Spurs' penchant for coming up short forms part of their 'Spursy' reputation
Spurs’ penchant for coming up short forms part of their ‘Spursy’ reputation
It is never quite clear if Tottenham are the best bad team or the worst good one. Not with results like Thursday’s 0-1 at Bournemouth coming so soon after their 4-0 at Manchester City. Their uncertain identity is compounded by a stadium which is the finest for football in this country but only ramps up the contradictions.
Champions League regulars without a trophy since 2008, chronically inconsistent, capable of great heights but often with a hapless new low just around the corner. There is a word for all of this and unfortunately for Tottenham it is “Spursy”.
Ask several Spurs fans how they would define it and you will likely hear different things. Try these four:
Fleet Street’s first female football reporter Julie Welch, author of the Biography of Tottenham Hotspur: “It’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I like it in a way because it tells you so much about all human endeavour. Things do go more wrong than they go right. We all have massive expectations and a lot of them are unfulfilled, a lot of them are mistaken. And Spursyness is that quality. ‘Spursy’ is just life, isn’t it?”
Broadcaster Danny Kelly: “To me it means a particularly glamorous kind of romanticised football, pleasing the fans, attacking, dynamic and with that comes a kind of frailty. But it depends on your age doesn’t it? I have seen with my own eyes the last nine spurs trophy wins, but if you’re under 40, you might only have seen one. Yes Spurs get into leads and don’t hold them, but they also get behind and come back. They have always been a team that gets involved in very dramatic football matches.”
TV presenter Kate Mason: “I’m not a self-loathing Spurs fan but it’s letting it slip basically, it’s looking quite good but not all the way to the end. Not being comprehensive. It’s part of the culture of the whole club. Lots of things look really good, but we can’t win a trophy. What’s clever about Spursyness is it’s got a macro and a micro version, that inability to win a trophy but the micro is managing to be 2-0 up then losing 3-2.”
Talksport’s Paul Hawksbee: “We’ll never get 48 hours of feeling great. There was a classic example of it the other day, we’d beaten Manchester City, and we’re revelling in this fantastic victory against the champions. It’s not quite 48 hours before the news comes out that one of our best players, our goalkeeper, is going to be out for two months. This only happens to Tottenham.”
‘Lads, it’s Spurs’
This is just the latest in a grand tradition. Paul Gascoigne secures Spurs’ place in the 1991 FA Cup final, then injures himself 15 minutes into it with an over-excited tackle. Mauricio Pochettino, the club’s best manager for a decade, takes them to the brink of European glory, gets sacked, then on his first return with Chelsea beats Tottenham 4-1. Harry Kane moves to Bayern Munich and fails to win a trophy.
All Spursy, somehow, but with no real common thread. The word can mean anything really, so long as it is negative and laced with schadenfreude. Nevertheless, this feels like a particularly Spursy time. After a League Cup win over Manchester City and 4-1 against Villa Spurs lost to Galatasary then Ipswich. A home draw with 10-man Fulham and a 1-0 loss to Bouremouth followed the 4-0 at City. The gap between Spurs’ best and worst performances under Ange Postecoglou is vast.
Paul Gascoigne (Tottenham) lies injured as Dave Butler checks out his knee
Paul Gascoigne’s injury in the 1991 FA Cup Final certainly had a ‘Spursy’ feel to it
Yet these qualities are not embedded in the DNA of the club. Many who started supporting Spurs in the 1960s did so because they were the most successful team in the country. There was relegation in 1977 but only a year in Division Two. Since then an unbroken spell in the top flight that most clubs would love, although admittedly the 1990s were a lean time without a top six finish. Even at their low points under Ossie Ardille or Christian Gross no one was calling them “Spursy”, but this era informed their current reputation.
Here the Manchester United contingent have a lot to answer for. It was Tottenham fan Roy Keane who revealed Alex Ferguson’s damning three-word team talk before a game at Old Trafford: “Lads, it’s Spurs,” the sort of pithy non sequitur from which there is no effective comeback. Gary Neville rarely misses a chance to blame Tottenham mishaps on some enduring club-wide character defect. At Anfield last year, Lucas Moura passed straight to Diogo Jota to give Liverpool a late winner and Neville called it “the most Tottenham thing that you will ever see”.
