Why I love Spurs

When I got home from my night shift yesterday morning, I lay in bed and started to think about just what it is that makes me love Spurs the way I do. It kept me awake for ages, despite my obvious fatigue, there were a million reasons flying round my head but there didn’t seem to be a way for me to articulate them, or anything I could think of to sum it all up. Until my mind flickered to one game, my whole love for Spurs could pretty much be summed up by one game.

Now some of you might think that this game is one which we romped to a storming 9-1 victory because we all love the attacking football that Spurs play but that doesn’t quite do it for me because let’s be honest, that is not all there is to our beloved club.

Perhaps you think it is a night where the Spurs faithful shook the very foundations of our long adored home from home, White Hart Lane, for we all know that when our fans want to, they make a noise like no other and renditions of “Oh When The Spurs” and “Glory Glory Hallelujah” never fail to send shivers down our spines, again there is so much more to why I love this club.

Some of the more lateral thinkers reading this article might be closer to the mark and may suspect that this one game is a heartbreaking loss that stopped us achieving our goal for the season, once again though they would be wrong.

This one game, took place 596 miles away, on a chilly October night in 2010. For purposes of suspense and drama I won’t tell you what the game was but you will guess it with consummate ease and some of you may have already cottoned on. For me this game had every element of what makes Tottenham Hotspur my one and only. Every Spurs fan knows that our team are liable to totally implode on occasion and put in some absolute diabolical performances, when everybody was expecting more.

[authquoteleft text=”Renditions of Oh When The Spurs and Glory Glory Hallelujah never fail to send shivers down our spines[/linequote]

This game started out like it was going to be one of those nights and one of those games. After just two minutes, all of our hopes and dreams of a famous European away win were dented by a legend of the modern day game slotting home close range. Shortly afterwards came one of the moments that sums up Spurs for me.

For every world class, incredibly talented legend that has passed through our club over our entire existence, we have had another player who is ten times as bad as any of those legends were good and that is part and parcel of being Spurs, you know that every now and then you are going to bare witness to some of the worst footbllers the planet has ever seen but sometimes we love them nonetheless.

Now I won’t name names but on this particular night one of these players happened to be our goalkeeper, and in the eleventh minute he showed us one of the many reasons he resides in this category, by giving away a penalty and subsequently seeing red. It all looked downhill from here and soon after we found ourselves 4-0 down a half time, which brings me smoothly onto my next point.

In recent weeks and months our support has taken a bit of a bashing from within it’s own ranks, from one of the clubs former manager and from various other angles, in some cases this criticism is probably warranted. I could write an entirely different article on why we have seen a decline in the atmosphere at White Hart Lane but this is not the time or the place for it.

Despite this one of things that sums Spurs up for me is our fans undying support for the club no matter what predicament the team may find themselves in. This incredible support is epitomised by the comparatively small group of Spurs fans that had followed the boys to the continent and who continued to sing their hearts out despite the doom impending scoreline.

Although I cannot claim to have been sat high up in the gods of that famous European arena, I do have second hand accounts of just how fantastic our following were that night and I can claim to have heard them belting out every Spurs song under the sun while I watched shell shocked in my living room. Now I am not saying that those fans are what inspired what we were about to see but it is without question one of things that sums up the club that I love.

[linequote]I could write an entirely different article on why we have seen a decline in the atmosphere at White Hart Lane but this is not the time or the place for it[/linequote]

Down the years as Spurs fans we have borne witness to some absolutely incredible talents grace the hallowed turf of White Hart Lane and those players are one of the reasons that I am so passionately in love with this football club. These are the players that play the Tottenham way, that play for the badge on the shirt and the ones who get us on the edges of our seats whenever they touch the ball.

There have been scores of them since that fateful day in 1882 and there will be many more. Think Jimmy Greaves, Cliff Jones, Glenn Hoddle, Paul Gascoigne and Gareth Bale. No matter what has happened since their time spent at The Lane, not one person can deny that when they were wearing our famous lily white shirts you couldn’t help but be mesmerised by them.

On this particular night we saw one of these players light up the world stage just like many more before him. What this player was about to do encapsulates everything that it means to play the Tottenham way; no fear, all out attacking master class. Filled with skill, pace, power, finesse and downright disregard for whatever opposition lay in his wake. This display was to go down in the history books as one of the greatest individual displays of brilliance in Tottenham’s history, a stunning hat-trick which catapulted a young Welshman into the stratosphere of world football.

Despite one mans heroics, my final point is one which will always hold true with every Spurs fan. A mantra which we all wish we could dispense with once and for all but for now at least it sticks with us but in a twisted way I love it. We are the perennial nearly men, the not quite there men, the close but not quite close enough men.

We lost this game by a small margin and down the years it has happened time and time again, whether it be one goal in a tight encounter or one point in a chase for an extra league position. Now don’t get me wrong we have had our fair share of glory, not so much in my lifetime, but we have had it but it has very rarely been prolonged or sustained.

Although we never quite pulled back the final goal in this one game we came so close in such an inspiring way that it almost felt like we had walked away with all three points. It inspired us to go on an incredible journey in Europe’s elite competition where we would dazzle not only our fans and our opponents but also several million neutral onlookers in the process.

This run saw us utterly obliterate the very team who we had so nearly inflicted the greatest of all comebacks on, it saw us return to the very same stadium for a famous smash and grab win ensured by a classic counter-attacking Spurs goal, it also saw us take on the biggest club in Europe and give a very good account of ourselves.

[authquoteright text=”an incredible journey in Europe’s elite competition where we would dazzle not only our fans and our opponents but also several million neutral onlookers[/linequote]

This is the magic of Spurs, no matter how great the setback, we will always comeback bigger and better than the last time. We will always put on another display akin to that Welshman’s in that one game, we will always have fans that love the club more passionately than anything else they hold dear, we will always revert back to the Tottenham way and one day we will enjoy the successes that our glorious club deserves.

Our club is one that isn’t always perfect looking from the outside in but to each and everyone of us there is not a single thing we would change because that is the magic of being Spurs.

[author name=”Pairsy1882″ avatar=”https://www.thefightingcock.co.uk/forum/data/avatars/m/2/2754.jpg?1389507674[/linequote]