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football is not the most important thing in life

Personally I don’t think an anniversary is a big deal
The thing about anniversaries is that women DO find them a big deal, so for the sake of peace and harmony..........go with it, buy "non garage" flowers....when you get a "special treat" that night, you'll be very happy you did :)
 
Had to check what triggered this thread. 1-1 away at Stoke, VdV penalty scored at 92 minutes. This followed three losses in a row starting with scum away and we were giving away third place.

Interesting to see some old names posting and those that no longer post. Clearly Glory-Glory is not the most important thing in life :rolleyes:
 
Interesting to see some old names posting and those that no longer post. Clearly Glory-Glory is not the most important thing in life :rolleyes:

I'm in the stalker bracket. I don't post much, but I've been around since before this version of the forum, I mean I remember the "MidoManlover" poster that is probably archived somewhere and that was 2005, but I have no idea when I started. And yea, there are a few characters on here that stand out and post a lot, then suddenly disappear.
 
East Stand Girl &

images
 
I agree with this.

If GHod (or whatever higher power is up there) gave me the option to not give a fudge about spurs i'd take it in a heartbeat. These bottle job, weak, overpaid, gutless, cowards who freeze at the first sign of danger and are led by a man that would rather be in another job don't deserve my Love. My family deserve my love, my friends deserve my love (well most), my girl deserves my love. These flashy good for nothing tacos can go choke on a 12 inch mandingo ****.

What a man.
 
I took my future wife to WHL, 10 days after we first met, never had any marital/football issues since.
 
I lost my dad a couple of months back, still struggling with it to be honest. And things like that always make you evaluate your priorities.

And as if to hammer the point home, I walked past a homeless guy last weekend, upon returning 20 minutes later there were ambulances by him and he was dead. Still not entirely sure how I feel about that one.

Football really isnt the most important thing in life. At all. Not even close.

But when its good, it can bring enough joy and happiness its more than worth having time for.

Though I must admit, I am less invested than I used to be, very "take it or leave it", which allows loses to be water of a ducks back and wins to be a real tonic. Probably about right for me, though each to their own of course.
 
I lost my dad a couple of months back, still struggling with it to be honest. And things like that always make you evaluate your priorities.

And as if to hammer the point home, I walked past a homeless guy last weekend, upon returning 20 minutes later there were ambulances by him and he was dead. Still not entirely sure how I feel about that one.

Football really isnt the most important thing in life. At all. Not even close.

But when its good, it can bring enough joy and happiness its more than worth having time for.

Though I must admit, I am less invested than I used to be, very "take it or leave it", which allows loses to be water of a ducks back and wins to be a real tonic. Probably about right for me, though each to their own of course.

This is really where I am at too. I used to get upset and stew all weekend when Spurs lost. One of my neighbors at work told me he didn't speak to me on a Monday if he knew they'd lost. Anyway, in 2016 I was still fuming the day following the 2-2 draw with Chelsea that meant Spurs had no chance of catching Leicester. It was after work and I was out in my garden working, when I got the (not unexpected) call that my mother had died after a long illness. I remember feeling like a real clam getting so worked about a football match and that experience has helped me put football in a better perspective. I love it when Tottenham win (I was walking on air after the last Ajax match) and when they don't win it doesn't really get to me. As you said, water of a duck's back.

Sorry to hear about your father.
 
Sorry to hear about both of your losses. Have started to think about how it would affect me as my dad has been struggling with cancer for over a year now and it doesnt look good. This is why I'm desperate for us to win the Champions League now - hes had such a rubbish time of it the last year or so, would mean the world if I could see him enjoy such a unique and glorious occassion of us lifting the trophy. I can handle us losing the final,but I really really want to be able to see my dad see us achieve what neither of us ever envisaged. Anyone who thinks football is the most important thing in life (and Im sure there are some out there) really need their heads testing....
 
The personal stories remind me of a moving article I recently read by a journalist who recaps Game of Thrones for the Guardian. She is a Spurs fan.

