Tottenham Hotspur vs. RCD Espanyol 10.8.13, 17:30 KO

  • The Fighting Cock is a forum for fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Here you can discuss Spurs latest matches, our squad, tactics and any transfer news surrounding the club. Registration gives you access to all our forums (including 'Off Topic' discussion) and removes most of the adverts (you can remove them all via an account upgrade). You're here now, you might as well...

    Get involved!

Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports

(Since planning an 1882 event isn't the same as a match thread…)

It must be terrible being second choice all the time. The best slice of pie never comes your way (literally and figuratively), and you're forever in the shadow of another, more formidable presence. I wouldn't know how it feels, since I follow the best club in the world, Tottenham Hotspur.

But I understand that when you do find yourself forever in someone's shadow, the best course of action is to strike out in a completely different path. If your older brother is running your crime family, you enlist in the Army, for example. It's hard to get noticed if you're only the second best mafioso among your brothers. And when that is the case, it's easy to lose your head striving for more, thereby getting
shot while fishing in Lake Tahoe.
So the Nomads from the south looked at our style of glorious football and decided that they would specialise in dreary, dire football. "1–0 to the something something" becomes their best known (and only) song, while we talk of how "even failure has an echo of glory in it".

The same is true in one of the best cities in Europe, Barcelona. There FC Barcelona carries the love of the city and of the region. We've all heard the "més que un club" stories, where the socios by the hundred thousand would gather in Camp Nou to use matches against Real Madrid as proxy battles against the Franco régime's repression of all things Catalan. FCB stood for a marginalised language, a banned flag, a discouraged identity. And every goal against the crown-sporting clients of the government was a notch to the good for a city with a strong tradition of democracy and anarchic syndicalism.

So what can Barcelona's second club do to get out from that shadow? Go all in with the oppressors, of course. Whereas FCB embodied the Catalan identity of the city, RCD Espanyol has spent most of its life as "Real Club Deportivo Español", a completely Castilian name for a club hundreds of kilometres from Castile. Only twenty years after the demise of Franco did this club embrace its local roots and change its name to "Espanyol", and even so, they use a debased version of "Esportiu"—"Deportiu"—to maintain the rich, royal, collaborationist tradition of the initials "RCD".

And, yes, I said royal. A crown adorns the Espanyol badge, the same crown against which the culers sang as their club soiled the arrogant white kits of the proxies of fascism.

In this summer of discontent aimed squarely at that becrowned club in Madrid, let's not forget that tonight's opponents decided to become more Real Madrid-like just so that they would be able to get out from under the shadow of their more formidable neighbours. And they failed.

The match begins at 17:30 BST, and it is an 1882 joint, so tune in to ITV4 to hear your best internet zoid mates from Block J sing for 90 + 3 minutes (or -3 since they'll be so pissed they'll miss kickoff. That's right. I said it. :dwi:).

Over here, the match begins at 19:30 EEST, and for those American supporters on the Eastern Seaboard, it begins at 12:30 EDT. As mentioned above, those in the UK (and those with UK proxies) can watch on ITV4. In the US, it will be on beIn Sport en Espanyol (ha!) and on TV3 Catalunya. For your local listings, please consult:

http://www.livesoccertv.com/match/851772/tottenham-hotspur-vs-espanyol/

I have no idea whom we'll be starting, but I predict a brace from Soldado and several knee-jerk posts in this thread about how we face a CB crisis, and, no, that's not a reference to little Charles.

Incidentally, if you're eager for a complementary Soldado song to the one @ Flav Flav sang for us on our Apple-branded mp3/podcast players, I recommend this, to the chorus of Abba's "Fernando":

He's a Spanish goal machine
A sight unseen
Soldado!
(Repeat)
Though we never thought that we could lose,
Coz we're Spurs
If he had to score again,
He would, our friend, Soldado!
 
I'm living in barca and I had no idea it was being televised so thanks for that!

Great post too. I dd consider being an Espanyol fan to be a bit hipster but was then told of their links to fascism and quickly backed down. Camp Nou it is for me now!
 
Back
Top Bottom