Don’t Blink Now

It was an unfamiliar mix of feelings starting the trudge up the High Road in the late afternoon gloom after the Villa game. I’m often been frustrated leaving the ground, but not normally this much that I’d get into a verbal altercation with away fans; as I did briefly with a cluster of Villa mouth breathers who were singing about Kane leaving because we’re shit. It’s not a good idea for me to get into any kind of altercation with anyone, because a wet paper bag would slump me. But I couldn’t believe that we’d found a way to lose that game with the quality of the football we’d played.

I’m often worried too in defeat, but this was different. It felt different.

Normally the worries are focused on the overall club strategy, and Daniel Levy, and how many years I have left to live and how likely it is we will win a trophy in that time, and back to Daniel Levy.

But this time the worries were about something different – not the manager, or the players, or the board, but the fans. Because for the first time in a long time, it actually feels like this season – and Ange’s reign as a whole – is going to live or die with their belief.

Asking a Spurs fan to be patient is a cruel joke. So is asking them to believe. When things look bad at Spurs, it’s normally because they are bad. Nuno’s look of cross-armed, rabbit-in-headlights confusion on the touchline wasn’t deceptive. He really was as lost as he looked and we were soon scraping him off the front wheel. Conte’s increasingly erratic behaviour wasn’t an ingenious motivational technique, he was genuinely spiralling out of control, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining but with more terrifying hair.

Each time between 2019 and 2023 when yet another new manager arrived and set up a low-block penalty box camp-out, we were asked to believe that the strategy wasn’t just “cling on for dear life and pass it to Kane and Sonny”.

There was a strategy here, a process, that once the players had learnt the “automations” it would all click – and under Conte, there were times when that click seemed to have happened, or to be just tantalisingly out of reach. But in the end, just as before, it all fell apart, with a rueful shake of Eric Dier’s big head and a chorus of boos.

When Spurs just miss out on glory, there isn’t always next year. Well there is, but it will be worse, not better. An opportunity to fail in an even more fascinatingly incompetent way. Throughout the peak times of the Poch era, a phrase I came to hate with every fibre of my being, normally heard uttered after yet another semi-final abomination, was “the trophies will come.” I knew it was hollow. After years and years in the swamp, we’d hauled ourselves out and we were actually, unbelievably, good. We had to make it count. Not next season. Now. We wouldn’t be good forever.

There’s no time for long-term thinking in the modern game. Sure enough, the “trophies will come” mantra died in our throats, with Son at left wing-back and a flick of Sissoko’s hand and Eden Hazard’s smug fucking face burnt into my consciousness for the rest of time.

The point is that Spurs fans are all out of patience and belief. On the surface, it’s a completely reasonable request coming from a new manager to ask for time, to explain that their philosophy needs to take root, that it’s down the road that we’ll really see the benefits. The problem for Spurs fans is you’re not asking for half a year, or a year. You’re asking for half a year or a year on top of decades already in the bank.

Compound interest. Countless transitional seasons. Years of laying the foundations for success. And whether the football looked inspired or hopeless, always the same outcome. What might have been, and not what was. By the summer of 2023, I’d been hurt too many times. I genuinely didn’t know if I do it all over again.

And then a big cuddly antipodean bear-hug blew the past into the water.

What Postecoglu did between June and November 2023 was truly extraordinary. And for all the love in the media and amongst the fans, I still don’t think it’s fully appreciated how extraordinary it was. He revolutionised the style of play in eight weeks. We went from a starting eleven where you would have swapped out almost every player if you had the chance, to one where only the left winger was on the naughty list.

He took a fan base that were comatose, knocked out on life support, an atmosphere in the stadium that was poisonously bleak, and caused a total transformation. And incredibly, he did it without even testing our patience.

The difficult bedding-in period we’d been promised wasn’t required. We skipped straight past the “believe in the project” phase and straight to the bit where we were smashing everyone in a blitz of glorious front-foot football. The vision he set out in those first ten games was so compelling, and the atmosphere he created amongst the players and the fans was so intoxicating, that even when Romero lost his mind and Van de Ven lost his hamstring and the Chelsea game collapsed in on itself, it was clear something different had been instilled – genuine belief.

Not that we were going to win the league (no-one thought we were going to win the league, FFS) but that there was genuinely something different here, something that would lead to glory if we immersed ourselves in it.

The Chelsea loss was as much a sign of the glory to come as all those wins, because the players and the fans doubled down on their belief.

Then we lost to Wolves.

Then we lost to Villa.

And this is where we started – walking up the high road on a misty Sunday evening in November, simple-minded Brummie voices in the air, praying that the fans have just enough belief left in the tank to stick with Ange.

This doesn’t have to be a crisis.

The media backlash is already up and running. The football world already wants to disregard the injuries and ignore the fact that he worked miracles putting together a top four starting eleven in one summer, that no-one with a squad as thin as ours could possibly cope with the injuries and suspensions we’ve had, no matter how high their line is. The fact that he entirely reimagined the midfield and attack against Villa, putting together a combination of players that had never started a game together before, and still managed to produce an exhilarating attacking performance.

The fact that we’d been exemplary on set pieces all season with our first choice defence, and that shipping a goal to a free kick had more to do with having to play four full-backs than with a lack of defensive organisation. Try not to let it get to you. Stop hate-scrolling through social media. Settle down with a cuppa and a best of Ange press conference compilation, and let your soul be soothed. These defeats are about injuries and suspensions. They’re not a refutation of Angeball.

Now is the time to back him. And I’m not, for once, talking about Levy. I’m talking about the fans.

Nuno and Conte’s failures were very different. But the one constant was that once the fans were done, they were done. With Nuno, it was all over on that sickening afternoon against United, and not just because of what happened on the pitch, but because of the reaction off it. And while fans still sung Antonio, Conte still seemed relatively secure. Once the Antonio chant stopped, only the incomprehensible press conferences and the inexplicable hair remained, and the end was nigh. Managers can overcome a lot of obstacles, but a toxic fan base is not one of them. We can make the difference here. The media and other fans want this to be a crisis, but it won’t be if we don’t let it be.

It’s going to be a rough ride between now and Christmas. The games are tough and we are playing with half a squad. More defeats are likely in the post. But when we have the players we need, this works. We don’t need to believe in it, because we’ve seen it. Blind faith is not required. What we don’t have yet is a squad that can sustain it. So put the pressure on Levy, but do it before the games, after them, in between them. In the ground, turn up and support the team like you DO think we’re win the league. The Ange era doesn’t have to be what might have been. We have to stay out of the swamp this time.