We’re off to Spurs. Apparently they’re a football team.
Modest, successful, self-effacing, bashful, reserved, shy. These are just a few of the words never said about Spurs. Arrogant, media darlings, pretentious, self-opinionated, up their own arses, cocky, pretentious, smug. These are a few of the words that are.
If ever there was a case of footballing style over substance then Tottenham Hotspur are it. Part of the Big Six because they say they are, and nobody can be bothered to say different. Until he end of last season they’d won as many trophies this century as Wigan, then they finished a place above relegation, spawned a win over a team that finished fifteenth and got into the Champions League by the tradesmen’s entrance.
If that’s not enough to earn undying derision, they last won the league in 1961. Since then they’ve come close to winning it again on no times whatsoever and the time they came nearest to making a challenge they got stopped when we beat them at White Hart Lane with Paul Rideout and Mark Walters scoring*. Spurs are a big club indeed.
They used to be run by Daniel Levy, who became a by-word for penny-pinching and wasn’t very well-liked. Now they’ve got a bloke who used to work for Arsenal and those scrupulously ethical conglomorates Uefa and the London Olympics. They have a nice new ground that’s got American football, concerts and boxing coming up. Sometimes they remember they’re a football club and they play the odd match now and again.
This season they’re doing reasonably well but that won’t last. Their manager used to be at Brentford and he won’t last long. They’ve spent lots of money on players who won’t last long either. Up against them on Sunday are a fully-fit squad** of highly-motivated, supremely talented claret and blue worldbeaters. Victory is beyond inevitable.
* Poetic licence a bit.
** Poetic licence a lot
