The Big Picture Tottenham Hotspur

My
ad, why couldn’t you have
supported Arsenal?”
It’s only when you bequeath a
loyalty to Spurs to your son that
you realise the full enormity of what
being a Spurs supporter means. It took my son, now
in his twenties, quite a few of his boyhood years to
realise that, unlike his Chelsea, Arsenal or Manchester
up against Manchester United and then losing by
two. At home. I remember Gary Neville saying in his
post-match interview that it could only have happened
against Tottenham. He smirked as he said it.
Neville was speaking the truth. At that point my son
must have wondered how he ended up shackled to
this shambling wreck, this Don Quixote, this shabby
deluded aristocrat of a football club. But then I had to

white
United supporting friends, his inherited allegiance to remind him that when you live where we do in north
Tottenham was likely to lead not to a trophy but to a London you either attach yourself to the overcrowded
h
pwort
lifetime of occasionally heroic, sometimes comic and coat tails of that bunch of arrivistes from Woolwich or
id H e
Dav o generally hurtful underachievement. you make the grand romantic gesture of nailing your

fe sh ackled t It’s a funny thing. In all other respects we do our best colours to Tottenham’s mast, knowing that they were
on a li m Hotspur; to make our children happier. It’s only in handing on lighting the way for adventurous attacking football and
a
Tottenh ling wreck, our loyalties to a club like Tottenham that we knowingly winning the Double in the days when Arsenal had little
b
‘a sham y deluded
condemn the fruit of our loins to bearing a painful need of a trophy cabinet. Bit like now in fact.
burden for the rest of their lives. It’s like asking your son
b
a shab rat of a
aristoc lub’
to turn round while you attach a note saying “kick me”
to his back before sending him forth into the world. I could tell my son of the quicksilver talents of Jimmy
Greaves, the inscrutable Alan Gilzean, or stolid
ll c
footba
He blurted the above heartfelt plea some time late Bobby Smith; I could sing the praises of push-and-run

heart
in the last century, during our most recent Dark Ages
when we had somehow contrived to be managed
by Christian Gross, who arrived at his first press
conference brandishing a tube ticket and never fully
recovered his poise, and then George Graham, a man
bearing the double shame of having been banned
for taking bribes and also having managed Arsenal.
Not long after that, in one of those doomed flourishes
to which clubs like Tottenham are attached, we had
appointed favourite son Glenn Hoddle as manager
and suffered the peculiar agony of going three goals
or the staggering width of Pat Jennings’ hands and
remind him we were the first winners of the UEFA Cup
in 1972. It would be little use. For anyone who’s grown
up in the Premier League era, only the Premier League
matters and in that time, despite getting fifth under
Martin Jol who was then inexplicably fired and replaced
by Juande Ramos, who was just plain inexplicable,
we’ve been, let’s be honest, left behind.
images DAVID CANNON / GETTY IMAGES