Game of Thrones, cancer and me…

The strangest thing about getting bad news is that your mind doesn’t quite act in the expected ways. When my oncologist told me that my triple negative breast cancer, diagnosed in 2017 when I was 44, had metastasised, spreading to my liver and was now stage 4 and incurable, the first thought that popped into my head, after the initial throat-closing “I don’t want to leave Kris and the kids”, was what if I never find out how Game of Thrones actually ends?

You may laugh – and I did sitting in that sterile appointment room in front of my concerned oncologist and the lovely nurse I’d forever now think of as my own angel of death. It was such an incongruous thought at such a serious time. Yet it also seemed like a legitimate concern.

For once I’d thought about Game of Thrones, then all the other things I might never finish rushed through my mind. The series left incomplete, the music I might never listen to, the plays I’d never watch, the conversations I’d never have about books I’d never get to read. Even the possibility that my football team, Tottenham Hotspur, might actually reward a lifetime of faithful trudging to White Hart Lane and Wembley by winning something (I am nothing if not an optimist at heart).

[...] while I might not find out how Martin himself intends to finish his series (there are still two long-awaited books to come), I will almost certainly see the TV series of Game of Thrones return for its brutal, no doubt bloody and hopefully rewarding conclusion this month. As for Tottenham Hotspur winning the league in my lifetime, that remains too great a step for even the most benign of gods to arrange.
 
Another article which I didn't know where to put it.

From Times columnist David Aaronovitch:

Champions League final: I missed Tottenham Hotspur’s glory years – this dream season should give fans of all sides hope

On the evening of Wednesday, May 8 the manager of Tottenham Hotspur shed tears on the pitch because his side had just won. And I don’t imagine that a single Spurs fan of an age thought that this was odd. What would merely have been a considerable achievement for Liverpool, or Chelsea, or Manchester United or even Arsenal was, for supporters of Spurs, almost unbelievable. Over half a century we had come to believe that this day — our team qualifying to play in the most prestigious match in club football — would never arrive.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote the famous line that “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson was wrong. It’s far better not to have loved. The knowledge that you have once had something wonderful but have lost it forever is a bitter fruit. In Great Expectations the young Pip finds himself with old Miss Havisham contemplating the huge wedding banquet and cake — once magnificent — that she has kept as a memory of the day she was jilted. “It and I have worn away together,” she tells Pip. “The mice have gnawed at it and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.”

Spurs were the first double-winning team. The first English team to win a European trophy. The team that epitomised the glory, glory game: Mackay, Blanchflower, White, Jones, Dyson, Smith — followed soon by Greaves. We fans that came later would always know someone on the terraces or in a nearby seat, who had actually been there and seen it. But what we saw was mostly very different.

Take me, for example. Wikipedia starts a section in its Spurs entry with “Bill Nicholson and the glory years (1958–1974)”. My first match at White Hart Lane was on Easter Monday 1976. There were three matches left, Queens Park Rangers led the First Division from Liverpool by a point. But Spurs were in a mid-table tussle with Coventry City. “Even if we defeat Coventry today,” said the match programme, “we shall still finish the season with one home league win less than last term when we had a narrow escape from relegation.” The programme records that Spurs juniors had just won a match with a goal from a teenage Chris Hughton and that most home matches in that campaign had attracted crowds of around 25,000.

The next season — the first full one of my match-attending career — Spurs were indeed relegated. Our top scorer recorded nine goals and the lowlight was an 8-2 defeat away at Derby in a game we had been leading 2-0. I probably went to a dozen matches that year, most of them on my own. Why? What was I doing there? What were any of us doing there?

I was the first Aaronovitch for a thousand generations to be interested in football. No one at home and none of my friends cared about it at all. But when I was ten, in the playground of my north London primary school, a fair-haired baggy-shorted boy called Clive Matthews told me that everyone was choosing a football team to support. He showed me a list — the English First Division league table — and got me to decide who I would follow. The names and places meant very little to me, but two looked attractive — Wolverhampton Wanderers for the alliteration, and Tottenham Hotspur. I had no idea where either Wolverhampton or Tottenham were.

