Post Traumatic Spurs Disorder

Spurs fans are dazed and confused. Since 2019, we’ve been on a four year-long bender, a four year-long emotional roller coaster ride, a four year-long boxing match. During this period, we’ve endured two of the modern game’s most explosive heavyweights, in Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, both of whom took it upon themselves to end their respective reigns with a bewildering flurry of hooks and uppercuts towards the glass chins of the Tottenham fan base.

This weekend we were collectively floored. To paraphrase the Evening Standard’s Spurs correspondent, Dan Kilpatrick, “…we are watching Conte’s tenure expire before us, as we muddle through under a manager without a long-term future”. Yes, Antonio’s term as manager is collapsing around us and the fans need help.

Nothing ruins a weekend quite like Spurs. It literally takes me days for the frustrations to ease following a poor result. I go through a kind of grieving process, as my mind races in the post-match aftermath and my thoughts scramble to analyse who is at fault. Initially I am in shock as my belief in the players and the manager is wiped out in a kind of emotional paralysis. Then I am in denial, as my pre-match hopes are dashed. Then angry as I look for someone to blame. I begin bargaining as I wonder ‘what could have been’, ‘what if’ and ‘if only’. The inevitable brief dip of depression is often swallowed down with a pint or three. I am then found testing new ways to come to terms with the loss and the need to rebuild my belief. Before finally coming to acceptance, as I find clarity and understanding. It is this final process that I want to explain today.

Whether amateur or professional, the quality of Spurs-based journalism, blogging and particularly of the podcasts over these last few weeks has been stratospherically good. Even if the players can’t find a way to step up when the fans need them, at least Spurs’ array of podcasts are still delivering explanations when we most need them. Because our club’s fortunes have been such a mess in recent months, because the fans are so angry right now, and because our run of managers since 2019 has felt like a run of pantomime climaxes; I liken the role of our favourite pundits to those of an actor that’s snared the part of the baddie. This is their moment. They can sink their teeth into the role, they can steal the show, it brings out their full skillset and they can produce content that pierces the zeitgeist in ways that lampoon our shit show brilliantly. They are my antidote, my cure, my medicine.

As I write this, (Monday 20th March 2023), the Tottenham fan base has been blown into a thousand tiny pieces by the actions of the club. Mostly by our manager, Antonio Conte, who this weekend, following that last minute equaliser at Southampton, turned Enola Gay, as he flew through the subsequent press conference dropping atomic-sized bombs upon our club, shattering every piece of it – the owners, the management, the players and us the fans – into molecules of angry electrons.

As The Athletic’s James Maw confidently predicted at the time, Conte would be sacked the day after our next home game (against Brighton). “It’s going to cause a massive stink, if it weren’t for our next home game being three weeks away they’d definitely, definitely sack him in this International break”. The inevitable severance is drawing near and it’s never felt so discombobulating.

Following a run of disappointment and after each horrible weekend’s result, the fans desperately clamour for answers and our favourite journalists respond in kind by sifting through our extraordinary mess. It’s a form of therapy, a necessary human process, a balm for our minds as we rock back and forth between crises. We can debate who is ultimately to blame for Tottenham’s current destruction, why Conte set fire to everything on his way out and how the hell we got here, but that’s a job always best left for the pundits, podcasters and journalists. And this weekend they heroically turned up once again, extinguishers in hand, as some of the finest few days of Spurs journalism in recent times flooded out of the usual apertures. They have the skills, they have the expertise, and with their use of language and their ability to self-edit their explanations, they’re able to crystallise our dizzying frustrations.

Each fan will have their own favourite conduits of punditry, often ones that line up neatly with the narratives they submerge themselves in on their social media echo chambers. There are literally dozens of options; some professional, some amateur, and understandably of varying quality.

Personally, I shy away from the overtly-amateurish, self-indulgent, often anti-Levy, ranting brain dumps found on many YouTube channels and prefer to indulge in something more cerebral, at least resembling a professional level of output. My handful of favourite podcast therapists include a routine diet of The Extra Inch, (for detailed analysis), The Fighting Cock, (one of the original podcasts that’s good for pastiche banter and passion in equal parts), Rule The Roost (mostly for Jack Hussey’s immediate post-match reactionary analysis), The Cheese Room Podcast, (a good blend of angry table-thumping and grown up content), the best-named Filthy Shambles (an articulate rant of a podcast), and The Athletic’s Tottenham podcast, The View From The Lane (for truly professional rational analysis, inside knowledge and agreeable high quality).

The hosts of these shows are also worth noting for their ability to nurse our weeping sores. As we depart the stadium following yet another example of one of Conte’s unsightly masterclasses, it’s easy to find yourself drowning your sorrows in a nearby pub, surrounded by ranting angry friends, before indulging in yet more sadomasochistic cruelty found upon social media. It can leave you tangled up in thorns. After all this pain, the antidote is always found in my podcast-shaped Spurs content.

Chris Miller, also known as Windy, is the host of the Extra Inch and is a calm, balanced voice in the dense fog. Gary Flavell, also known as ‘Flav’, The Fighting Cock’s host, points out the silliness in the Spurs experience. Jack Hussey, host of the Rule The Roost podcast, is the halfway point between the two, interchanging both emotional and rational analysis. Then there’s Spooky’s Filthy Shambles pod, where he unloads a stream of thoughts that always has you nodding in agreement. Finally, there’s Franco, the host of The Cheese Room podcast, who is always measured and intelligent and slices through the more emotional reactions provided by its regular contributors, Brendan McGerty, Owen Culshaw (aka Caller), Lloyd Stiles (aka HG), Seb Short and Paul Muir.

