As any journalist who covered Celtic regularly during Ange Postecoglou’s reign will testify, he liked to keep his players at arm’s length, never mind lowly reporters. Mostly, we were at the end of the proverbial 10-foot bargepole, or at best, on the end of a withering ‘mate’.
But then, to Postecoglou, Vince Rugari isn’t just any journalist. Even if, in true Postecoglou style, he likes to keep him wondering.
“I think we’ve got a good relationship, but it’s a bit like with his players, you don’t really know for sure,” Rugari said.
“I'd like to think I've got his respect just from slaving away in Australian football for as long as I have, I think he can see a bit of a kindred soul with me there.
“It’s not like in Scotland where everyone is football mad. Here, it’s a mission, and it’s something we’re trying to convince everyone else to follow.
“Anyone who devotes their life or at least their career to furthering that cause, that’s the thing I think he’s wanted more than anything else in the world, for Australian football to progress.
“It’s as good a relationship as I think you can have with him, but it's not like we're mates.”
As evidenced though in his new book ‘Angeball’, Rugari has a better grasp on the man, what made him, what makes him tick - and his teams so successful - than just about anyone else in the game.
A respected sports reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, Rugari’s career covering football in Australia has unfolded in lockstep with the emergence of Postecoglou as a managerial force of nature.
From his humble beginnings as a Greek immigrant through his playing days in the Australian Soccer League, to managerial success in his homeland and with the Socceroos, to Japan and then to his time in Scotland, Rugari charts Postecoglou’s unlikely path to the English Premier League.
To Celtic fans, and the wider Scottish football community, it was as if Postecoglou had dropped out of the clear blue sky when he landed in Glasgow a little over three years ago.
“We were laughing at that over here to be honest, because with the greatest of respect, you guys had no idea what you were talking about!” Rugari laughed. Quite.
“It was so funny to see, especially on Twitter, people who perused his Wikipedia page for five minutes and saw that in his last season with Yokahama, he'd finished ninth, I think it was, the year after they won the title,” he continued.
“The reason they finished ninth was because the Japanese season got condensed into four months. Japan was one of the only leagues to play every game, but they crammed them into an incredibly small window.
“Knowing the intensity of Ange's football, it's no surprise that blokes ended up crashing and burning physically. That's why they finished ninth.
“But shorn of all that context, Scottish fans would look at Wikipedia and see he finished ninth in Japan, and he won the title in Australia a couple of times, and I get it. That's why the reaction was the way it was, but it was hilarious to me personally.”
The irony being of course that when Postecoglou eventually moved on to Tottenham Hotspur after his two trophy-laden seasons in Glasgow, Scottish football fans in general, never mind just Celtic supporters, mocked the dismissiveness of English Premier League fanboys towards a man that had long since banished those early Caledonian doubts.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, and well, you know the rest.
“It’s the same cycle every single time,” Rugari said.
“Every time he steps up a level, he manages to bring with him the people who he's just convinced. And so, it was really quite stirring actually to see when Spurs announced him that there were Scottish football fans, mostly Celtic obviously, who were in the trenches with us.
“They were saying ‘well you don’t know him’, so that was pretty funny, because we had been through that with them three years ago.
“It just goes to show the measure of the guy. Once his football sort of casts a spell on you, you feel attached to him, he just draws you in.
“If you’re a football fan, then he plays great football, and he’s a great guy. Honest, strong, a great leader. Why wouldn’t you want to fight for his honour, for want of a better phrase? He brings that out of you.”
To understand how Postecoglou inspires that disciple-like devotion in his true believers, and how he had the Celtic support eating out of the palm of his hand, you have to go back to the start of his journey. And not just in football.
In the book, Rugari maps out Postecoglou’s own path in life, arriving in Australia as a child from Greece and all the obstacles that come along with that. It is a tale that holds resonance for Celtic supporters, chiming as it does with their club’s own origin story.
“I think what Celtic fans can get from the book is just a fuller appreciation of the man and where he came from and what that means to him,” he said.
“I personally find his relationship with football in Australia fascinating, and he doesn't seem to have resolved those emotions for himself when he left.
“He doesn't seem to be able to fully appreciate yet just how much what he's doing means to football people in Australia, and if you want to understand that person better, that's the stuff you need to dive into and understand.
“So, I hope there's a bit of that for Celtic fans as well, because it is a great story. Some of the stuff he dealt with when he was Socceroos coach, but also in his childhood, he was trying to piece that together coming from a place of Mediterranean migrants at the time when he moved to Australia.
“My parents had come not too far before him, and the things he experienced there and the way he fought through that. I don't think it's just a great sport story, and not just for Australians, it's just quite a tale.
“As much as the football really chimed with what Celtic fans like to see, I think his backstory does too, because obviously coming as an immigrant, all the disadvantages you have to overcome, the prejudices you have to overcome, and then to succeed.”