But it was Tottenham fans who first coined the phrase, some attributing it to a poster on The Fighting Cock messageboard in 2013. Originally it was an affectionate way to describe a brand of skilful but flaky player. A year later it had an entry on Urban Dictionary, closer to the current understanding, before really taking off during the rise of social media as fans of other clubs turned it into an insult. The Collins dictionary is assessing it for inclusion with this definition: “A Spursy performance is to have success in reach but to ultimately chuck it away.”
There is another corollary to the fatalism, which is Spurs’ reputation as accommodating opponents for a team in bad shape. Supposedly “Dr Tottenham” will offer the cure. “Dr Tottenham is now so good he’s Mr. Tottenham,” says Hawksbee. “He’s become a consultant, he’s got his own private practice.” There is also ‘St Totteringham’s Day’ marking the moment in a season when Spurs can no longer finish above Arsenal.
Tottenham then are surrounded by scorn, linked to their flexible status. They are like little brothers to the more garlanded sides they should be mixing with, if matchday revenue equated to points. Yet to the vast number of clubs in the pyramid there is an element of jealousy to the mickey-taking.
‘Soft, weak, bottle it, Spursy – that’s rubbish’
All of it unfairly overlooks a great deal of glory. The fever dream run to the Champions League final in 2019, with crazy comebacks against Manchester City then Ajax. Or January 2022 when Davinson Sanchez scored in the 96th minute to nick a 1-0 win at Watford, then two weeks later Steven Bergwijn scored twice in second half injury time to turn a 2-1 at Leicester into a 3-2.
The stats do not match the received wisdom either. Only Liverpool have gained more Premier League points from losing positions since 2015-16, 165 to Tottenham’s 154. Spurs are not especially prone to conceding crucial late goals either, joint 11th in the table over the same period with Chelsea. Both have lost or drawn from drawing or winning positions 19 times through goals conceded in the last five minutes, it has happened 23 times to Manchester United.
Still the idea of Spursyness endures, so much so that players and Postecoglou have been asked about it. “It’s irrelevant, who cares,” said Postecoglou in October. “Neutrals talk about Tottenham, they often say; soft, weak, bottle it, Spursy, all that rubbish,” said James Maddison last year, midway through a good spell. “I think the last couple of weeks shows we might be going in a slightly different direction.”
It seems unlikely but not impossible that this perceived fragility becomes self-fulfilling at some point and filters to the players. But it is the fans who really have to reckon with being Spursy. How do they feel?
Ange Postecoglou has not been able to shake the 'Spursy' repuation
Ange Postecoglou has not been able to shake the ‘Spursy’ repuation
Hawksbee: “You’ll take another Tottenham fan saying it, but it’s quite irksome when a fan of another club says it and kind of unfair. Misfortune and bum results happen to a lot of teams.”
Welch: “Spurs has always been famous for its firsts. The first club to win the double, the first to win in Europe, now the first club to have a pejorative adjective.”
Mason: “I’d like to say we’re brilliant and this concept doesn’t exist. If we’d had the results Arsenal have had in the past few years then I think it wouldn’t matter but because we don’t it’s annoying. It’s immature but that’s football isn’t it? I still don’t recognise Arsenal as coming from North London.”
Kelly: “It’s a tiny little slogan that, like so many things, reduces all thinking and nuance. The fact that younger Spurs fans in particular have started using the phrase shows how easily we are all, in the age of multi-platform conformity, so desperate to be part of the gang we’ll all start using a word that has historically negative connotations about the club.”
It seems an optimistic reading after Thursday night, but perhaps Postecoglou will deliver on his promise to end his second season with his trophy? This could hasten the demise of Spursyness.
Whatever happens, the club have a manager whose style guarantees a certain level of risk. Sometimes that works, sometimes disaster strikes. He seems a good fit and at least you can say something about Spurs which you could not during the reigns of Antonio Conte and Jose Mourinho: It’s never dull.
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