It was a desultory affair to begin with. Initially the trainspotter element — the statistics, lists of scorers — drew me in, and then the romance of the shirts, badges and tribes. It was a bit like all that “House Stark, House Lannister” business in Game of Thrones. You know, sigils, clan histories, castle names etc.

All the same, by the time Spurs beat Chelsea to win the FA Cup in 1967, with me listening on my transistor radio, I was fully invested. It was, however, something I did entirely on my own. Until my younger brother decided he would support Spurs too, there was no one to talk to about it. And at the robust school in Holloway that I went to at 11, though there was plenty of interest in soccer, the biggest and most uninhibitedly violent boys were all keen Arsenal fans. I remember one talking about how he had lined potatoes with razor blades to throw at Spurs supporters. I believed him then, though I don’t now.

Still, it was nearly a decade before I went to an actual game. My first was QPR versus Manchester United at Loftus Road. Then Arsenal v Chelsea at Highbury. Other people’s clubs. I was a student then and the student organiser of the British Communist Party (long story) was a Spurs fan and she made the revolutionary suggestion that she and I and a few others go along to an actual Spurs match. We beat Coventry 4-1. I loved it. I loved the shouting, the unrestrained reaction to what happened on the pitch, the excitement of the build-up to a goal-scoring chance, above all the celebration — with total strangers — when we scored. We were in this together.

For my first half-decade of active fanship, it could be pretty miserable. Watching your team draw with Mansfield at home in the Second Division when you still have memories of Jimmy Greaves must have been hard for the more veteran supporters. But at the beginning of the 1978-79 season, promoted back to the First Division, the club did something impossibly glamorous. It signed two of the players who had just won the World Cup with Argentina. Ricardo Villa and Osvaldo Ardiles arrived at the Lane to a tickertape welcome from the fans. Ardiles and the young Glenn Hoddle in midfield. We might not be a machine like Liverpool, the subliminal message ran, but we are the glory boys. History records that we promptly went up to Anfield and lost 7-0.
 
... continued ...
The Eighties were not a bad time to be a Spurs fan. For several of those years I was living in Stamford Hill from where the train took only 15 minutes to get to White Hart Lane. Hoddle was in his prime, we won the FA Cup two years in a row and in 1987 nearly won everything (though in the end nothing) which meant that for the first time in my fan history you could go to a match actually expecting to win. As many fans know, this alone is an exalted condition. Most of the time hope, not expectation is your pre-match emotion.

In 1991 the Spurs team with Gazza and Gary Lineker in it won the FA Cup, and then the sky collapsed. We had badly overspent. Gazza was sold and the chairman of Spurs, Irving Scholar, even went to Robert Maxwell to seek a loan. Eventually Scholar departed and Alan Sugar took over the club, fell out with the manager Terry Venables, and the resulting battle ended up in the courts.

Fans often choose not to understand football finances. Supporters of rich clubs like to pretend that money plays no role in their team’s success, and those of poor clubs like to pretend that there’s plenty of money if only their stingy chairman would spend it. With the brief hiatus including the famous signing of the German international (and demigod) Jürgen Klinsmann in 1994, Spurs began to fall behind its rivals and — most egregiously — to be utterly eclipsed by our north London enemies, Arsenal.

After one season Klinsmann quit Spurs, leaving Sugar furious. No more signing some foreign “Carlos Kickaball” for him, he said. That year Holland’s Dennis Bergkamp signed for Arsenal.

Wormwood. In the 1990s Spurs became enmired in mediocrity. In 1993-94 we finished 14th, ten years later, 15th. We hired and fired managers, some with an almost comic rapidity. In that period Arsenal won the double twice.

The nadir was 2003-04. That was the year Arsenal went undefeated all season. Glenn Hoddle, who had returned to manage the club back to glory, was sacked after six games. We lost 19 games and ended with a goal difference of minus ten. They had the sublime Thierry Henry, we had Bobby Zamora, about who it was famously sung, “When you’re sat in Row Z and the ball hits your head, that’s Zamora.”

