Tottenham Hotspur – The Day After The Night Before

So that was the Champions League. Fun, wasn’t it? As I took my place in the upper tier of the West Stand at White Hart Lane for the second leg of Spurs’ quarter-final with Real Madrid my thoughts turned to what I had written on my own blog back in August:

I’m able to look upon Spurs’ impending Champions League campaign as the beginning of a glorious adventure. We will play the reigning European Champions twice. But we will definitely not be at Wembley in May’s final. Because experience tells me it’s appreciating the journey rather than the blind pursuit of some imaginary glory that is the true, most gratifying aspect of being a Spurs fan.

This was before the mind-boggling brilliance of Gareth Bale’s hat-trick in the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza against Inter, the blistering demolition of the same opponents in the return fixture and the maturity of the defensive rearguard action displayed against AC Milan in the last 16. For many Spurs fans, these will be the memories that we take away with us from the club’s debut season amongst Europe’s elite. What’s more, Europe has sat up and taken notice of a club that for so many years has traded on its past glories in an attempt to justify itself as a giant of the game.

I could give you a tactical breakdown of the game. Dissect for you how Madrid played on relative cruise control knowing that the tie was all but over having amassed such an unassailable lead in the first leg. I could bemoan the referee’s unwillingness to buckle under the (legitimate) howls for penalties from the crowd.

I could use this article to call for the head of the hapless Heurelho Gomes after he committed yet another act of wanton buffoonery that threatens to put the skids on the club’s pursuit of a second successive fourth-place finish. I could do all those things. But then again, I saw Henry Winter entering the player’s car-park yesterday and I’m sure many of you would have read his views on all the above before reading this.

What I want to talk about is this: on 13^th April 2011, Tottenham Hotspur played Real Madrid at White Hart Lane. It’s really that simple. I remember the dour, soulless days of the George Graham era when the likes of Andy Sinton and Steffen Freund were considered to be good enough to wear the shirt.

I remember the inconsistency and the limbo of mid-table finishes. And watching as London rivals went on to dominate the domestic game and have a wail of the time playing the likes of Barcelona and Monaco. I never want to go back to those days again. And judging from the spontaneous outbursts of pride from the Tottenham faithful, neither do many others.

Many of us had spent the week lurching from the gut-wrenching horror of that 4-0 deficit to slowly but surely allowing ourselves to entertain the prospect of a minor miracle happening in N17. On 50 minutes, that hope was extinguished. Once Cristiano Ronaldo scored the goal that essentially killed the tie, it could have been so easy to pack it in, have a beer, miss the traffic, go home. But instead, the cries and the chants got louder and more passionate.

“Champions League and we’re having a laugh!” rose from the South Stand. And we were having a laugh. Because our team had taken on some of the world’s finest. From Maicon to Ibrahimovic, they’d held their own. And right before our very eyes we had luminaries such as Ronaldo, Ozil and Kaka. World Cup winners too. And gesticulating wildly from the sidelines, arguably the greatest but most definitely the most controversial manager of the last decade. And it all was a pleasure to watch.

There was no point in getting on Gomes’ case after the goal. We just had a party instead, as the full repertoire of songs were sung in honour of the club’s favourites. Pavlyuchenko was ‘Super Pav’ and Jermain Defoe was a ‘yiddo’. Modric, van der Vaart and Bale all celebrated by people who appreciated just what these men had achieved this year.

And the biggest chant of the night came as people caught a glimpse of another White Hart Lane great. “One Paul Gascoigne, there’s only one Paul Gascoigne” came the cry, as if giving thanks to all that had gone before. I saw Pat Jennings and Nayim before the match and Garth Crooks was sitting three rows in front of me. Ghosts everywhere in what in essence, was the end of a very glorious adventure.

The final whistle came and most of the crowd stayed to applaud the team off the pitch. Bale, as ever, the last man off. The re-assessments and plotting for next season have already begun in earnest. Will Spurs qualify or not, etc, etc?

Sometimes though, it’s best just to take pause and savour what we have and what we did. Ronaldo gave us the opportunity to do just that as the ball trickled past Gomes. There’s no silverware in this year ending in one, but what Spurs gave us is something a little more special. As Simon and Garfunkel once put it:

“Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.”

(pic via G’n'L on Flickr)

Champions League, Real Madrid, Tottenham Hotspur