The truth about fairytales

If there is one single thing that is the most vexing to Spurs fans about this year’s Premier League season it is the echo chamber of pundits yammering on and on about fairytales.

A quick search of Twitter yields:

As fans of the beautiful game, we are blessed to see a fairytale like this one that #Leicester are creating. Long may it continue!
— Sid Mallya (@sidmallya) April 10, 2016

West Ham boss Slaven Bilic admits Leicester’s fairytale season has put his team’s achievements in the shade.
— Mail Online Sport (@mailsport) April 15, 2016

We have the youngest squad, lowest net spend, most goals scored, least conceded and yet Leicester winning is the fairytale.
— @fazioed April 17, 2016

The first from a neutral, the second from a journalist, and the final from one of our own. Though it’s worth discussing all three, it’s the final one that feels the most familiar. We’ve all felt the sensation that we should be the one talked about as romantic title chasers not that lot. “It’s Tottenham!” we seem to say, “we don’t normally deserve this! So, you know, tell us you love us too!”

Instead, we’ve been relegated to the role of the villains chasing the flawless flaxen-haired foxes. If we win the league we will be spoilers. We will be the perennially bullied kid turning to the new kid and giving him a kick in the pointy end before he even takes off his jacket on the first day of school.

They’ll boo us. Everywhere we go. You know they will.

Harry Kane could score the winner for England in the Euros after controlling an inch perfect pass from Danny Rose, who collected the ball from Alli who stole it off a dawdling midfielder before blowing a kiss to Dier… but if we we win the league instead of Leicester there will be a surprisingly not too small part of the football world that will gaze at us as “them that ruined the greatest story football has ever known.”

[linequote]we’ve been relegated to the role of the villains chasing the flawless flaxen-haired foxes. If we win the league we will be spoilers[/linequote]

It’s not fair, I thought at a dinner party in Boston when a non-football-following London transplant asked “so how’re your Tottenham lads doing this season?”

It’s not fair, I thought watching yet another video of our boys on the training ground, and another one of Pochettino’s accomplishments, and another of Harry’s goal celebration at the Emirates as my phone buzzed with yet another article about the improbable rise of the improbable team with the improbable blah blah blah. Oh and have you heard that Jamie Vardy used to play for the Dillingsworth Puppies in the Central Outer League?

Even my favorite American sports rags are talking about Leicester. They are inescapable.

“This is our year,” I want to stomp and scream, “we’re the fairytale.”

It’s not fair, I thought on Sunday as I watched Cheikhou Kouyaté head a ball past Schmeichel only to see it bounce off both posts, roll along the goal line, before deciding that it would rather take a holiday in Kasper’s loving Danish hands than nestle in the goal.

And then I remembered something so very important: fairytales aren’t real. They’re things people make up to explain circumstances that never happen. Don’t forget, boys and girls, if you meet a witch in the forest make sure you bring a clever elephant.

Fairytales are for children. Football is for bigger children.

I mean I’ve been saying it all along: there is nothing to be learned or emulated from Leicester’s season. Nothing that no one didn’t already know, that is. Play negative football and if you have an incredibly pacy forward on the form of his life you will be hard to beat. Sure there will be agents touting the new Vardy. And Ranieri might be praised for the mind-boggling genius of taking Okazaki off at the 60th minute and replacing him with Ulloa… every single game. But success built on a few players playing the best they have ever played is just a fairytale.

It’s fake. It’s fleeting. Maybe it will make you feel something at the end of the day, but it won’t be anything real. Because fairytales are shallow.

[linequote]Real life is that we are winning games convincingly and with style. Real life is that we’re beyond fairy tales, we’re the genuine article[/linequote]

Take, for example, the story of Chicken Little. He went out one day and was hit on the head by an acorn. He shouted “the sky is falling! The sky is falling!” And everyone panicked and wanted to tell the king but they didn’t know where the king was. In the end of the story the clever fox tells Chicken Little that he knows where the king lives, and lures him into his Fox den. And, of course, eats Chicken Little.

Cute.

But that’s not real life. Real life, is that the next day the fox gets run over by a bored husband trying to find out the score of the Leicester game on their mobile while driving.

I wrote this before our game against Stoke — a game I couldn’t watch because I was at work. Instead, I just sat at an editing desk as my knee bobbed nervously up and down as my phone exploded with notifications. I couldn’t look. Had we collapsed? Had Kane been sent off with a rare straight red immediately after having his leg broken by Charlie Adam?

Finally, I glanced at the screen. Four goals. Another clean sheet. A goal difference the same as my age (a fact shocking to me on all accounts). I smiled.

We are no fairytale. We are real life.

Real life is that every team in the league is trying to figure out how to buy Pochettino from us, or at least try to emulate him. Even Klopp’s gegenpress is going to be Pochettino-fied this summer. Expect him to dump his backline and buy a low-rent Toby to provide the support in the back.

Real life is that we’re providing an enormous part of the England National Team and that we’ll continue to do so for many years. Real life is that we are winning games convincingly and with style. Real life is that we’re beyond fairy tales, we’re the genuine article. We’re actually the best team in the league and all things being equal we’ll continue to be for many years to come.

So let them be the fairytale. Those are things you tell to your kids because the truth is too hard to handle. The truth is that there’s no Knight in Shining Armour that’s going to save you. The truth is, foxes are not apex predators, they’re scavengers. They scrape together whatever meal they can until something bigger and scarier comes along.

Sometimes the bigger and scarier thing is a wolf. And sometimes it’s a cockerel.