This Week in Fandom: Voyages Homeward.

Dom Solanke, courtesy of @spurs official

Every (ahem) week, I write my nephew letters about sports that he mostly doesn’t read. They centre on my support for the Knicks, Yankees Cubs, 49ers, and Tottenham Hotspur – and his love of Chelsea, LeBron James, and prop bets.

My (ahem) complications with sports loyalty seem to mirror my complications with nationhood. My heritage and my people are in one country, my gainful employment is in another, and my wildest dreams reside in yet one more. This is the way with fandom, even though I believe (go ahead and blame ageing) that my affections have finally begun to crystallise around concrete things, in certain places.

I used this trip home, back to Lusaka, to play games of zero sum with myself. I’ve made hard, concrete decisions about my forthcoming novel. (Lols – ‘forthcoming’ – sweet pretense, my friend, that you are all waiting with bated breath. Whatever keeps one going.) It appears the classicist in me will shun a higher education in Artificial Intelligence for a humble one in Journalism, not because it’s the right thing to do – but likely because it is the more dangerous, and therefore the more exciting. I shall consume less Coke Zero, kick my chocolate habit (a little bit), and endure the categoric silence it takes a mind as listless as mine to read and write on weekday evenings. I shall root Cubbies, come baseball’s Opening Day, because our country asks even the most privileged among us to be strategic, deliberate, about finite time and finite resources. If I were attached to someone or something serious, like a prodigious poet or a Journalism diploma, and so could only follow one hapless outfit per sport, what would those hapless outfits be? My heart has spoken, and continues to insist upon Tottenham Hotspur to boot.

When I checked the flight plan on Thursday, I saw that I would be back in Berlin in time to have gathered something to eat, inspected my abode for signs of spectral interference, and of course endure the Tottenham game. Even though we are Manchester City’s bogey team I had a bad feeling about this one. This season our boys have shown a lack of collective appetite for big games against big clubs, and there was also a European bubble just waiting to be popped by the right needle. Erling Haaland, for instance, is a very large needle. Maybe I passed on Spurs’s most recent Champions League outing, an allegedly competent away win at Frankfurt, to instead binge-watch Landman – which feels like an appropriate series for the precarious world in which we find ourselves. The trouble with Spurs results, and Spurs reporting, is people besides Thomas Frank take away the numerical positives when there are terrible habits yet to iron out; the most fundamental that Tottenham would probably lose by three goals to a table soccer side with rods connecting their waists, for pure lack of forward passing.

I thankfully didn’t need to slide across ice out of the U-Bahn, and was honestly stuffed full of airline food. So I procured a box of Leibniz, that understated German biscuit, boiled myself a mug of camomile, and settled down for the Premiership’s oddest fixture – Tottenham V City – in which the league’s most lampooned side is somehow repeatedly able to best the league’s most financially extravagant. This one was odder still, for the fact that either team this season can only really show up for one half of football.

For City this is a focus thing, that has hampered their ability to be perfect much more than their tendency to be excellent; but we’ve seen it all before, then witnessed them make a mockery of most Januaries. Januarys. January’s. For Spurs, it’s the TV series you love to hate-watch, a bit like Landman but with fewer kahones. Start quickly. Tease change at last. Concede unfathomably. Concede again. Play urgently. Pull one back. Drop points. Grab pitchforks. Boo Thomas Frank. Visit Aston Villa online shop. Do nothing. Repeat.

So we gifted them the first half. Looked nothing like the side that went and showed Frankfurt what a serious commercial enterprise looks like. You can grant Frank grace, again, for a mishappen lineup that would make Dr. Frankenstein blush. Djed Spence is out injured. Missing Van De Ven missing still. Lucas Bergvall has just had ankle surgery, and this is to say nothing of stalwarts like Kulusevski and Maddison who’ve been missing all season.

This is why the fans blame the players. There are neat passing ideas but there’s no oomph in the delivery, or there is no courage to play the ball into dangerous, even gaping areas. Whenever I see Tottenham give away possession, I’m reminded of school days when high school rivals would turn up with an excessively pumped ball, and I didn’t have the boots necessary to properly knock it about. Whenever I watch Xavi Simons operate for more than 20 seconds on the ball, I think of people who make excuses for TV series like Severance season 2, who project deeper meaning onto screenwriting that simply isn’t there. Simons has the beginnings of menace, like a bulldog, but all the defense has to do is stand pat and plant a foot down. I disengaged from the match roundabouts the moment he ran towards City’s defenders, and instead of rifling one from just outside the box, spent a lifetime pondering the descent of man. Meantimes, Rayan Cherki turned our centre-backs into spaghetti Bolognese twice. Of course Antoine Semenyo nicked one, more open and free for his goal than a Scotsman at Augusta, because God is a sadistic and petulant Gooner.

Naturally the media has forgotten all about this this first half because the second, much like Tottenham Hotspur the institution, made no sense at all. Xavi Simons ran around more purposefully and actually got a shot attempt on target. We signed Connor Gallagher precisely because we need players with an ultra-low tolerance for bullshit; at 2-1 he turned some honest hustle into a cross so clean, so basic, so commonly sensible it was almost laughable. Dominic Solanke, who waited longer for service than I did at baggage claim, showed once more that if you feed the man he will eat. (Pause, etcetera.) That scorpion kick is not the sort of TikTok nonsense I go for normally; but it will go down as another entry into those of us on the inside admire this maddening football club, and why those of us on the out (despite all better judgment, and savage bias) continue to take it seriously. Tottenham Hotspur is Linsanity, the Northern Lights, Morrissey before he started spouting fascist bollocks: you have to see it, hear it, curse at it to believe it.

As I speak, the transfer window is winding down, and not even an injury crisis could compel Spurs to spend any of the money in the world.