On the evening of Wednesday, May 8 the manager of Tottenham Hotspur shed tears on the pitch because his side had just won. And I don’t imagine that a single Spurs fan of an age thought that this was odd. What would merely have been a considerable achievement for Liverpool, or Chelsea, or Manchester United or even Arsenal was, for supporters of Spurs, almost unbelievable. Over half a century we had come to believe that this day — our team qualifying to play in the most prestigious match in club football — would never arrive.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote the famous line that “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson was wrong. It’s far better not to have loved. The knowledge that you have once had something wonderful but have lost it forever is a bitter fruit. In Great Expectations the young Pip finds himself with old Miss Havisham contemplating the huge wedding banquet and cake — once magnificent — that she has kept as a memory of the day she was jilted. “It and I have worn away together,” she tells Pip. “The mice have gnawed at it and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.”
Spurs were the first double-winning team. The first English team to win a European trophy. The team that epitomised the glory, glory game: Mackay, Blanchflower, White, Jones, Dyson, Smith — followed soon by Greaves. We fans that came later would always know someone on the terraces or in a nearby seat, who had actually been there and seen it. But what we saw was mostly very different.
Take me, for example. Wikipedia starts a section in its Spurs entry with “Bill Nicholson and the glory years (1958–1974)”. My first match at White Hart Lane was on Easter Monday 1976. There were three matches left, Queens Park Rangers led the First Division from Liverpool by a point. But Spurs were in a mid-table tussle with Coventry City. “Even if we defeat Coventry today,” said the match programme, “we shall still finish the season with one home league win less than last term when we had a narrow escape from relegation.” The programme records that Spurs juniors had just won a match with a goal from a teenage Chris Hughton and that most home matches in that campaign had attracted crowds of around 25,000.
The next season — the first full one of my match-attending career — Spurs were indeed relegated. Our top scorer recorded nine goals and the lowlight was an 8-2 defeat away at Derby in a game we had been leading 2-0. I probably went to a dozen matches that year, most of them on my own. Why? What was I doing there? What were any of us doing there?
I was the first Aaronovitch for a thousand generations to be interested in football. No one at home and none of my friends cared about it at all. But when I was ten, in the playground of my north London primary school, a fair-haired baggy-shorted boy called Clive Matthews told me that everyone was choosing a football team to support. He showed me a list — the English First Division league table — and got me to decide who I would follow. The names and places meant very little to me, but two looked attractive — Wolverhampton Wanderers for the alliteration, and Tottenham Hotspur. I had no idea where either Wolverhampton or Tottenham were.
It was a desultory affair to begin with. Initially the trainspotter element — the statistics, lists of scorers — drew me in, and then the romance of the shirts, badges and tribes. It was a bit like all that “House Stark, House Lannister” business in Game of Thrones. You know, sigils, clan histories, castle names etc.
All the same, by the time Spurs beat Chelsea to win the FA Cup in 1967, with me listening on my transistor radio, I was fully invested. It was, however, something I did entirely on my own. Until my younger brother decided he would support Spurs too, there was no one to talk to about it. And at the robust school in Holloway that I went to at 11, though there was plenty of interest in soccer, the biggest and most uninhibitedly violent boys were all keen Arsenal fans. I remember one talking about how he had lined potatoes with razor blades to throw at Spurs supporters. I believed him then, though I don’t now.
Still, it was nearly a decade before I went to an actual game. My first was QPR versus Manchester United at Loftus Road. Then Arsenal v Chelsea at Highbury. Other people’s clubs. I was a student then and the student organiser of the British Communist Party (long story) was a Spurs fan and she made the revolutionary suggestion that she and I and a few others go along to an actual Spurs match. We beat Coventry 4-1. I loved it. I loved the shouting, the unrestrained reaction to what happened on the pitch, the excitement of the build-up to a goal-scoring chance, above all the celebration — with total strangers — when we scored. We were in this together.
For my first half-decade of active fanship, it could be pretty miserable. Watching your team draw with Mansfield at home in the Second Division when you still have memories of Jimmy Greaves must have been hard for the more veteran supporters. But at the beginning of the 1978-79 season, promoted back to the First Division, the club did something impossibly glamorous. It signed two of the players who had just won the World Cup with Argentina. Ricardo Villa and Osvaldo Ardiles arrived at the Lane to a tickertape welcome from the fans. Ardiles and the young Glenn Hoddle in midfield. We might not be a machine like Liverpool, the subliminal message ran, but we are the glory boys. History records that we promptly went up to Anfield and lost 7-0.
