This Week in Fandom: Yardie.
Every (ahem) week, I write my nephew letters about sports that he mostly doesn’t read. They centre on my support for the New York Knicks, Mets Chicago Cubs, Giants San Francisco 49ers, and Tottenham Hotspur – and his love of Chelsea, LeBron James, and prop bets.
I arrived in London on Black Friday, pretty sure that I was here to a) renew my love for the city and then b) bring to a close my now 18-year engagement with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. I spent the early afternoon wandering around Shoreditch – first in and around the area of the Old Spitafields Market, a dizzying assortment of classic urban architecture and (now) relentless commercialism. This maze of streets seem designed, so exquisitely situated, to tempt you into celebrating your arrival at Liverpool Street. Despite this, and for the entirety of my long weekend in the city, I always felt like I knew exactly where I was: in the sprawling village that had introduced me to Gazza, Danger Mouse, Top of the Pops, and Harry Enfield. The city whence I had sworn, as a 7-year old shedding teeth, to someday keep up as a professional winger for any commonly sensible Premier League side. I tell you: I almost cried at my first fresh sighting of the Underground logo.
Fulham would visit the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium that Saturday evening. I’d spent the last few weeks watching YouTubers condense the perfect London stay into 15 or 20 minutes, optimal for engagement, while Tottenham Hotspur shat the bed in successive derbies and against Manchester United. I was not as excited as I otherwise could have been to witness the football, but I went through the necessary motions that day. Retro kit, striped black-and-white hoodie, puffer jacket in case it got deadly out there. I roamed but a portion of Camden for several hours, snatching up future reads at the Owl on Kentish Town Road, contemplating a Black Friday deal on brown Docs at Camden Market, whilst searching in vain for a chain that would serve as a memento of my short time in the city; but also a genuine promise to return. I ran on a full English breakfast and exactly one Wiley song for several hours.
I returned to the Airbnb to rest my legs and dump my bags. I did not guesstimate any of the ways, as is my custom, in which to set about fixing Tottenham Hotspur. I did not hope manager Thomas Frank would start Brennan Johnson over Richarlison, or find the temerity just yet to start both Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall at centre-field. I did not presume this collection of players would suddenly increase the intensity of their defensive pressing, or move the ball upstream with greater urgency, simply because I happened to be in attendance. But it’d be grand if they did.
It seems it’s always buzzing in Camden. I stopped at a corner shop near The World’s End – an establishment I’m sure I’ve seen in period fantasies – for some gum and a Yorkie. Whenever I’ve gone on these trips, to visit fabled sports arenas, there is a cinematic current running across my body in the build-up. Time slows down by a meaningful half-second. If you add up all the half-seconds over the course of a 30-minute train ride, every word uttered to and by you assumes a kind of historic crispness – any sudden movement makes you feel like you might implode, and then explode, and thus never summon the courage to face humanity anywhere ever again – because every last moment seems to be etching itself in stone. I will never forget struggling to make anything of Tottenham itself as our train floated above the neighbourhood, through a dark and wintery night, before panels of glass gleamed all kinds of blue in the immediate distance. The sudden loss of breath trumping all else for just that moment: that the Spurs possessed no clear footballing identity, Richarlison’s first touch counts as a war crime, and there is no lasting justice in competitive sports.
Once you’re inside it, the scale of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is an impressive thing – like sitting inside an open air cathedral with the golden cockerel perched atop it all, gazing if not further North then towards Bethlehem. I mean this much more as a compliment than a slight, when I say it’s almost more spell-binding before any football takes place. I felt a kind of gratitude to former Chairman Daniel Levy, who of course left the club just months before my illustrious visit. For all that Spurs fans young and old believe Levy put them through, there is no other way to interpret this ground – debtors and sponsorships be damned – as an act of love.
I sat next to a teenager who told me he was from Bilbao, and with whom I shared shock and consternation when Guglielmo Vicario left his line to make a hash of clearing a loose ball. I had only been there an hour, and the game had really only been going on 20 minutes, when Fulham were up 2-nil. Their section of the church was rocking, as if Fulham are a club beloved by proper lads and proper punters, or that has ever been repeatedly accused of playing proper football. I was too awestruck by the occasion to anguish at the scoreline. In any case this was what I came to see: a reason to purchase a Crystal Palace shirt, with Adam Wharton’s full government name stitched onto the back.
No one ever believes me when I say this, but I can tolerate losing if it’s done in style, with aplomb, but perhaps not with reckless abandon. (I was ‘Ange Out’ even after the Europa League victory in May.) So what really moved me to despair that weekend was the Mass-like behavior inside the ground. Granted I was sat between families, with children, and older gentlemen in woolly coats and flat caps. But for miles of seats, this is what it felt like, no one helped the proper lads in the upper decks get the chants going. No one really roared the team into counter-attack whenever the ball was repossessed at midfield. Thousands registered near-complete silence until the ball was literally bobbing around the six-yard box, which in Spurs’ case that day it rarely did.
At least two of those older gentlemen in woolly coats and flat caps turned round to quietly wonder who was making all that racket, when I yelled out this player’s name or that. I thought to myself, I actually don’t want to celebrate an equaliser with you lot if it somehow goes limbs in here. No one besides the proper lads up top, which I presume is where die-hard fans can afford to sit every week, played their part to fix the score.
This got me thinking about the double-edged sword of running a football club. You want to keep the vibes high by both winning and maintaining a tangible relationship with the local community; but you have to build monuments like this stadium, and charge people an arm and a leg to visit it, or else you won’t be able to keep up with football’s super-powers and win. This leads to a match-day experience where, it seems to me, Tottenham Hotspur is but another tourist checklist item before folks visit the wax museum at Madame Tussauds or see Wicked at the Apollo Victoria (which I did a day later). Is this what you get? A cavernous steel doughnut, and my word what a doughnut, where you can literally hear your bladder fill up after pint number three? Is this the cost of competing? Hundreds hung around after the final whistle to take selfies, to smile and pose despite another bowl of gourmet porridge.
I thought I was done. Next time I came to the city I would find lodgings in Croydon, and I would stick it out with Crystal Palace and their gorgeous stripes even after Oliver Glasner takes the United job, even after City sign Adam Wharton to be Rodri’s heir apparent, even after Jean-Philippe Mateta winds up on a billboard in Milan. Palace like to piss on Liverpool’s boots, I thought, and they fly an eagle round the gaff before kick-off – and they’re in London. On the train back to Camden, as I planned a trip to the fan shop at Selhurst Park, a lady with short brown hair and browner freckles asked me why on earth I was a Tottenham fan. She introduced herself as a Chelsea supporter, her friend as a Gooner, as the train screeched in and out of our brief conversation. I smiled broadly, my lad, as I left the Tube.
To humble me perhaps, as I rode up the escalator and he down, a proper lad pointed multiple times at the cockerel on my chest and sang a North London hymn: “Same old Tottenham! / Same old Tottenham! / From the Lane …”
Onto Candlestick Park, and Wrigley Field.
