They couldn't, could they?
Tottenham may not go down — but watching them try is objectively hilarious
We weren’t embarrassed by it. In fact, it would have been deemed improper conduct to have behaved any other way. One Sunday afternoon in the early to mid-2000s, my Dad and I ambled over to a Spurs-supporting family friend’s home to watch a Tottenham match on TV.
I don’t recall who they were playing — we must have seen scores of games together. The only reason I remember the occasion is that our host’s elderly mother had passed away earlier that day. “You’re not going over there to support the other team?” my Mom asked incredulously before we left.
Of course we were. They were playing Tottenham. So in an atmosphere of macabre humour, we quietly cheered as some team in blue — perhaps Leicester City, although Ipswich Town were in the Premier League around that time — scored their third and fourth goals at White Hart Lane.
This isn’t one of those moments to trot out Bill Shankly’s oft-quoted line about football being more important than life and death. Not least because Shankly himself never quite meant it that way. As his biographer John Keith later explained:
Shankly’s famous quote was said with his usual devilment, to underline just what football meant to him. It was his life. In that sense it was tongue in cheek, not to be taken literally.
Rather, it’s because no one would expect devoted fans to switch loyalties to their fiercest rivals even for one match and even if their friend was experiencing one of life’s most painful milestones. Football can’t be a matter of life and death because that would suggest it is a separate entity, rather than deeply embedded in the psyche. I can no more disown my allegiances to the red side of North London than I can any other part of my identity.
Speaking of which, on the occasion of my bar mitzvah party, held for religious reasons at Arsenal’s Highbury Stadium — and briefly attended by various players by way of apology for blocking most of Islington with their open-top bus parade following a League and Cup Double triumph — a troupe of Spurs-supporting fathers stood up, took to the microphone and began singing ‘Glory, Glory, Tottenham Hotspur’ to the tune of the American folk song ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.
No offence was taken. It wasn’t quite the loss of a parent, but amid a sea of red, white and silverware, it was a difficult day for Spurs fans. Whether in grief or celebration, apologies needn’t be sought or proferred.
Oh when the Spurs, go marching down
Fast forward to 2026 and Tottenham, on a run of five successive league defeats, languish in 16th place, one solitary point above the drop zone with nine games remaining. Their latest manager and headline writers’ dream, Igor Tudor, may not be long for this world. In the Champions League this week, Spurs subbed off their goalkeeper after 15 minutes for performance-related issues. The club is not — in footballing parlance — in a good moment.
Of course, as an Arsenal fan, I have my own neuroses. Declan Rice’s thigh muscles, Bukayo Saka’s hamstrings and the fear that, with just two months of the season to go, the Football Association may decide to ban corners, the only way the team knows how to score.
What keeps me going is all the podcasts that have suddenly sprung up about Spurs going down and the million permutations that go with it: how much it would cost them financially, which players would leave, just the whole Spursiness of it all. A few more weeks of this and we’re in 2007 Britney Spears territory.
And it’s proving too much for my Dad, who refuses even to countenance the possibility. “All theory because they are not going down” was his uncharacteristically terse reply to an email of mine on the matter.
If given the choice between a first Arsenal league title in two decades and Spurs playing in the Championship next season, there is no contest. I just don’t hate Tottenham enough, or even at all. Growing up in the nineties and naughties, the club was more amusing local curiosity than fierce rival.
Still, Spurs going down would be hilarious. And even the mere possibility — transmitted on the airwaves and in the whites of the eyes of my Tottenham-supporting friends — is pretty damn amusing.
So my comments keep coming… even now!
So footie impinged upon your Bar Mitzvah party? I think I’ve heard it all now! (I suppose if it was at the post event do, then the Rabbi took it in good humour.)
This letter is quite amusing. I, too, was raised in north London. So how come my support veered towards Chelsea? Well, the prep school I attended in Muswell Hill had an obsessively fanatical Spurs-supporting sports master. He hated me and the feeling was reciprocated. He didn’t think I played the game seriously and in one school report, he remarked: “Peter plays the game in his own particular way!” So in a gradual process, my best mate and I made it known whom we supported.
Thus I can honestly say, with true Lord Mandy emphasis, that I am intensely relaxed at the prospects of a Spurs’ demotion! Thus, a kind of latent Spurs neurosis….
[PS: Is there such a thing as FA Cup tie syndrome? In the round, Chelsea were quite boring last week against Wrexham….Wrexham!, and reports say Arsenal had a “scare” too….I am not so focused about the draw as to know instinctively if these two are likely to meet in the final. I’m sure you’ll advise…]
I'm Spurs. I was an in-patient at a hospital yesterday, and a very loud Gooner, on being asked by another patient about his hopes for silverware this season said "I don't care if we don't win anything as long as Tottenham go down". Sums up Woolwich, IMHO.