Listening to Ange Postecoglou describes the noise around the season of Tottenham Hotspur can feel like life in a world of extremes.
The highlights of Frankfurt and the lows of a number of recent Premier League matches are only the part on the football field. The Spurs head coach used the word “hysteria” at some point, when describing the external voices that comment on his side.
“Within the football department we have tried to maintain a discipline about how we behave and keep the noise from us from us,” he reveals.
“We came back from Frankfurt at a peak and everyone buzzed, then it was again a disappointing game in the week [a 2-1 home defeat to Nottingham Forest] And that claps 180 degrees. From our perspective it is really important that we Cocon ourselves. “
Easier said than done, right? “It's not easy, because as much as I can say to the players' block the sound,” we all live in the outside world. If I could keep them here in the following month, I would be ok. What you look at is the behavior of the players; The way they train, the way they are talking. The way they have it.
What IRK Postecoglou is is the idea that Spurs has achieved this point where they can achieve European success, without carefully building and preparing themselves in the course of many weeks and months. He talks to the players about 'The Stonecutter's Credo'. It is an allegory of the Danish writer and photographer Jacob Riis:
If nothing seems to help, I will look at a stonemason who insists on his rock, maybe a hundred times without a crack that is shown in it. But with the hundred and first blow it will split into two, and I know it wasn't the last blow that it did, but everything that had gone earlier.
“Sometimes people look at success and look at the end of the end and do not realize what went in,” explains Postecoglou.
“Much of it is work that is or seems as if you are not really progressing. For us, no matter how difficult the season has been, much of it has been good for us in terms of building resilience and staying united.
“I know that we can break through and take a trophy with us, we will need bundles of it. We just have to keep on pounding at the rock and hopefully we will crack it at the 101st blow.”
The latter battle represents a possible Europa League -definitive triumph. It can be a very exciting or frustrating outcome, depending on whether or not the stones are bursting.
“It just depends on how it throws away,” Postecoglou continues. “That is the reality of football. Sometimes you don't get what you earn. I have always discovered that it is in the short term. On the long track you will succeed. It's about coming back to rock and doing the right things, I really believe in that.
“All the success I had in my career, nothing of it has been right, nothing is due to one or one answer to everything. It is consistently about – again and again – trying to do the right things. In the end, success comes and sometimes it comes at unexpected times, it doesn't come if you think it should be.”
Postecoglou is in his 60th year and retains a sense of perspective that is accompanied by the wisdom he has won over time. He was only half that age when he started in management in South Melbourne and admits that his younger person himself would not have dealt with the pressure he subtles today.
“No, probably not, that is the reality of it. Sweetheart if you are younger, you take things much more personal, you think things are very clear in terms of the results. In the course of time you realize that nothing is true, everything is a moment in time and the moments that all pass.
“It is not that I have never been busy when I was younger, you always do that. For all young managers, the first job is really important, because if you don't succeed, you may not get any other chance. The pressure is always there, it is now just the noise and the way the world has changed. There are so many more platforms.
“When I started for the first time, the media used to be journalists and that was it. Now every platform that you can think of has an opinion and they all have the opportunity to express that opinion and it can really feel overwhelming, and the younger I would have had trouble dealing with it.”
If Spurs can prevail in Europe, the Mission of Postecoglou will be demonstrably completed. He was instructed to reduce the team's age profile, to change the direction on the field and bring success. It has been a huge challenging campaign, but one that can end with each of those boxes that are checked.
“Yes, that was the assignment, that's why I came,” he adds. “To change the way the club played his football, to regenerate a team because it came to win at the end of a cycle and win trophies.
“I still have the feeling that that is the motivation and they were the objectives for me that came here and that is what I am determined to see. I did not try to change the first mission to play football that excites the fans, to bring some exciting young talent to the club, and hopefully succeed.”
And while the noise builds on Sunday's trip to Liverpool and that Europa League semi-final first leg against Bodo/shines on Thursday, Postecoglou will not have his preparations for the biggest test of his Spurs career influenced.
“Provided that you remain faithful to yourself, your head touches the pillow at night and it goes well. In those moments changes when you change what you believe in, whether your values, or who you are as a person, is where you have those sleepless nights.
“That sometimes happened in my career, but as you get older, you realize that it is just like any other storm, they all pass.”
View Liverpool vs Tottenham on Sunday from 4 p.m., Live on Sky Sports; Kick -off at 4.30 p.m.