As they plummet towards possible relegation from the Premier League, it's time to have a revisit the root of this trauma. I couldn't even enjoy their last major trophy win, but I still love them.
As people who listen to our podcast will be fully aware, I have a surprisingly take it or leave it attitude towards the football team that I support. It’s not a matter of not caring. It’s a matter of preserving my mental health. A lot of people have said a lot of things about Tottenham Hotspur this season, many of them hurtful, pretty much all of them true, and I’ve found that, even in times of (relative) success, it’s easier to not engage too much with them.
Of all the football teams in all the world, this is the one that I ended up supporting, except it’s not quite that simple. Because in truth, I never really had any choice. Tottenham Hotspur Football Club are burned into my soul, and the only thing that I can reasonably do is consider this to be a form of generational trauma.
Not that I knew any of this when I was five or six years old and that choice was being bred into me, but things could have been different. My mother was 37 years old when she had me, and she was also tiny. This, coupled with the fact that my parents had been trying for me for about three or four years, meant that I was considered a “special baby,” and the hospitals in which I could have been born locally weren’t considered appropriate for the caesarean section that would be required to bring me into this world.
I also made the decision to arrive into 1972 three weeks early. My mum once told me that I fulfilled one of her life-long ambitions by getting her rushed across North London in an ambulance with the blue light flashing and sirens blazing as a result of this. Our destination was the Royal Free Annexe on Liverpool Road in South Islington. Perhaps the biggest irony of this particular Spurs supporter is that I was born considerably closer to Highbury than I was to White Hart Lane.
And yet, and yet.