Hope For The Best, Expect The Worst

Do you want to know how to cure bad luck? Optimism. This is what psychologists might suggest. They’ll tell you to recognise that fortune isn’t actually a fixed state, that you can learn to face your fears, to practise gratitude, to focus on successes, to avoid negative thoughts and to see problems as opportunities. It’s about empowering yourself to change your own story. Of course, if you ever figure out how the flying fuck to do this then please do let me know. When applying all this to the life of football fans such as us, there’s a depressing realisation that we’re actually trapped forever in a negative mindset, entirely helpless and without any real control over that which makes us experience such awful luck.

Essentially, (unless you’re a Manchester City fan), you’re doomed to focus on the regular, annual, season-long cycle of disappointment and misfortune. And if you’re a Spurs fan then you can surely magnify this whole experience, as there are few fans tainted by catastrophe and accident as the life of a Tottenham Hotspur supporter.

So are Spurs fans particularly unlucky?

I fired out a request to fellow Spurs supporters, via Twitter, asking for them to recall stories that show just how unlucky our club is. Over 150 anecdotes flooded in. Some had me spitting my coffee out at the quite unbelievable hardship.

Some were more obvious, but all had me cursing our depressing affliction. Every tale was told with a collective sense of trauma and bitter disappointment. Trauma and bitter disappointment – the life of a Spurs fan written out in as few words as possible. That’s the bit my father never warned me about, but then again, I didn’t warn my kids either. You follow your family into Spurs fandom all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, but fast forward 50 years and you too will soon find yourself crying over every lasagna served up in front of you.

And you’d imagine that the infamous ‘Lasagna-Gate’ incident is probably the best place to begin. But it’s not. It’s not even close to the start. Sure, it was the most popular reply on Twitter (how can something that randomly unfortunate not jump off the page?) but there’s been worse incidents over the years. Far worse.

You could argue the catastrophes began over 100 seasons ago, in the 1919 season, when Spurs were robbed, by rivals Arsenal no less, of a place in the top division. We’d been relegated pre-war, but when the league restarted afterwards an expansion of the league up to 22 teams was proposed. The question was whether the relegated teams should avoid the drop, or whether more teams should be promoted from the league below. It ended up being a choice between Tottenham and the 3rd placed team in the lower division, Barnsley. Other teams with somewhat weaker cases applied from the lower division, including Arsenal, (who had finished 6th), putting their case to a committee who were to vote on it.

In a baffling decision, Arsenal won the vote. It turns out that Tory MP, Sir Henry Norris, was pushing for Arsenal’s inclusion and he was a very well connected man, so in a corrupt blag that would even have Sep Blatter shaking his head, our rivals stole the spot. Even though Spurs won promotion the very next season anyway, it’s fair to state that Arsenal have played their part in Tottenham’s dolorous fortunes ever since.

Another older example comes from back in 1964 when football had its ‘JFK moment’, as one of Tottenham’s, (and the game’s), brightest stars was unexpectedly killed aged just 27 years old. Spurs were all set to build our team around our double winning Scotsman and one of our best ever players, John White, back in the mid-1960s. The incident happened whilst he was actually enjoying some down time, playing a round of golf alone, when a storm blew in and he was struck by lightning, killing him instantly. White was taken away from us by an occurrence that literally only happens to approximately one in a million people in the UK. Even if you are unlucky enough to be struck by lightning, only around 5% of those people eventually die from it.

So one of the unluckiest things to possibly happen to any human being, happened to one of Spurs’ best players, at the peak of his career, at quite possibly the most important period in our club’s history. It’s one thing for referees to cast misfortune upon us, but interventions by God himself? Over the years and decades since it has felt as though he’s set about intervening on a fairly regular basis.

The first time tragedy entered my own personal Tottenham following career came in suitably dramatic circumstances. It was the 1987 FA Cup final no less, when our captain, Gary Mabbutt, somehow attempted to block a cross, but sent the ball in a perfect slow motion loop over the floundering goalkeeper, Ray Clemence. It put Coventry 3-2 up in extra time and we never recovered, losing the final. This became a lifelong pattern. Not only would my club go on to suffer ignominious misfortune on a regular basis throughout my life, but the scale, the repercussions and the impact of these moments would often be enormous. This shit literally cost us trophies.

You’d think our bad luck only applies to moments, but alas, we’ve endured entire games that have seemed cursed for 90 minutes. Take the European Cup semi-final in 1962, a game so important, in a fixture so rare for any club, that you’re praying for no fuck ups. We went on to have three perfectly good goals disallowed and hit the woodwork three times – we went on to lose 4-3. Of course we did.

