And The Spurs Go Marching On (with the occasional stumble and more than a few nasty falls)

That’s another one over with, then. And a disappointing one it was too, a bit like being a kid and really wanting a bike for Christmas, and seeing a bike-shaped parcel by the tree, all wrapped up in the most exciting shiny paper ever – paper made of the same black and glossy stuff as Darth Vader’s helmet, paper spun from the skin of Jesus himself – then unwrapping the bike and being more excited by it than you would be by even an astronaut suit, then riding it around for a couple of months having more fun than any other human being ever before has ever had, before realising, as you stare up at another impossibly steep incline and feel the dull ache in your calves, that in the end it’s just a bloody bike.

At the start of the season my mate Phill was pre-emptively complaining about the state of play – I think we were lying sixth or something – and I told him that if a year beforehand somebody had offered sixth place and the Champions League, he’d have had their hand off. Which he would’ve. But here we are, one eminently losable game against Liverpool away from the end of the season, and no matter how much you piss and moan about lousy refereeing decisions costing us fourth place (yes, we should have won at Chelsea, but we should also have won the five games before and the two games afterwards regardless of who was running the line) we’ve got sod all to play for and a great stretch of wasted year behind us. Great dreams of a decent CL run, of a top-four finish being our right, all gone. Sixth if we’re lucky, seventh more likely.

So let’s put it behind us: loathe as I am to agree with an Arsenal supporter, the neckless fat ginger sub-literate git Steve Byrne said after the victory at the Emirates that it was ‘just another game.’ At the time he took a pounding from the Spurs fans, but he was right. This has been a bloody awful year to be a Spurs supporter. As John Cleese said in Clockwise: “I can handle the despair. It’s the hope I can’t take"[1]. But we have to accept it, embrace our limitations, and move on. It's been just another season. 

So: next season. Tempting though it is to say that QPR and Norwich will easy six-pointers, the new boys and the bottom-of-table stragglers tend to be the ones we screw up against. It will, however, be nice to see Loftus Road again as it was where I saw my first ever away game.

Players? VdV, Luca and Pav may well move on having shown the rest of the Prem what they’re worth (which isn’t as much as it was a year ago). Crouch and Palacios can go regardless of how well Harry gets on with Wilson’s mum.

And the two biggies: Gomes first. Goalkeepers are remembered for their mistakes more than for anything else. The only exceptions are Gordon Banks and Pat Jennings. Don’t believe me? What ‘s the first thing that comes into your head when I say the following names: Seaman. Green. Fabianski. And Gomes. Against Nani. Harry’s right, he’s a great goalie who pulls off some astonishing saves – that left-hander against Blackpool was a beauty, stopped us being a complete laughing stock in that match. But the eye-popping beauties are well outweighed by the comedy slip-ups and the school reserve-team errors. Ben Foster’s just withdrawn from international duties and despite his fragility he’d be a decent buy. Frankly, someone pulled at random from the crowd and given a couple of those giant foam pointy fingers would be a decent buy, but Foster would do.

And what about Gareth? Come closer, I have to whisper this: is he a bottler? Seriously. He had that incredible run in the CL, made himself one of the most talked-about players not just in England, not just in Europe but in the world, and then… not a lot. Injuries all over the place, one or two trademark runs down the left, but the talent we all threw our hands in the air and stared open-mouthed at seems to have taken a long holiday.

So: if there’s a clause in his contract – which there’s reported to be – that lets him go if the club’s not in the Champions League (a clause that a couple of the other big names may also have), then do we let him walk away? We’d get a fair amount of money for him but that’s a secondary consideration. Would it do him good to spend a year or two somewhere in Europe – not a Real or a Barca, I doubt they’d actually want him on his late-season’s showing – but a Schalke 04 or a Bayern where he could learn a different style of game, gain a bit of patience, show them what he’s capable of?

I’d say not. Bale’s got the potential to be our Giggs, and not just because he’s Welsh. He could be the talismanic player that Defoe or Jenas should have been but never became. He could be our new figurehead. He could be the new Ledley King. 

Anyway; there’ll be no victorious open-top-bus parade down Tottenham High Road this year. We’re going to slink back home like a repentant drunk, hoping nobody notices us, praying we can have a better tomorrow. Harry says he wants to win the Premiership with Tottenham. Let’s see if he can make a few decent buys during the next transfer window, get us the extra level of skill and resilience we need to make his ambition a reality.

And most of all, let’s see if he can get us to stop losing to the Hull Cities and the Blackpools. 

---

[1] Going by memory there. Probably a misquote.