What is a “title race” exactly? How do you know if you’re still in it? Who decides? When you’re deemed to have dropped out, does a judge show up and wave a red paddle in your face like Jane Saville at the Sydney Olympics?

Cambridge Dictionary offers a frustratingly broad definition of “title race” – a competition to win a particular sports title, in case you were wondering – so in our hour of need, we turn to Ange Postecoglou.

Ange Postecoglou’s Tottenham Hotspur might be out of the title race - but they’ll still have a say in who wins it.Credit: Stephen Kiprillis

“Define to me what a title race is,” he said in a press conference three months ago, flipping the question onto his questioners. Each time the English press has tried to bait him into either conceding defeat or making a bullish declaration about his side’s Premier League hopes he has wriggled free of the trap, using this one weird trick: logic.

The response from the gallery on this occasion was about whether Tottenham Hotspur were still a “realistic” chance of winning the title: they were, at that point, only six points behind league leaders Liverpool at the halfway mark of the season.

“Yeah,” Postecoglou said. “So by that definition, if I said, ‘No’, you’d say, ‘Come on, Ange.’ By definition, we are, aren’t we? So, yes, we are.”

Three months later, we come to you with this breaking news: Tottenham Hotspur, now 13 points adrift of Liverpool, are out of the title race. They will not win the Premier League this season, our sources say. Mathematically, they’re still a chance, but only in the Dumb & Dumber sense. But yes, they’re still “aiming for the title”, so to speak, because as a team that attempts to win every match they play in, why wouldn’t they be?

These silly little media games don’t matter to Postecoglou, who sees no reason why he should publicly put a lid on his team’s ambitions, and rightfully so. Nor is he particularly interested in the “race” for fourth spot, which offers UEFA Champions League qualification – because it is not, in his words, a “Willy Wonka golden ticket” to greatness.

They were at him again about that on Friday, asking how important it was that Spurs get the minimum of £15.9 million ($30 million) that clubs receive for making the group stage to bolster their transfer kitty. After spending almost 40 years watching the Australian game debase itself in pursuit of the almighty dollar, he knows all too well that money is important, but it’s not the solution to everything.