If you are a Tottenham Hotspur fan do not say it, do not whisper it, do not write it on a piece of paper, fold it up and hide it at the back of a cupboard. Do not discuss it with friends and family at awkward social gatherings, or nodding acquaintances at bus stops. Do not be tempted into mentioning it to a cabbie while making small talk. Do not scrawl it on your hand in biro when bored at work.
If someone who supports another team wants to bring “it” up then change the subject quicker than someone who owes you money does. Don’t even dream about “it”. The “it” that I am talking about is the prospect of Spurs winning the league.
If broached, avoid the difficulty of the subject like the kind of man who finished with his fiancée over Whatsapp rather than tell her to her face. Stay well away from the very suggestion of it like you would keep away from a person trying to hug you after admitting to having just left a bedbug-infested hotel room. In short, do not under any circumstances talk about even the merest prospect of Spurs winning the league.
After just nine games, in a 38-game season, we should not be hiring out open top buses and visiting DVD manufacturing plants just yet. We need to chill like Snoop Dogg and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in a shisha lounge and live in the moment.
Every minute created by “Big” Ange Postecoglou, pictured, and his extraordinary band of lilywhite-clad brothers this season has been a spectacle to rejoice in. But let me state this very clearly: we must not get ahead of ourselves. Even though by the end of play today we may well be five points clear at the top of the table we must remember, without smirking too much, what happened to Arsenal last season.
I am not a particularly religious man, but I must have prayed to almost every deity humankind has ever worshipped so that that lot in red didn’t win the league last season. And now every Arsenal fan from Highbury to Woolwich (where they are originally from) must be praying the same happens to us. They topped the Premier League for a total of 248 days, or 93 per cent, of last season and still managed to lose the title.
It was the footballing equivalent of Mo Farah leading from the front at the 10,000-metre race at the 2016 Olympic games in Brazil, but on the 9,300-metre mark he tripped over his own shoelaces and landed face first into a custard pie. The calamity that befell Arsenal last season should be a warning to every single Spurs fan. This has been the dream start for Spurs and with Big Ange becoming the most successful manager, in his first season, in Premier League history across the first nine games, the omens are certainly looking good for a top-four finish.
In a press conference yesterday afternoon the Tottenham manager, and all-round hero, was asked about the title. His response was swift and definitive: “There’s a real good reason that no manager would talk about winning a title in October and November, and that’s because we all know there’s a long way to go.”
But what if we let our imaginations run wild for a moment? Fast forward to May 2024. With just two games to go, and with Spurs holding an unassailable lead, I will still believe that our rivals have invented one of those giant cylindrical time machines from the movie Tenet and somehow reversed the flow of time to ensure we lose the title, or the “Spursy Principles”, as theoretical physicists call it.
I am even trying to crush mutterings of “could we?” springing up like meerkats surveying the savannah. For those of you who are too young to understand my unwillingness to entertain any thought of Spurs winning the league, let me provide you with some historical perspective. We last won the league in 1961.
My mum was 23 and hadn’t at that stage even left Sri Lanka to travel by ship to Britain and become a nurse in the NHS. She is now 85, has two middle-aged sons, three grandchildren and we still haven’t won the league. As I have said before, as a a Spurs fan we often tell each other that it is the hope that kills you. With a long way to go, with Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal and even Villa, Brighton and Newcastle in the mix for those Champions League spots, it will be the hype that kills you if us Spurs fans start believing we can win the league.