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Ramos may have done us
a favour because his bizarre
tenure must have cured the
club’s owners of their belief
that salvation had to come
from the other side of
the English Channel.
The latter part of
Ramos’s reign, which
began the second the
final whistle went in our
2008 Carling Cup victory,
was characterised by a drift
so complete you wondered
if some of the players were still
calling themselves professionals.
It mercifully ended on October 25,
2008 with us having got only two points from eight
games and looking more than capable of going
down. If any team can make a nonsense of the bland
nostrum “too good to go down”, it’s Spurs.
Then along came Harry. Or ‘Arry, as he is known
to reporters, who can’t decide whether to be
outraged or impressed by his historical dealings in
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the transfer market.
Earlier this season he
finally bridled at a TV
interviewer who called him
a “wheeler dealer”. “F-ck
off,” he said. “I’m a football
manager.” It’s difficult to blame
him for finding this kind of attitude
patronising. Under him we have
finally glimpsed some sunlight in the shape of last
year’s qualification for the Champions League.
Now we’re tasting once again the old truth that it’s
not the despair that kills a football fan, it’s the hope.
Of course all true Tottenham fans know the wheels
could very easily come off at any moment. This
season we’ve managed the seemingly impossible by
making the group stages of the
Champions League interesting,
conceding three goals to Swiss
side Young Boys before coming back,
putting four past Twente Enschede and
then politely waving Inter Milan through
four times before Gareth Bale got so sick of
supplying crosses that nobody got on the end
of that he went and scored the same goal three times
in the second half. We still lost, of course, but, hey, in
Tottenham terms, that was a moral victory. Even better,
it was followed by an actual victory over the Italians at
home. Bale woke up the next morning to find himself
the most acclaimed young player in European football
and therefore, the argument ran, Tottenham couldn’t
possibly retain him if some properly competitive club
came calling. Tottenham fans, having watched him
gallop past every right back in England home and
away for a whole year, wondered why it had taken
everybody so long to realise how good he was, while
also suspecting that he could easily end up at Old
Trafford or the San Siro. It wouldn’t take the world’s
most persuasive agent to convince Bale, who seems
quite a bright young man, that he’s more likely to
Glenn Hoddle on the ball
during the 1981 FA Cup final
“They’re occasionally brilliant, often embarrassing, always
entertaining, usually under-achieving. You feel an undertow
of bred-in-the-bone pessimism coursing through the crowd”
become a world name at a club that wins something.
And there’s the rub. Ever since I’ve been watching
Spurs, which was in the days of Martin Chivers, Ralph
Coates, Mike England, Steve Perryman and Pat
Jennings, they’ve been occasionally brilliant, frequently
embarrassing, always entertaining but usually under-
achieving. You can feel that undertow of bred-in-the-
bone pessimism coursing through the crowd during
a game. If they go ahead too early in the match you
just know that they are incapable of shutting out a
top team for more than half an hour. All conversations
amongst fans will at some point or another feature the
expression “that’s so Spurs”, usually accompanied by
a shake of the head.
Wonderful players are not a problem. White
Hart Lane has provided a perfect stage and an
appreciative audience for some of football’s most
princely figures over the past 40 years: Glenn Hoddle,
Paul Gascoigne, Teddy Sheringham and Martin
Peters to name a few. Tottenham were the first English
team to take overseas players to their hearts with the
arrival of Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricky Villa after the 1978
World Cup. Since then the crowd have thrilled to the
likes of David Ginola, Jurgen Klinsmann and Dimitar
Berbatov. Right now there’s Luka Modric and Rafael
van der Vaart. They’re all wonderful players.
But during that time what have we won? The
Carling Cup, that’s what. We spend a lot of money
but we were never going to attract Fernando Torres or
David Villa with a record like that. They can read. Van
der Vaart, who is a natural diplomat, said he wanted
to come to Spurs where they “play from the heart”.
When he scored against Villa at home he celebrated
by heading straight to embrace a white-haired granny.
I’m surprised he didn’t sing Roll Out The Barrel at
the same time. He knew that Tottenham is, like the
English according to Evelyn Waugh, addicted to its
own charm. In fact Tottenham are the most English of
football clubs. They might win something from time to
time but they’ll put you through hell doing it and then
witter on about it for years afterwards. Nostalgia is in
our blood. We’d far rather think about some triumph
that took place long in the past than contemplate the
possibility that we might lose the next game.
It’s frequently observed that we have the richest
array of bench talent in the country. And yet we have
hardly any defensive cover since Jonathan Woodgate
succumbed to a mysterious injury, Michael Dawson
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crocked himself
playing for England
and Ledley King, the
club captain and, since the
acrimonious departure of Sol
Campbell, the embodiment
of the club, can only play one in
three and doesn’t train. We have
full backs – Assou-Ekotto, Hutton
and Bale – who are likely to have senior moments that
lead to the opposition getting a tap-in at the far post.
In midfield we have so many players they can’t give
a start to Nico Kranjcar and Wilson Palacios, both first
picks for their national sides. Upfront we have four
strikers – Crouch, Pavlyuchenko, Defoe and Keane –
none of whom you would put your house on. No other
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club can boast as many players
capable of scoring a goal.
No other club have so many
who can’t be relied on to
score a goal.
Young players tend
to get briefly better at
Tottenham and then
