Tottenham, Depression and Me

I woke up on Wednesday morning and checked my phone to see if Spurs had signed any of the hundreds of players we had supposedly bid for. From the reaction I subsequently saw on social media, you would think that our fans were entering a manic depressive episode. Bemoaning a lack of back up for Harry and cursing Levy’s unique brand of transfer brinkmanship, it would appear the only person that got #levyd was the man himself. You know you are in panic mode when you allegedly bid £15m for Ayoze Perez.

I have scanned through the tweets and watched enough clips of Anthony Martial to assist my false claims that I have known who he was for longer than the past 18 hours, I shrugged my shoulders, put the phone back on the nightstand and built myself up for the real task in hand. How in god’s green earth am I going to find the strength to get out of bed and make the 18 paces to the shower. Actually having a shower and then taking the dog for a walk is about as far as I can look forward without bursting into tears.

You see the trials and tribulations in N17 just do not affect me, at the moment, in the way they used to. I still follow everything the club does, but the highs are severely capped and the lows just do not seem to register in the same way as before.

I was medically diagnosed with depression about two months ago. It is not something that has affected my every waking moment of my 30 year existence. However, I believe it is something that is buried in you from birth and simply rears it head at certain periods. My journey with the illness, diagnosed or not, has been a long one, with Spurs at the heart of all the significant milestones. Not surprising really given until recently the fabric of Spurs and being a fan was the very fabric that knitted me together.

I want to take you back to the mid 90s in South-East England, after some light persuasion on my part, my Mum and Dad parted with about £200 and bought me a junior’s season ticket for the 1997-1998 season. The previous season aged 9 I had started to attend matches on a regular basis, my parents pleased that this seemed to carry my mood upwards for days. Detracting from what outsiders looking in would say was ‘a deeply unhappy child’. I had no reason to be particularly unhappy, it just was that way. About the only time I was denied anything was when Dad returned out of the blue with the new away shirt and turned it round to reveal ‘Fox’ and ‘7’ on the back,

“Ruel Fox Dad, he’s sh…”.
“Watch your language you ungrateful git, bloody quid a letter son, I’m not made of money, when you get a job you can spend as much money as you like on the team.”

Little did he know.

So from August 1997, I was carted off every 2nd Saturday, to watch us struggle to a bottom half finish. Only Klinsmann’s class coming back was enough to save us from the drop. The years of mediocrity flew by after that, and I attended hundreds of games.

I relished in the routine of the match days, parking in the same spots, the same seats, the same voices around and how the chicken at Chick King seemed to taste different dependent on the result.

However, most importantly, not that I was aware at the time, shouting obscenities that a 11-year-old boy should not really know at opposition players, and Chris Armstrong, was giving me an outlet for the frustrations and anxiety I was unable to express properly as a child.

I was obsessed with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. It would define my week. A lot of my strongest friendships came from shared love of all things Spurs. As I got older, starting to attend games with mates, travel away from home, the love grew and grew. I cried tears of despair as we lost to the scum at Old Trafford in the FA Cup in 2001 as a teenager, and then cried a different type of tears as an adult as Crouchy sent us to the promised land at the Ethiad in 2010. Some of the funniest moments in life have happened on trains going up and down the country to and from Spurs games.

The nadir coming on a holiday in Paris with my then girlfriend, now wife, during the first week of the season playing out across the channel. She had no desire to come to football with me, but took a keen interest in Spurs’ fortunes. In the city of love, on top of the steps of the Sacre Coeur, sweltering hot and with the city sprawling in our vista, she grabbed my arm and looked deep in my eyes and as she went to utter something meaningful…

[buzz buzz]
“YESSSSSSSSSSSS, its only Adebayor babe we’re one up at Wolves!”
(sigh) “M you said you were boycotting this year because they bought Adebayor, you hate Adebayor, when your drunk you coming in singing horrible things about his mum. We’re in Paris for god sake the city of love…(sees my grinning face and accepts the moment is lost), oh go on then, you have permission to make a scene.”

Now as the other tourists looked on in bemusement as a sweaty man danced and cursed on top of those famous steps, I look back on that now as very visceral moment, when I was genuinely happy, not a care in the world.

[fullquote]My journey with the illness, diagnosed or not, has been a long one, with Spurs at the heart of all the significant milestones.[/fullquote]

Now lets fast forward to the beginning of 2014. My now fiancee is begging me to seek professional help as she hates seeing me in this way. However, I only accept something is really up three months later in March. It is about 9.30pm on a crisp spring night, I could not feel more empty. There is white noise all around me, but the only clear noise is the thoughts in my own head.

The white noise is from the rowdy bunch of Benfica fans celebrating going 3-1 up at the Lane in the Europa league last 16. I stand in Park Lane feeling nothing, no anger, absolutely nothing. I do not want to be there, I want to be where I have spent all my spare time of late, locked away in bed.

How I had arrived at this stage at that particular time is a combination of many factors and and not especially relevant. But what is key is that the one constant in my life, the one thing that always seemed to pick me up when I needed it most, was now not able to. I had lost interest in something that I had taken great pleasure in previously. A classic sign of depression.

You will note at the top of this post, I said that I had woken up in the morning and checked my phone for deadline day details. The reason for that is that the deadline closed in the middle of night on Wednesday for me as I am now living abroad. My wife, felt it could be a great new start for us.

I have struggled to adapt to the new country and my depression is still what defines most of my actions and thoughts at the moment, but things are starting to ever so slowly move upwards. I see a therapist every fortnight and I can feel some of her ideas starting to stick. I have made a couple of friends, a plastic Liverpool fan and another yid.

In the country I live in they have a very different way of following sport to the Brits. Watching sport is treated as a hobby and professional outfits are simply means to watch the athletes take part in that Sport.

For most of us we did not choose Spurs, Spurs chose us for whatever reason. That passion, humour and deep connection with the club is something that is not really replicated in sporting ‘franchises’ as they are known out here. Guess that word sums it up really.

As I make my way back to full mental health, climbing the steps back up to that moment at the Sacre Coeur, I know that Tottenham is going to be involved in some fashion, it has to be, it could not be any other way.

So hopefully by the time January window comes around and we bring Louis Saha out of retirement or get the current day equivalent of Rasziak to cater for Kane’s almost inevitable injury in the next couple of weeks, I for one hope that I am able to join you all in the anger as I can’t wait to feel what that is like again.