then ultimately, some form of intelligible message. Somehow he managed.

Ange Postecoglou’s first season at Tottenham Hotspur is ending in drama.Credit: AP

Who would have thought it was in England where he’d be most misunderstood?

In fairness, Postecoglou has himself partially contributed to a situation where there has been ample room for misinterpretation – wilful and otherwise.

For months, he has fobbed off questions about where Tottenham Hotspur have been positioned in the “title race” or the “race for fourth”, dismissing them as rhetorical media games (which they are). His answer, routinely, has been that he wants to win every single game he’s involved with and finish as high on the Premier League table as possible – not that he doesn’t care about where that happens to be, but that he doesn’t care for letting anything other than mathematics dictate his ambitions.

If Spurs were to qualify for the UEFA Champions League, he said, it would have confirmed nothing material about the club’s embrace of his methods. It would not be an end in itself. He has tried to get people to look beyond the outcome as a measure of their overall progression, which some have taken as a bit of clever, self-serving semantics to save his own hide.

“It’s probably the worst experience I’ve had as a football manager.”

Where Postecoglou perhaps committed a rare error is........

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