Love this piece from Souness on rivalries. I've lifted the North London Derby bit, read the rest in the link:
On Rivalries | The Players' Tribune
I first learned what a rivalry really was at White Hart Lane.
Well, to be honest, I probably learned it first from the Woolwich fans clinging to the top of the team bus in hopes of sneaking into the grounds for the match. How exactly they got on to the top of the bus, or how long they’d been there — for the life of me — I do not know.
What I do know is that I never experienced anything else in my career quite like that day.
I had just arrived to Tottenham in 1968, only 15 years old at the time. A lot of lads, they grow up going to matches with their fathers or mates. Those Saturdays or Sundays when you head over to the stadium, probably with a scarf on — knowing every word, every clap and every pause to the supporters’ chants. I never actually had that experience. Don’t get me wrong, growing up in Edinburgh, I was all too familiar with the Hibs and Hearts rivalry. My father grew up in Leith — Hibee territory — just off of Easter Road on Albert Street. But I’d be playing in the morning for my school team and in the afternoon for the Scottish School Boys league. So until I moved down South I didn’t really see that side of the game.
Until I witnessed my first North London derby.
I was just in the youth side at the time, but we’d get tickets through the club — sitting way, way up — to watch the older lads. In those days, I’d walk over to the grounds … I lived only about a mile’s walk away. I had done it plenty of times before for training. But that day, as I got closer and closer to White Hart Lane, all I could see were people filling up the roads and lanes around the park. I’ll never forget that. Just the amount of …
people.
I mean, a
total mob of supporters from both sides. The North London derby is still enormous today, but things were a little different back then. For one thing, you could show up to the grounds the day of the match and get tickets. But of course, this isn’t any regular game. This is the derby. So they reckon about 250,000 people showed up to White Hart Lane, which at the time only held about 50,000.
Two-hundred and fifty
thousand. It blew me away. Let me remind you, I had come from a city where that would’ve been half the population.
It was utter madness.
And then the Woolwich team bus arrived … trying to make its way hopelessly through the main gate … as the legs of half a dozen Woolwich supporters dangled from above. Supporters swarming everywhere.
I’ll never, ever forget the site of tens of thousands of people, with literally nowhere to go.
Or the results. That’s the other thing that I learned that sticks with you. You never forget when you beat — or when you lose to — your city rival. And the result that day wasn’t too great for us.
Win or lose, that night will always be my first derby day and the night when football changed for me … in a way.
Every supporter knows what those matches mean — the bragging rights, the scarves and all that. I maybe saw that firsthand a little later than the rest, but from that night I knew. I understood.
I just didn’t think football rivalries would take me to the forefront of religious and political debates in Scotland, or find me standing in the middle of a pitch staring down dozens of angry Turks ready to turn me into mince….