Or what about more recently, in 2013, when Tim Krul broke the record for the most saves in a single football match in the Premier League era, with the keeper later declaring his performance and the 14 saves he provided as his “career highlight”. We went on to lose that game 1-0. Of course we did. Tottenham Hotspur, the place where opposition goalkeepers enjoy career highlights.

As for our goalkeepers, well, it’s not quite been a series of career highlights, more like a highlights reel of calamity. You can pray to the Football Gods repeatedly, but it seemed as though they’d popped in their ear plugs when Heurelho Gomes was in goal for us, with one particularly memorable match, against Blackpool in 2011, seeing the goalkeeper save a penalty, before impulsively rushing out unnecessarily during the resulting corner and giving away yet another second penalty immediately afterwards. Did they score the second one? Of course they did. There are few better examples of a player going from hero to zero than that. Even our best goalkeeper in modern times, Hugo Lloris, once dropped a long range shot, fell backwards into the goal and snapped his arm, before the loose ball fell to an opposition player.

Did they score from the rebound as Lloris floundered screaming on the goalmouth floor? Of course they did. We lost 3-0. Ten years previously, our man between the sticks, Carlo Cudicini, broke both arms, but alas that wasn’t on the pitch, he fell off his motorbike. At least that didn’t directly result in us conceding a goal. A somewhat minor positive admittedly.

Zooming out and bringing this tale right up date, as I was literally writing this very article and whilst we are in the midst of one of the most important transfer windows I can recall, (we remain a side sprinkled with impressive talents, so just a few additions could genuinely allow us to truly challenge), our Director Of Football and transfer guru, one of the best in the world of football, Fabio Paratici, has been banned from signing players due to financial irregularities. You honestly couldn’t make this shit up, and in the middle of a transfer window of all things. It’s as if the Football Gods are struggling to come up with original ways for us to get dumped on. They move in ever-more mysterious ways.

Some of the luck can be put down to referees having exceptional brain farts. Remember Manchester United’s Nani scoring against us back in 2010? He went down for a penalty that wasn’t given, but as he laid out on the floor he literally scoops the football up with his hands whilst claiming the penalty, but when the referee doesn’t give it, our rather (some say permanently) confused goalkeeper, Gomes, assumes (correctly) that it’s a free kick to us, so he puts the ball down and takes a few steps back, before Nani gets up off the floor behind him, runs around and boots the unattended ball into the empty net. The referee, Mark Clattenburg, inexplicably decides to give the goal to United.

Or what about the offside of Jan Vertonghen back in 2015, when he was put through on goal whilst still at least eight feet inside his own half. It’s impossible to be offside in your own half, yet the goal he went on to score was disallowed. You can’t explain it, you can’t even try to understand it. It just leaves you feeling cursed. Another that smarts is the Pedro Mendes ghost goal at Old Trafford. Not only was his audacious 45-yard lob due to be one of the most memorable goals you’ll ever see, away to the best team in the country, but as the goalkeeper let it slip through his hands, it crossed the goal line by so much it was shockingly inexplicable that a goal wasn’t given. It was daylight robbery and years later it still has me facepalming every time I see it.

Psychologists may well tell us that “problems are opportunities”. Well, it seems as though Spurs’ problems are opportunities for the authorities to create rule changes. Take the rules that helped the FA to implement goal line technology, after Chelsea and Juan Mata scored a phantom goal.
Our goalkeeper Cudicini had kept the ball out with a marvellous save, but the ensuing goalmouth scramble resulted in the referee, Martin Atkinson, preposterously giving a goal just because the Chelsea players claimed one, when in fact the ball hadn’t actually crossed the line. That means a referee literally gave a goal he didn’t see for himself. Goal line technology arrived soon after.

Then there’s the weird array of hand balls that led to rule changes. Back in 2020, Lucas Moura was fouled as he neared the opposition box, but the referee played the advantage. The ball struck the arm of the fouled Moura as he hit the floor and it ricocheted to Kane who scored. The goal was chalked off, as the new hand ball rule disregards intention, meaning that ‘any connection between ball and arm that leads to a goal will not allow the goal to stand’. So that means a perfectly good goal was disallowed, for a handball that wasn’t even deliberate, following an advantage for a foul on our player! Even the opposition manager, Sheffield United’s Chris Wilder, called the rule “a farce” despite winning the game. The ‘Accidental handballs leading to a goal’ rule was changed later that season.

