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On the cusp of love

4 min read
by Vass Koni
We may have only drawn with West Brom, but there is still something special happening at Spurs. Vass Koni returns and looks at our team and how behind it all is one man. Mauricio Pochettino.

There was a time when as Spurs fans we were told that we’d apparently never had it so good. Aside from effectively telling us that we should be happy with our lot, there is also a rather disappointing undertone in that statement that we didn’t really have to reach any farther. Or moreover that we couldn’t.

Of course football clubs should always strive for better and such resignation and acceptance of the status quo in any aspect of life – not just in football; can result in a rather tedious and monotonous existence. Thankfully our club didn’t stop striving. And in the course of striving decisions were taken that perhaps didn’t work out, but for as long as you learn from errors you can move on.

And how we have moved on. The recent game at White Hart Lane against Manchester City was, by the admission of many a fan, one of the best games they have ever been to. That we are now in the midst of witnessing the emergence of one of the most entertaining and harmonious squads in many a year is down to one man. Mauricio Pochettino.

I won’t dwell on what he has done for us. It has been well documented and many Spurs fans are already in love with the man. But the greater issue is that due to his efforts and what he is doing, he is giving us all a team to love. We used to sing about wanting our Tottenham back in the dark days that are thankfully behind us. Well there’s certainly a Tottenham that we can relate to right here right now.

[linequote]That we are now in the midst of witnessing the emergence of one of the most entertaining and harmonious squads in many a year is down to one man. Mauricio Pochettino[/linequote]

We all as football fans fall in love with a team as our fan journey begins. All Spurs fans through the generations have had one particular team that they will have watched and with whom they can identify their fandom. For me it’s the team of the early 80’s. Of Hoddle, Archibald, Crooks, Ossie, Ricky and Robbo.

People older than me may identify with the 70’s side of Chivers, Gilzean, Mullery, Peters and Jennings. And those older still with that amazing double team of the 60’s. The names of those players forever etched into our history and which do not need naming again here.

All of those teams were formed under our two most successful managers to date in Bill Nicholson and Keith Burkinshaw.

Sadly though many a generation of Spurs fan has no clear identifiable Spurs team with which to attach themselves to because of the paucity of our existence in the 90’s and our slumbering turbulence of the noughties. That is until now.

Of course we had a fleeting surge of joy for a couple of seasons around 2010 and the Champions League journey we embarked on and the performances that we had in it. But it passed. And it passed too quickly. Aside from falling in love with individual players like Bale, Modric, VDV and King, can we really say that we fell in love with that team? With Corluka, Crouch, Ekotto or Pavlyuchenko?

And that has been the problem at Spurs during that twenty year period since the early nineties. We loved individual players. Ginola, Klinsmann, Sherringham, Berbatov, Modric, Bale. And always we hung on to the coat tails of those individual players talents in the hope that we would get to some place good because of them. Naturally that didn’t happen. How could it? What Pochettino has proven is that you need good leadership and you need the talent of a team to be spread across the whole team and not just parts of it.

[linequote]What Pochettino has proven is that you need good leadership and you need the talent of a team to be spread across the whole team and not just parts of it[/linequote]

It was the same under Nicholson and Burkinshaw. Good managers that built a good teams. Winning teams. And that is what is left for this young Pochettino side to do. Win things. They may not be the finished article yet. They are still absorbing information and learning their trade. But there is no doubt about the underlying talent that the squad currently has. I doubt we have seen the best of it yet. Silverware may not come this season. If indeed we really are on the cusp of something good, odds are we cannot be far away odds are we cannot be far away. And I defy any Spurs fan to feel otherwise.

It is a strange feeling of course. We are not used to having good things happen to our club in recent years. And writing about your team is, believe it or not, quite a difficult thing to do when things are going well. Unless its some kind of eulogy or tactical write up which I try to avoid. It’s so much easier when there is an anger fuelled rant to put to paper!

So as long as I haven’t jinxed things and Spurs go to perform poorly for the rest of the season, then I for one am riding this high that we are currently on. And I hope that we will soon no longer need to fly under the radar as we are at last taken seriously by our peers and Pochettino and the team take us to where we have longed to be for so long.

All views and opinions expressed in this article are the views and opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of The Fighting Cock. We offer a platform for fans to commit their views to text and voice their thoughts. Football is a passionate game and as long as the views stay within the parameters of what is acceptable, we encourage people to write, get involved and share their thoughts on the mighty Tottenham Hotspur.