Everything will be ok

Long ago, the year Spurs qualified for the Champions League, I was living in East Dulwich, South London. On the evening of the Man City game, the day Spurs qualified for the Champions League,I rushed back to Dulwich from Holborn. I honestly don’t think I had ever been more excited for a game of football. 

That season I’d somehow managed to get my (then) girlfriend interested in Spurs. By the time of the Man City game it seemed like she had gone past the point of humouring me and was actually enjoying it all independently.

Out of nowhere she began to have very strong and relevant views on Niko Kranjcar’s inclusion in the starting eleven. I’m not saying girls can’t be interested in football, but it certainly hadn’t been one of her hobbies before we got together.

Maybe I was kidding myself and it was all just for me, it didn’t really matter. With the exception of the time she let slip she found Sebastien Bassong sexually attractive, it was a flawless introduction. What a time to be introduced to Spurs.

She started coming to games with me. I somehow managed to get us tickets for both the Arsenal 2-1 and the Chelsea 2-1 at The Lane, it was about three hundred quid of Category A tickets, or something close. Somehow, I managed to get two tickets together for both those games on the ticket exchange, for face value – something I will never be able to do again because of StubHub. I couldn’t really afford it but I put the tickets on a credit card.

The atmosphere in the Bell and Hare after those two games will be laser etched into my memory for every second I remain alive. The volume of the singing in the outside section, it didn’t seem to stop.

[authquoteleft text=”With the exception of the time she let slip she found Sébastien Bassong sexually attractive[/linequote]

The evening of the Manchester City game was the net result of all the little moments that season had provided, not just the glorious ones, but every single one of them. Still being in the stands, unable to leave, as the clock ticked down in the Birmingham 2-1 game – the one where Modric broke his leg, half the ground had already left before Lennon’s goal went in, but I was still there.

I felt like Spurs had truly earned this chance, but every time I took a moment to reflect I came back to 2006, the year of avian flu, some business in Iraq, the year we got turned over by a lasagne.

A couple of days before West Ham 2006 my Mum got sick. She was in a pretty bad way. That Sunday I went to go and see her in hospital. I couldn’t watch the game, I couldn’t be at the game, I couldn’t listen to the game. Of course, this is my Mum, it is more important, but it meant that I was removed from all other Spurs fans. However, the universe gave me something.

I was in the hospital all day and I didn’t want to use my mobile because it was an intensive care ward, full of other people’s families, strangers crying, nurses being busy. About fifteen minutes after the game had ended I managed to find a moment to go outside.

I went to the front of the hospital, to a little outside bit with patients in gowns holding wheeled drips and smoking. I turned my phone on. Immediately I was mail bombed by a million – mostly unkind- text messages. I sat there and lit a cigarette, a couple of seconds later an old man tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if knew the Spurs score.

He had specially asked for ‘the Spurs score’, but this was in Canterbury, Kent.  I didn’t know what type of old man I was about to get. A West Ham fan? It would have been terrible. An Arsenal fan? It would have truly made this the worst moment of my life, all things considered. But the old man was Spurs.

[linequote]I felt like Spurs had truly earned this chance, but every time I took a moment to reflect I came back to 2006, the year we got turned over by a lasagne[/linequote]

When I told him the score he started to well up. I saw it instantly. He pulled himself together inside of a pico-second, but I saw an old man nearly cry in front of a group of strangers because of Tottenham. He was a hospital porter, or a cleaner, or something. He’d gone outside for a cigarette too, and I’m pretty sure he had a mop with him but I might be embellishing things. In my mind I make him look like Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours, but I think he was just a normal old man.

I wanted to hug him. My Mum was ill, Arsenal had finished fourth and God had somehow created the genetically engineered super solider of all Spursy situations. A comedic state of affairs you couldn’t have made up if you tried, dodgy Italian food, the epitome of nearly men, a situation manufactured by circumstance in such a way that somehow – yet again – it wasn’t our fault that we’d messed up.