Later on in 2020, Eric Dier insisted that “something has to change” after Newcastle had been awarded a penalty in stoppage time, in the 94th minute no less, when Andy Caroll headed a ball against Dier’s raised arm. Dier wasn’t even facing the action, and besides, what was he supposed to do, remove his arms? The rule stated that penalties should be awarded following ‘any balls hitting arms raised above the shoulder in the penalty area’. It was eventually revised citing this moment as a prime example of it no longer making sense. I’ll tell you what makes no sense; that it’s always Spurs’ misfortune that leads to rule changes. Tottenham Hotspur: The tortured guinea pigs forever trapped in an FA laboratory.

Perhaps the most famous handball of the lot, and certainly one of the most traumatic incidents
in Tottenham’s history of setbacks, was with Moussa Sissoko in the Champions League final of 2019.

The Frenchman was as clumsy as a drunk octopus at the best of times, but by anyone’s standards this one felt harsh. We arrived as underdogs in our first European final in decades. We’d inexorably reached the one game considered as the pinnacle of any club side in world football. Our hearts had already been tested to the limits following the drama in the quarter and semi finals, so to suggest that Spurs fans were beside themselves with a mixture of dizzy anticipation and sweaty excitement was a massive understatement. It took less than a full minute of this goliath game for the Football Gods to strike. Sadio Mane’s cross found Sissoko’s arm, in what at first glance looked like a penalty, but upon replay clearly shows, firstly, that the ball ricocheted up onto his arm from his chest, but secondly, that Sissoko hadn’t actually deliberately blocked the trajectory of the ball by raising his arm at all. He was simply pointing instructions to a teammate. The rules were redefined for the following season in order to reduce incidences in which arms are being used naturally. Arms were deemed a part of the game because, well, they’re attached to human beings.

In the 2012 season we finished 4th, in a precious, hard-won Champions League place, but in a cruel twist of circumstances, Chelsea won the prestigious European competition that same year, so even though they finished outside the Champions League places way down in 6th, they stole our qualification spot as the competition’s champions. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they only won the damn competition due to a last minute equalising goal, from Didier Drogba, taking the game to extra time, even surviving a rare penalty miss by Arjen Robben at the start of the additional period. The stars really couldn’t have aligned any more for that Chelsea side. We were condemned down to the Europa League competition, meaning that summer Eden Hazard would choose to sign for Chelsea over Spurs citing the attraction of Champions League football.

Hazard would go on to be one of the best players the league has ever seen. The rules around qualifying for the Champions League changed following this incredible turn of events. Rule changes can stuff us after they implement it too. In the 2018/19 season the away goals rule was removed, only for us to subsequently draw on aggregate 2-2 with Chelsea in an important semi-final.

Even though we were the only team to score an away goal in the tie, the rule change meant that this particular season, for the first time, the game would have to go on to penalties. Yes, of course we lost the shoot out. Whether we lose out before a rule change, or after it, we always seem to suffer. They may as well change our club motto from ‘To Dare Is To Do’ to ‘Fuck My Life’ – it’d be infinitely more accurate to the way things regularly pan out at Tottenham. Go on Levy, plaster that all over the stadium instead.

I couldn’t write this article without referencing the term ‘Spursy’. We’re the only football club in existence that has an entry in the dictionary associated with how we mess things up. It doesn’t so much apply to our poor fortune, more to how our club always lets the fans down, but its very existence is surely a bit unlucky. The definition states “A Spursy performance is to have success within reach but to always throw it away”. It’s surely bad luck to be forever consigned to a term that predicts a failure to live up to expectations. We all hate the term, particularly as it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Spurs is our baby, so it’s like sending your kid out to play a football match and as part of the pep talk you turn to them and say “don’t hope for too much kid, you’ll almost certainly find a way to fuck it up”. We are officially a cursed club, even the dictionary says so.

Some of the responses I received weren’t bad luck as such, but a wonderful example of the mindset Spurs leave you with. There’s clearly an enduring misery at what Spurs fans have to endure, a kind of collective sigh at the sheer bleakness of it all. “Going an entire season undefeated at home, before knocking the damn building down, moving into Wembley and losing the very first home game in our temporary home” one person wrote on Twitter. “Leicester enjoying their one and only extraordinary freak season, robbing us of a title just as our team was at its peak” wrote another. “Over two seasons under Pochettino, we had scored the most goals, conceded the least, gained the most points, and STILL didn’t win a league title.” submitted another.

Bad fortune now seemed to last entire seasons. Is this bad luck though, or just life not quite unfolding in your favour? Either way, there’s no denying that it all felt utterly awful. It’s also worth pointing out that losing football matches is just a part of the sport. Humans play it, humans referee it, humans run it, and none of them are robots, they’re allowed to be as flawed as the rest of us. Also, whether we don’t sign players window after window, or whether we sack our manager at half time, it can all be put down to miserable occurrences rather than luck. Many instances of such abject misery can be recalled over the years.

