It’s Spurs at home on Sunday afternoon.
In between two games against one of the most successful and best-known clubs in history is this fixture against an even bigger, better, greater and more successful outfit. Ladies and gentlemen, doff your caps and tug your forelocks to greet the arrival of the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club to our unworthy home.
When Spurs are doing well it’s because they’re one of the greats, with a long tradition of exciting, wonderful football. When they don’t win anything again it’s because they’re all Spursy, isn’t that typical eh and anyway, winning is a bit vulgar and beneath them. But still they get more luvvie attention than any club with their history have got a right to expect. One trophy this century (equal with Wigan), two league titles ever (less that Huddersfield), once runners-up in the past sixty years (less than us). Awe-inspiring.
This season they’ve only been stopped from running away with the league because of an injury crisis that at one time threatened to overwhelm BUPA. At one point Spurs were the only club to ever have players out. We, on the other hand, are only where we are because we’ve been lucky enough not to have anyone out and if we have nothing’s been said so that proves it can’t have happened.
Years ago Spurs were owned and run by a collection of spivs and chancers such as YesLord Sugar, Terry Venables and him that owned Easyjet. Now it’s a family trust that almost certainly pays their fair share of tax and running the show is Daniel Levy, a man admired throughout football for his hard bargaining and ability to not pay more than the going rate, or indeed not pay at all when he offers sixpence and a goldfish in a plastic bag for a generational talent. We’re operating on the eighties nightclub one in, one out principle when it comes to injuries and team selection.
The daft thing is that this game probably is more important that the Ajax tie. Win it and we can almost reach out and touch fourth place, which is more important these days than any number of trophies. I still haven’t forgiven Steve Perryman.