We had managed, against all odds, to almost achieve qualification for the Champions League. Not only had we missed out, but we had managed to fail in such a way that only outside forces and third parties could be blamed. We couldn’t even wallow in the simplicity of being rubbish. Proper Spursy. But the universe gave me an old man.

We sat down on the bench outside and he told me some stories about watching Bill Nicks’ team, being a lad in London, jumpers for goal posts, stories that I’ve now forgotten.

Looking at it through the eyes of a stranger made me realise that sometimes, that thing, the entirety of that thing, is far more important than the little details of the thing. What I mean is that, while the result mattered, it didn’t actually really matter. What mattered was that tomorrow, when I woke up, I’d still be a Spurs fan.

I thought about that moment again, displaced in East Dulwich, sitting there waiting for my mates to arrive, I realised that tonight only feels like tonight because of 2006. I thought, how exactly is this going to go down?

Behind me a man in a suit and woman who is not his wife are talking about whether Peter Crouch should start not. Her view is he shouldn’t start, his view is he should. I’m a few pints down, I turn around and say, half-joking, half-serious ‘Crouch will score the winner’.

[linequote]We couldn’t even wallow in the simplicity of being rubbish. Proper Spursy[/linequote]

People keep arriving to watch the game. There are now a few Spurs shirts around the place, someone has a Holsten top on. I have no idea where they are coming from. Before long the pub is packed with Spurs fans and there is a cluster of City fan’s too, much larger than I anticipated even the Spurs contingent was going to be in midweek, provincial South London.

When Crouch’s goal goes in it is like I teleport to the top of the table. I don’t remember the process of getting up there. I jump in the air, land back on the table without embarrassing myself and scream something, I basically incant something. There is a Street Fighter style sonic boom across the back of the pub, still on the table, half reflexively I start singing oh-when-the-Spurs.

The non-couple behind me back me up almost instantly. When the tempo changes and the clapping starts, a bloke wearing a beanie and a yellow V-neck home shirt cautiously joins in. I don’t know to what degree I’m exaggerating this as it is the only version of events I choose to remember – but I truly believe I had the whole pub singing, the whole pub brought together not by me, but by this single moment.

When it is all over I am in a pretty emotional state, the people behind buy a bottle of champagne and I sit and talk to them for a while. Everyone gets drunk. The pub eventually kicks everyone out. We all get a cab home and I monologue to the taxi driver on why tonight is so important, so much so that I manage to get him shouting “YID ARMY“. I think he might have been Arabic.

To me, this kind of moment is football. These ludicrous extremes are all I know. To me, that moment is also what it means to be a Spurs fan. Without that West Ham result, the Man City result wouldn’t have been the same. Without a lifetime of Spursyness it just wouldn’t have felt the same. Success had been made a thousand times sweeter by all of the previous frustration.

I don’t think it is quite like this for any other team. I don’t know what it was like in the 60’s, but for almost my entire life Tottenham have existed in this strange little space. A Groundhog Day loop of almost achieving something, an endless cycle of rebuilding, small tastes of intense glory.

[authquoteleft text=”When things are bad we have to chin up and we have to take it, because we literally have no other choice[/linequote]

I know for a fact is that there will be another season like that one. Think how truly on our knees we were when Ramos left, think for a second how thoroughly preposterous the idea of Gareth Bale scoring a hat-trick in the Champions League seemed back then. Think what could happen tomorrow.

It might not be next season, or the season afterwards, but when it happens – not to be mawkish – it will be yours, it will be mine. It will be ours.

Maybe it is dysfunctional, but in order for these things to feel as special as they do, we have to the take the two points from the eight games, we have to take the embarrassing managerial carousel, we have to take the putrid sadness of AVB’s departure and, right now, have to support Tim Sherwood. When things are bad we have to chin up and we have to take it, because we literally have no other choice.

This is the circle of life, this is football. This is Tottenham Hotspur.

[author name=”Nick Calvert[/linequote]