Not many teams have endured their main striker, (Roberto Soldado), bursting into tears after finally breaking an impossibly long goal drought, and it’s not easy watching us lose 5-2 to rivals Arsenal twice in six months, or losing a 2-0 lead against a team whose manager had been sentenced to prison the week before, or watching Lamella scoring the Rabona goal-of-the-season against Arsenal before getting sent off soon afterwards, or Mario Balotelli clearly stamping on Scott Parker’s head, not getting sent off, then going on to score the game’s winner. ‘Why always me?’ he once asked. Actually, Mario, why is it always us?

Some of the debacles have been so ridiculous you’d go mad if you didn’t laugh. Even the toilets have become a part of our club’s story. Whether it’s Eric Dier running off the pitch because he needed a dump mid-game, quickly followed down the tunnel by Jose Mourinho who stood outside his toilet cubicle shouting at him to get back on the pitch. That’s an image only our club could generate. Then there was that game back in 1997 when only nine players came back out after half time up at Newcastle. The second half kicked off before we realised that both Les Ferdinand and Ruel Fox had gotten stuck in the loos.

Then there’s the more abstract stuff, such as getting mugged off on Twitter about our trophy cabinet needing a fresh lick of paint by one of our new sponsors, Dulux, or breaking our transfer record on Ndombele only for him to flop horribly, or being a trophy-starved team yet sacking the manager, Jose Mourninho, a week before a cup final, or being thrown out of the Europa Conference League for supposedly forfeiting a match because our team went down with Covid in the middle of a global pandemic. It’s utterly ridiculous at times.

Lastly, there’s the classic, ‘Lasagna Gate’. The bad luck that everyone knows of. Getting pipped to a Champions League spot on the final day of the season, by our rivals Arsenal (of course), because half our team got food poisoning from a lasagna they’d eaten the night before. The absolute worst kind of bad luck is the kind that’s hilarious to opposing fans and utterly heartbreaking for us. Michael Carrick may have been throwing up pre-match, but I will never get over that day. These incidents stand out because they were gargantuan injustices, legendary mishaps, with enormous consequences. Even rival fans gasped at the shocking disadvantage before regularly bringing it up for the rest of time.

This article has to end somewhere, yet there are literally dozens of further examples I’ve not managed to squeeze in, from our Argentinians, Lo Celso and Romero, missing games because they’d been put on an enforced confinement for breaking Covid protocols whilst on International duty, or even the mythical, unconfirmed fortune, such as Steed Malbranque having a period off injured after getting a penis enlargement operation, but I’m done in. Enough already. The thing is, ultimately, supporting a football club is a roller coaster of good and bad luck. You have absolutely zero control over what really happens on that pitch. It’s the jeopardy that makes sport enjoyable.

It’s the fortune, the mystery, the chance, the unknown outcomes and the randomness that keeps things unpredictable and interesting. Your team always has a chance, so does everyone else’s. Every weekend we all just have to hand it over to the Football Gods at kick off. Each club has bad luck, and as much as Spurs seem to endure an incredibly unbalanced roller coaster, with way more dips than rises, poor fortune doesn’t belong to just us.

Without the ability to affect outcomes, as the psychologist will profess, it’s up to us to change our perceptions. Bad luck breeds cynicism, so it’s hard to strive for an optimistic outlook, but it helps to focus on our successes, to retain some semblance of hope, whilst acknowledging that the possibility of misfortune keeps things interesting and that is partly why we love the game. And when things do eventually go our way, the relief that it will bring to the constant sting of bad luck will be palpable.

So if optimism is the cure for bad luck, yet there’s so much pessimism loitering around our club, and we have virtually zero control over what actually happens at Spurs, then how can we ever get away from our calamitous affliction? Well, uh, you can’t. There really isn’t a cure, or a cancellation. What we do know is that fortunes change, they shift, and if you can ride out the dips you’ll eventually get back to the crests.

There is a term for those that feel damned, ‘Learned Helplessness’. Apparently it can develop after facing repeated stressful events. It leaves you feeling as though nothing good can ever happen. However, luck doesn’t really tangibly exist, it is just a fallacy and the reality is that in a sport of random, infinite outcomes things will swing either way each and every time you experience it. The real fallacy is that we will always be unlucky, always cursed, but that’s incorrect and although it might feel as though supporting Spurs is doomed to be a miserable thread running throughout your life, then consider this; it isn’t actually your story, it’s Tottenham Hotspur’s; we are just observers. At least we get to experience it all together. You’re not alone, just hold on for the ride, and even though it’s the hope for brighter outcomes that kills you, we will be there together for when things do eventually go our way. Even bad luck runs out eventually.