At the beginning of the same season Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea and changed everything. All of a sudden the finances of football were transformed. Despite the growing TV money, it became clear that only two routes to success were now possible. Get your own sheikh or oligarch sugar daddy to magic you into the top four, or prepare for the long haul, a slow build through bringing in good but raw young players, developing the youth team, buying low and selling high, building a bigger stadium. Spurs, under Daniel Levy, went for the latter. It probably wasn’t going to work.

The thing that crushes me most about defeat is the way a few fans almost prefer it to victory. The talk in the stadium becomes dominated by complaint and irritation. An odd pleasure comes from choosing spacegoat players to berate, or being the first to yell that the manager should be fired. I hate that. It crushes me.

So the Pochettino era — so unexpected but so hoped for — has been like a marvellous dream. Spurs fans love him for what he has brought to the club and they love his players as they haven’t loved players for many years. It’s not just been the habit of winning but the relationship between all the parts of the football club. After all those mediocre years, glints of hope and long passages of disappointment, it has meant so ridiculously much.

Do you know, I never thought I’d see this? All those years. And this season has been a difficult one — uncertainty over the new ground, the mental and physical hangover from a World Cup in which too many Spurs players were involved for too long. Too many injuries to allow consistent success.

In Madrid next weekend, whatever the result — and Liverpool are easily the favourites — Spurs fans will celebrate. If we win, though, then I will probably die of happiness and supporters of teams like Everton, Leeds and Saudi Sportswashing Machine can ask themselves whether eventually their beloved clubs could do it too.

So the Pochettino era — so unexpected but so hoped for — has been like a marvellous dream. Spurs fans love him for what he has brought to the club and they love his players as they haven’t loved players for many years. It’s not just been the habit of winning but the relationship between all the parts of the football club. After all those mediocre years, glints of hope and long passages of disappointment, it has meant so ridiculously much.

Do you know, I never thought I’d see this? All those years. And this season has been a difficult one — uncertainty over the new ground, the mental and physical hangover from a World Cup in which too many Spurs players were involved for too long. Too many injuries to allow consistent success.

In Madrid next weekend, whatever the result — and Liverpool are easily the favourites — Spurs fans will celebrate. If we win, though, then I will probably die of happiness and supporters of teams like Everton, Leeds and Saudi Sportswashing Machine can ask themselves whether eventually their beloved clubs could do it too.
 
Sorry to hear @nayimfromthehalfwayline and @Alaric. It’s tough.

I had a bit of a messy year too and there is certainly nothing as important in life as my kids. But when everything else was going to brick, Spurs really helped. The day I found out my mum wasn’t going to make it, we beat Dortmund in Germany. Kane’s goal allowed me to let out a scream that got rid of some of the bad emotion that day. Another Sunday driving home from seeing her, I was listening to the Leicester game on the radio and they looked like they were going to equalise. Then Son scored. I just went mental in the car on the motorway with no one else around.

Bringing my little fella to watch Spurs and his face the first time he saw the stadium. It was pure magic. The absolute wonder and awe in his face reminded me of the Bobby Robson quote about what a football club really is.

The Champions League run. The Barca game, the City game and the Ajax game. When I was low, they pulled me up and had me walking on air.

You’re right. Football’s not the most important thing in life and defeats don’t affect me like they did when I was a kid. But in a year that’s been really dark many times, Spurs have often been that small bit of light that’s kept me going as silly as that sounds. There are few things in life that have that power.
 
Big thanks for JTS 1882 for sharing the excellent Aaronovitch article. A good reminder of how much crap we endured in the Sugar days, before Big MJ started steering Spurs back to the good times. Of course football doesn't compare to real relationships - but it can be truly depressing, or (particularly this season) utterly bonkers and daftly uplifting. The good thing is that win or lose in Madrid, there is a sense that Spurs are back in the big time again. Fingers crossed the upward march continues :):D
 
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