I've been on a bit of a bitterness-tinged video binge over the last few days. This one was the one that stood out, if anyone's interested.
Strangely enough, it left me feeling a bit better. Sure, Sunday was utterly gutting...but that year was so much worse, and the ending of that poignant video is made all the more bitterness-tinged given that it doesn't elaborate what happened after the season's end: it just hints at it, while closing on a sad but defiant note.
Hit the lows, slowly gain in confidence, belief and purpose, deliriously savour the highs, dream of radiant glory, and finally, inevitably, throw it all away in the most horrific, painful way possible.
Everything this club has done since then has been tinged by the ghostly echoes of that season, imo. So close. So goddamn close. And we f*cked it up: from the boardroom's cowardly shrinking at the last hurdle, to the management's dreams of bigger things, to the hitherto magnificent players slowly losing their way amidst a storm of recriminations, anger, despair and fatigue. And like that, a great team, probably the most technically-skilled, brilliantly intense and exciting we ever had in the Premier League era.....just like that, it was dismantled, vanishing into the mists of nostalgia and thoughts about what might have been. It was brilliant, relentless, full of life and vitality, utterly unplalayable when on form and utterly unpredictable and quirky in terms of the characters and personalities that inhabited it and shaped it. Rafa, Assou-Ekotto, Ade, Bale, Modric, Parker, Sandro, Ledley, Harry f*cking Redknapp....what a combination of fiery characters and world-class talent, backed up by a bouncing White Hart Lane and a roostertail of heady dreams of great things waiting just beyond the golden horizon. And it all slipped away into the mists of time.....relentlessly and tragically, as our horrific failure let the vultures descend, the accusations fly and history be rewritten.
So, compared to that, losing this CC final is small potatoes. We have a new team now, a more quiet, more predictable, more low-profile side, led by a manager who lets his work do the talking and spearheaded by a bunch of young academy lads who (mostly) bleed blue and white. And in the future, we will probably ascend back to a level somewhat comparable to the one we were at during that epoch-defining season. Probably this time we'll do it more professionally, more consistently, and ultimately more successfully.
And we'll hopefully avoid redoing what we did that season. We hit the heights, we crashed to the lowest lows, and we lost everything we'd been building towards for the past few seasons. It was brilliant, exhilarating, ultimately tragic. Quintessentially, indubitably Tottenham Hotspur FC, summed up in one unforgettable, rollercoaster year.