Finally, the host of The View From The Lane podcast, Danny Kelly, is the clear professional, (having been editor of both Q and the NME magazines in a previous life), delivering a Spurs fan’s viewpoint in elite journalistic articulacy. Few podcasts can compete with closing statements such as the one Danny delivered on the most recent podcast following Conte’s destructive outburst:

“Antonio Conte looks to me like a big, spoiled, blame-swerving child…For him to turn around and pretend that he himself has been tarnished by this horrible institution, that he somehow, at £51,000 per day, finds himself chained to us. He must think we are fools to fall for that, but you’re not fools really…When he has gone and the toxicity of his reign follows him out the door, we the fans will still be there and we, Spurs, Tottenham Hotspur, the club, will still be there and he will gradually diminish into the horizon as a person lost in our history.”

To praise Danny yet further, it’s worth pointing out that, among all the words typed and spouted following the match last February in which Harry Kane broke Jimmy Greaves’ exceptional, long-standing record, few will resonate more with every Spurs fan more than Danny’s personal soliloquy of that moment.

“I want to say something about the passing of the torch from Jimmy Greaves to Harry Kane…how blessed we’ve been to watch the two best English strikers of all time playing for long long periods at this club. It has been an extraordinary thing…Over the years I’ve watched some brilliant forwards at Spurs; Martin Chivers, Gary Lineker, Clive Allen, Jurgen Klinsmann, Jermain Defoe, Dimitar Berbatov, Teddy Sheringham, Robbie Keane, none of them were ever going to get near that tally of 266 goals. It was an immovable sun in my world. But what I didn’t know was that Harry Kane was going to be the next genius to come along. And here we are. It’s been an extraordinary journey and I love him, I love him to death. Well done Harry…it’s bringing tears to my eyes now”.

Also worthy of a particularly special mention, Nathan A Clark, (one of the brighter talents in Spurs online journalism, regularly found on The Extra Inch podcast among other spaces), is known for his detailed analysis, thorough deep-dive explanations and clarity on complex issues. His words are rarely a spewing stream of consciousness, of a kind you’ll get from other online amateurs. He clearly puts the research in, producing coherent content, with ideas fully fleshed out and justified, and often correct. There was a weird moment during the most recent Extra Inch podcast, in which I actually found myself agreeing out loud with his criticism of Conte.

Nathan explained, “We are in the most hotly-contested league in the entire world by a long way. There are four major trophies that we are eligible for, two of which we largely discount at the start of each season. Conte can criticise the club’s stance on that, but don’t then swap the entire fucking team out for a cup game that we need to win. He’s completely undermined his own criticism…Why don’t we win the league and the Champions League? Because we are completely up against it. Because Chelsea, City, Man United and now Newcastle, can spend huge, huge sums again and again and fail, and then spend it again.

We can out-perform them on the pitch, it is possible, we can outsmart them, I believe we have the capacity, but with the 7th highest wage bill in the league, every time we finish above 7th we are over-performing our financial reality. It’s not statistically likely that we will win one of the trophies on offer. For Conte to suggest that if you’re not essentially one of four teams in the world, then you’re shit. It’s such a bollocks way of talking and thinking about football. It’s how our rivals talk about us. It’s not acceptable for our coach to talk about us in that way and that’s why he’s got to be sacked.”

Their ability to untangle issues and to articulate feelings will always place them in a special position, a special role, as a kind of coping method for disturbed Spurs fans. And here we are once again, currently in the centre of yet another tornado, distressed by Conte’s horrific antics. We’ve been left miserably unsettled and painfully traumatised by the tenures of both Mourinho and Conte. Until the Italian finally departs and is replaced by something fresher, even if it’s not any better, we will have to remain propped up by the punditry of our online therapists. So thank you Danny, thank you Windy and thank you Flav. To Caller, to HG, to Bardi, to Ricky, you know them all. We salute your efforts, we drink your medicine, we willingly recline upon your chaise longues and like all genuinely helpful counsellors, we need you more than you realise.

To end on a brighter note, any PTSD we’ve been left with over recent seasons will eventually subside. As much as we’ve been trapped shut in a seemingly lengthy wash cycle for months on end, the washing machine always gets switched off and emptied each summer. The departures of unwanted players and the influx of new arrivals, should launder the feelings somewhat. A new season can begin with a refreshed chance and a new opportunity to go again. The inevitable departure of a toxic Conte is also imminent and nothing removes the deeper stains better than the cleansing agent of a new manager and with it a new era.

As Jack Pitt-Brooke rightly pointed out Monday’s View From The Lane pod, this all feels like the period we endured back in 2014. We’d suffered a season of ‘supply teacher’ Tim Sherwood. Horrible runs of losses, sometimes up to six games at a time, saw the man sacked and our club once again left outside of the Champions League places. There were several players regarded as useless in a disjointed and flailing team. Jan Vertonghen was savaged as a bad player with a bad attitude, whilst Danny Rose and Kyle Waker hadn’t fully opened their wings, even Mousa Dembele didn’t seem worth the money. Fans were disgruntled, disjointed and arguing over social media with the usual faultlines often found drawn over Twitter. Then a new manager, by the name of one Mauricio Pochettino arrived and everything changed. By the middle of the next season, everyone could see the way forward, everyone had bought into the new narrative.

The football excited us, the manager connected with us and the players believed once again. Most importantly, feelings can shift, the trauma can subside and as Levy sets out on yet another manager hunt over the coming weeks, we can all hope he brings in someone, anyone, that can heal us once again. As invaluable as the service provided by our podcasting pundits can be, the real counselling service, the real cure for our ailments, is found in the success on that football pitch.