Ange Postecoglou has explained in an insightful interview how he counters the threat of bigger, more successful teams and Tottenham Hotspur supporters can expect a radical departure to the football seen in recent years.
Spurs fans have grown frustrated in previous season with their players' natural inclination to sit deeper in their own half and try to catch teams on the break, eventually inviting so much pressure on themselves that they collapse, particularly last season on many occasions as they conceded 63 goals in the Premier League.
Postecoglou will start pre-season work officially on Saturday and is set to bring a relentless, aggressive style of possession football to the north London outfit that will see Spurs camped high up the pitch rather than in their own half. One fear among some is that it might leave Tottenham exposed against bigger teams with plenty of their own quality in attack.
When asked during an Australian interview during last season as Celtic boss for Stan Sport FC with Craig Foster, a former footballer and pundit who Postecoglou famously had an on-air argument with almost two decades ago, the Hoops boss, at that point, explained exactly how he adapts his teams to face opponents with plenty of quality.
"It's always for me how the football I want us to play, how is it affected by what the opposition want to do. It's not about changing our approach. It's about what are they going to do to try to stop us?" he said. "What are the potential weaknesses in them that we can use in our game model to exploit that?
"So you're always well prepared and the players are well versed in their strengths and weaknesses but it's always around the notion that we're still going to play this style of football, try to dominate in these areas and we're going to do that by addressing it in this way.
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"It's a bit of both [tweaking personnel and knowing their threats]. There's been some constants in my career over the last 25 years, some things I really believe in that are unshakeable in my beliefs. I like my team to have the ball, I want us to be aggressive in everything we do. I want us to play in the opposition half. I don't want us to be passive at any stage.
"Those are the fundamentals but within that you find that as you go along you get challenged by unbelievable teams with great qualities and their own sort of way of playing and you need adjustments. The way I've done it in how I've set up the game model now and how it's evolved, if you look at our team now I've got four to five wingers and they're all wingers but they've all got different qualities.
"Some have speed, some are better on the dribble, others are just great at getting on the end of things so depending on who we play it's then about team selection. It's the same with the midfield dynamic. Do I need two more dynamic midfield players? Do I need two tens? Do I need an eight and a ten? I've tried to build teams where we'll play our 4-3-3 but that can look so different depending on the 11 I put out there.
"That way we don't have to change too many fundamentals in terms of our approach but having those players will mean that we change, it tweaks us just naturally."
One trait of a Postecoglou team is that his full-backs are instructed to move inside rather than stay wide and the Australian was asked whether he has to temper that tactic to prevent his side getting overrun by stronger opposition, particularly last season when Celtic faced the likes of Real Madrid in the Champions League.
"I'm doubling down, I'm going the other way. If I'm going to make the ground up as a manager, I'm 57, I don't have another 20 years, for a club like us we've got to be a little bit different to everyone else," he said. "If we set up with a traditional model that everyone else does to negate these threats we're going to be with the rest and we're not going to make up the ground. So we've got to be a little bit radical and I don't mind that. I'm not risk averse. I love going all in on these things.
"It's about then if we can get even more aggressive in the way we do things, can we then limit those opportunities even further or limit where they get those opportunities? Particularly because if you want to play this way, if you give players some security then invariably in tough times that's what they're going to fall back on and then you become that traditional model.
"We've changed a little bit from last year, we've learned from a couple of things, but our positioning will be just as aggressive and in fact try to be more aggressive. My feeling has always been that your best chance of success is to make them uncomfortable. If you give them what they see every week, you retreat and you give them that space to play then they're not going to be uncomfortable.
"So when we played Real we made them feel uncomfortable for an hour. They saw a team that was trying to keep the ball as much as they were and trying to play football and were really aggressive on the press which they're not used to. They're used to teams that just back off.
"After an hour they adjusted, they've got quality and they found a way to get through us, but we'll chip away and next time that 60 minutes becomes 70 minutes, 80 minutes and eventually we crack it."
There is another common theme with every job Postecoglou has had. The results in the early months of his tenures can be rocky as the players buy into and learn his methods and he drills exactly what he wants into them and what is usually a completely new coaching staff. Then it suddenly clicks and then success and trophies follow.
The key to the new Spurs head coach getting to that stage is the fans having patience and often the football helps his case.
"The way I've found it is that with fans in general as long as they can see what you're talking about, if they can see that then there is buy-in there. They want their team to play the game the way they want to see it played, irrespective of the opponent," he said.
"I'm trying to take this different approach and I think it does resonate with fans but you've still got to deliver with results. There's no getting away from it but as I keep telling people, the reason that I get my teams to play this way is because I've had a lot of success with it and I continue to have a lot of success with it, not just because I like teams to play this way."
Once again at Spurs, Postecoglou is going to have a new coaching staff to teach his ways to and football.london has previously reported that Ryan Mason and former Leicester assistant manager Chris Davies are to be two members of his set-up.
"The other thing I've got really good at as I've got older is that I surround myself with really good people and give them the opportunity to be the best they can be," he explained. "While I've got my hands over everything - I'm still fairly old school in that it's my direction we're following - I give people the autonomy and the confidence that 'that's your area and you do it your way, be the best you can be'.
"You need that as you get into a big environment. For young coaches as you're going through, the more you can get your hands dirty on every aspect of the game if you move up the rank and eventually you get the opportunity to have all these great resources you get to understand what it should be like from your perspective."
