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Based on a blur of childhood memory that hardly equals sociology, Australia in the 1980s and 90s was a place obsessed with celebrity. A small population at the far end of the world, a gap unbridged by cheap flights and eternal internet: when famous people came to visit, it was a huge deal.
When Australians got involved in major events overseas, even bigger. There were years when Nicole Kidman just showing up at the Oscars felt like a national event. So it’s a hell of a story that one of the world’s greatest footballers coached a local soccer team in 1991, and hardly anybody noticed.
Most Australians still don’t have much more than passing football references to turn to. Didn’t Diego Maradona love getting on the gear? Why did Lionel Messi finish the World Cup dressed in a cloak? But those who know the game, know Ferenc Puskás.
Fifa’s goal of the year bears his name, fair for a guy who banged in almost as many of them as he played top-flight matches. He led the 1950s Hungarians whose only loss in seven years was an injury-hit World Cup final, saw his nation crushed by the Soviets, then spent his 30s collecting trophies for Real Madrid.
This is the same guy who in 1989 finds himself living in a weatherboard flat knocked together behind a garden supply store in Ashburton, riding shotgun down the newly-linked South Eastern Arterial towards Dandenong to run coaching clinics for kids in a paddock in Parkmore. It truly is superstar meets suburbia.
That’s the irresistible hook for Tony Wilson, Cameron Fink, and Rob Heath, leading to the limited release of a documentary 13 years in the making: Ange & The Boss. The boss is Puskás, drawn to Melbourne by its Hungarian community, then hired as coach by South Melbourne Hellas in the National Soccer League.
Puskás has little English but does speak Greek, from his time coaching Panathinaikos to a European Cup final. Which brings Ange Postecoglou into the story: translator, chauffeur, minder, lanky defender, and club captain. Postecoglou has since gone on to become Australia’s most successful coaching export, presently managing Tottenham in England’s Premier League.
It’s a revelation for these young Hellas footballers to find themselves in the hands of a legend, and even more so to discover him preaching simple enjoyment. Heavily overweight, huge of appetite, averse to rain or too much training, Puskás brings confidence in calm, with the occasional tactical twinkle. Thanks to some remarkably unlikely archival finds, the film brings him to life with footage of the dimly lit Hungarian clubs and Greek restaurants of the day, or the suburban matches he kept agreeing to play in his 60s, age and physique barely hampering the deftness or power of that left foot.
So it’s a film about contrast: trips to work in an old Datsun, so beaten up that Ange and the Boss spend the hot months passing the one remaining window winder back and forth. But it’s also about Postecoglou, with the Puskás influence on his own coaching philosophy becoming more evident by the minute. And it’s a migrant story, about how dislocated post-war Europeans built community, how football clubs became a lifeline. Postecolgou frames it as two places of worship.
“There was church in the morning, and a lot of the Greek community found their comfort there,” he says. “And there was Middle Park, South Melbourne Hellas, in the afternoon. Particularly my father, come Sunday afternoon, as soon as he walked through the gate, and the smell of the souvlaki, and the language, everyone’s speaking Greek – my dad just became a different man.”
So there is heft to this story, emotionally, culturally. There is sporting adrenaline, with a success-starved club slamming in goals on the charge towards a final, the NSL heaving even as Anglo Australia still looked at it with derision or suspicion. But overwhelmingly there is delight.
Hellas players can’t wait to share their Puskás stories; Paul Trimboli in particular spends the whole film beaming. Postecoglou’s hours of recording came two days after acrimoniously resigning as Australian national coach, but he insisted on keeping his appointment. Their love and respect for their manager is tangible.
Drawn by that energy, the filmmakers went ahead and started shooting interviews from the beginning, an eagerness that cost them in an environment where funding is available for proposals but not existing projects. The vast cost of licensing match footage then made it impossible to get Ange & The Boss a streaming partner or a full theatrical release. So it’s a minor triumph that after much effort will see a fortnight of screenings in eight cinemas across Melbourne during March, with accompanying showings in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Geelong, and Mildura.
It’s a tale of heart, built around a man who had plenty of the same.
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