He certainly succeeded here, with Angeball devotees on the other side of the world adopting Celtic as they revelled in watching one of their own finally smashing through the glass ceiling of not only managing in a European league, but completely dominating the scene through his football and the force of his personality.
“It was huge here,” he said.
“This was all brand new to us. We've never had really anyone manage overseas before ever, let alone somewhere like Celtic.
“It was definitely a big thing here to the point where the club came out for friendlies. There has always been a big sort of Celtic supporter base here, which is the same as any other city on the planet I guess, but there was also a big bandwagon element here.
“I feel bad actually, because I haven’t been keeping tabs on Celtic as much as we all were during the time Ange was there. Marco Tillio isn’t even there anymore!
“I remember particularly that first trophy day, when he gave that incredible speech, it felt like – at least to me, anyway – that the whole of Australia was watching. Everyone was just beaming; it was really incredible.
“The thing is, this sort of penetrated the mainstream more outside of the football community in Australia, and there was a huge value in that for football here. Even Snoop Dogg once said he wanted to have a have a party with him, which I really hope happened.”
If the book can’t quite reveal that to the reader, what it does reveal is that Postecoglou’s adherence to his principles – in and out of football – have been a consistent theme throughout his career.
Frustrations that marked his efforts to improve football in Australia could just as easily apply to some of the gripes he had when he was here (plastic pitches, for instance), and as Rugari explains, came from the same place - a passion for the betterment of the game and the raising of standards.
“He left the Socceroos and in quite sort of controversial fashion,” he said.
“Just after qualification for the World Cup. I thought it had been a good amount of time to look back at that and sort of re-litigate and map out how it happened and who said what and when.
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“It doesn't really affect how he's perceived here anymore. At the time there were people who were upset that he'd left the Socceroos in the lurch, so to speak. But I think over time people have sort of come to understand it a little bit better, and I certainly do after speaking to him for the book.
“It’s just the same thing he's tried to do with all his teams, Celtic and Spurs included. He was trying to drag all of Australian football to a place that is aligned with his view of football and how it should be played.
“And I think he sensed that there were too many people in Australia - and I'm speaking generally here about people in the game, people outside of the game, fans, everyone - who just didn't have the bottle to see it through.
“He brought in a back three in that last year with the Socceroos and that became a real national talking point. It was a really aggressive, Conte-style back three. It was very, very heavily aggressive attacking. More so than what you'd even imagine with a typical Ange team. It was really gung-ho.
“Everyone here was like, ‘well we don't have the players to be able to pull the system off’. And there was a lot of resistance, particularly from parts of the football media, but also fans.
“And I think he just thought, ‘you know what, I'm trying to do something here and you people don't get it. So, I'm just going to move on’.
“It was really sad, even if it was inevitable, because he's too good for us, but also kind of heartbreaking in the way that it happened. I really wanted to, you know, sort of be the first person to dive back into that from an Australian perspective and piece it all together.
“He's such a giant of the sport here and so passionate about it, he sort of stretched his job description in a way to almost be the figurehead of the whole sport. And I just think that weighed him down eventually.”
The Socceroos’ loss, ultimately, was Celtic’s gain, albeit a few years down the line. His spell here is unlikely to be forgotten any time soon, and he has already gone down in Celtic folklore for the trophies he won and the memories he left the supporters.
And, Rugari hopes, his legacy will also be one of a lesson learned.
“I hope what world football takes from the Ange story, aside from that us Australians may know what we're talking about sometimes, is that you shouldn’t just look at surface level stuff,” he said.
“Don't look at a players' passport or the league they come from, or the club that they came from, and make a decision based on that.
“It's so obvious to say, but make a judgment based on what you see on the pitch and the qualities, rather than this hierarchy of reputation, which really exists only in our minds as a sort of collective sport, we create that. And I understand why we create that, but we need to look deeper than that.
“I hope a lot of fans have started to do that now. If Celtic or Rangers sign an Australian player, or a Japanese player, or a player from Somalia, you don’t dismiss that player because you haven't seen the player or you've never heard of that name.
“It's about what's happening on the pitch, that's all that matters.”
The Postecoglou story isn’t over, of course, and Rugari is firmly of the belief that he can be the man who finally brings some sort of trophy success back to Spurs.
“I think they might challenge the Premier League title a lot sooner than people think,” he said.
“I'm not sure that will happen this season. But anything is possible. Anything.
“Whether they can win something this season, who knows? And it may be the case that as Ange sort of suggested at one of his pressers at the end of last season, maybe this is a step too far for him. Maybe the state-owned clubs and the concentration of talent at that sort of really pointy end, maybe he can't make that up with Tottenham. That's possible.
“But he’s been coaching for 28 years, so I've got 28 years of evidence that suggests that he can. Until he sort of runs into that brick wall, I've got no reason to think he can't crash through it.”
Celtic fans are unlikely to forget the day he crashed Scottish football, and all that followed. You might never really get too close to Postecoglou, but through Rugari's book, you can at least get to know him that bit better.
And you can't say fairer than that, mate.