slip back. It’s as if
there’s something in
the water at White Hart
Lane. David Bentley, Aaron
Lennon, Tom Huddlestone,
Jermaine Jenas; they’re all
talented, all English but none of
them have grown and improved
like a Gerrard or a Rooney. There’s
a sense in which they don’t look as if they believe
they’re expected to win. Our record against the
traditionally stronger teams bears this out. We’re quite
likely to turn them over in spectacular fashion from
time to time but mostly, when it comes
to the tense arm-wrestles that decide the destination
of titles, we’ll give in.
Spurs boss Harry
Redknapp with Luka
Modric
That’s the dark secret every Spurs fan carries in
their heart: the lust for glory is outweighed by the fear
of failure. The people talking them up at the moment
are not the fans. They’re the pundits, who are suddenly
surprised to find another entertaining team outside the
usual suspects. Tottenham fans frankly wish they’d
stop going on about it and leave us to gloriously fall
short somewhere far away from the spotlight.
None of this is to suggest for a moment I don’t love
Tottenham. That’s the important thing about football
love. Like love of your children, it’s unconditional.
They may waste your money, let you down in public
and make the same mistakes again and again.
This changes nothing. The thing you love is the
accumulated experience of joy and pain that you have
stored inside over the years. As the Americans say,
you are invested in them.
Talking of Americans, yesterday I listened to Bruce
Springsteen talk about one of his old records which he
had worried away at for over a year. He said: “You don’t
choose the story. The story chooses you.” Maybe it’s like
that with Tottenham. They choose you. You wouldn’t
change them if you could. They’re part of who you
are. That’s why we don’t support Arsenal, son.
the SPURS primer
10 tales you might not know about Tottenham Hotspur
Goals and glory
Way back in October 1958, with new manager
Bill ‘Mr Tottenham’ Nicholson enjoying his first
game at the helm, Tottenham won a phenomenal
contest over Everton, 10-4. Just 14 months later,
in February 1961, they beat Crewe Alexandria
13-2, and went on to claim the League-FA Cup
double the same season.
Selling a Sol
The club’s bitter rivalry with Arsenal is perhaps
best summed up by the story of former Spurs
captain Sol Campbell (above). The ex-England
international left Tottenham on a free transfer to
the Gunners, making him public enemy number
one among Spurs fans, who quickly dubbed
him ‘Judas’. Campbell later came in at No.1 on
a list of ‘football’s biggest traitors’ in an English
newspaper, while in 2009, four Tottenham fans
were banned from grounds in England for three
years after directing offensive chants at the
defender while he was playing with Portsmouth.
Wheeler dealers
Current strikers Jermaine Defoe and Robbie
Keane are both in their second stint at Spurs,
with the club having paid a total of A$66m for the
pair. Defoe was sold to Portsmouth for $9.7m and
bought back at an expensive $25.6m. Keane was
the better business – sold to Liverpool for $33m
and bought back for $19.5m.
In Hod We trust
White Hart Lane has been a virtual revolving
door of international stars in the past 20 years,
with the likes of Jurgen Klinsmann, David Ginola,
Sergei Rebrov, Dimitar Berbatov and Luka Modric
being just a few to have graced the club with their
presence. Yet the status of the club’s favourite
son falls to an Englishman, Glenn Hoddle, who
was voted the best Tottenham player of all time
by fans on the official Spurs website. Hoddle
pulled the strings in Spurs’ midfield during their
golden period in the 1980s, playing almost 500
times for the club and returning as manager
from 2001-2003.
Game of two halves
Tottenham’s ability to simultaneously entertain
and frustrate their fans was at its puzzling best
in the 2001-02 season, when they went into half-
time leading Manchester United 3-0 at White Hart
Lane. The final score? United 5, Spurs 3. “We
attacked brilliantly and nullified United’s attacks
in the first half,” said the manager Glenn Hoddle,
“but the second half was just the opposite.”
Conquering Europe
Martin Chivers (above) was the hero of Spurs’
UEFA Cup success in 1972. In what was the
inaugural UEFA Cup tournament, Tottenham
faced Wolverhampton Wanderers in the final,
winning the first leg at home, 2-1, courtesy of
a Chivers double, the second of which was a
20-metre screamer. They held on in the away leg
for a 1-1 draw to become the first British side to
win two different major European trophies.
The People’s Club
Spurs became the first football club to float shares
on the London Stock Exchange, doing so in 1983.
Gross error in judgment
The British tabloids were rubbing their hands in
delight shortly after the arrival of Swiss manager
Christian Gross to the club, during the 1997-98
season. Gross infamously waved a tube (London
underground transport) ticket in the air at his first
press conference, to which he arrived late, saying:
“I want this to become my ticket to dreams. I came
by Underground because I wanted to know the way
the fans feel coming to Spurs. I want to show that I
am one of them.” The club avoided relegation but
when Spurs lost two of their opening three matches
the following season, Gross was shown the door.
Six decades of silverware
Tottenham beat Chelsea 2-1 in the final of the
League Cup in 2008, which ended nine years of
pain for fans who had been desperately waiting
for some silverware. Jonathan Woodgate’s extra-
time header gave them victory over the defending
champions and it also meant Spurs had secured
a trophy in each of the last six decades – an
achievement matched only by Manchester United
among English clubs.
Bale brilliance
On May 5, 2010, Spurs reached the qualifying
rounds of the Champions League for the first time
in their history. The highlight so far? It has to be
a pair of stunning performances on the left flank
from Gareth Bale (below) against Inter Milan.
Bale scored a hat-trick in their 4-3 defeat to the
reigning European champions, and backed it up
with two assists as he inspired Spurs to a 3-1
home win against the Italian giants.
(YouTube: Gareth Bale vs Inter)
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