Win. A. Cup.
Any cup. FA Cup would be the best one, since it's always been inextricably tied to our identity as a club right from the time we became the first non-league side to win it. But, failing that, even the League Cup would suffice (or whatever they're calling it nowadays).
The Lane stands, bloody but unbowed, in her final season. The long years have seen happiness and despair, glory and humiliation, pain and inestimable joy ripple through her old stands. The stanchions have always, always reverberated to the sounds of the club she nurtured, to the masses of humanity that have thronged her gates, week after week, season after season. She has seen boys and girls walk up through the stairwells and gaze with twinkle-eyed wonderment for the first time upon the green expanse they could not help but fall in love with. She has seen them grow, she has seen them become men and women, and she has watched them in turn carry on with the unbreakable cycle of love, pain, joy and sadness that make up the threads of this journey we're all on...one weekend at a time.
On the field she so jealously guarded, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club epitomized the wild abandon that forms fortune's tempestuous nature. They taught the nation how to play, they epitomised style, grace and glory, they hit the highest of highs....and they also fell to the lowest of lows. They struggled through the barbs of fate, they fell victim to their idealized notions of propriety, they bumbled, and stumbled, bled, and fell. They were laughed at, as much as they were praised in the uproarious days of their greatest times. On that field, Bill Nicholson built a legendary team. On that field, Thierry Henry won the league for the lot across the way. Both are a part of the one hundred and thirty-four long, winding years that make up our history, and both are windows into the nature of the club that rose under the lights perched on the roof of that grand old ground.
And she watched it all. She could not speak, but in the days of despair, the stands stood tall, and unbowed. And in the days of glory...when the thunderous echoes of thousands of voices in unison rose to fill the air, rose almost to the roof of heaven...she sang with them. Her very foundations vibrated with glee, her floodlights shone joyfully upon the scenes, her fittings gleamed, burnished, in the light of those great days.
The Lane has seen the journey of life that Tottenham Hotspur embarked upon. It has seen the eras of history, the great tides of men and machines, the waves of civilization that marked the century of history that took place upon the sceptered isle off the coast of Europe. It has seen the passage of young men and women, filled with ideals and ambitions, into its changing rooms, out onto its fields and then into the pages of football history. And it has seen the passage of countless ordinary men and women from childhood into adulthood, repeated again ,and again, and again, throughout those long years.
The Lane has seen an awful lot. In her final year, what I'd like more than anything else is to see her smile on one more piece of silverware, brought out onto the pitch...one last gesture of gratitude. And one last tribute to the stadium which sheltered the tempestuous life of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.
