DubaiSpur
Ian Walker
So, I watched as the final whistle went. The pub behind me erupted in roars of delight, beer showered down, and the celebrations began.
And I left, stage right. This was their night; their celebrations were earned. And they hadn't been c*nts about it, so I had no reason to begrudge them their joy. I said a perfunctory goodbye to my colleagues who had come down with me, nodded at the few similarly silent Spurs fans filtering out, and began walking.
To nowhere in particular. I just wanted to walk. Eventually, after a few hours wandering across Ottawa, I ended up here - on a bench, by a trail, overlooking a placid lake on a cool early summer's evening.
And here I stayed, to contemplate a good many things. The birds chittered - somewhere a distance away, a dog barked. Very occasionally, the ripples of the water were softly parted by a pair of geese, regally sailing down the waters as the clouds above parted and the golden rays of a setting sun glittered beside them.
For the most part, all was still. And it was the perfect place to think - about everything leading up to that moment. Both at our club, and for me.
For the majority of my Spurs-supporting existence, I've been alone in my loyalties - I've gotten used to what that entailed. Being the kid with the counterfeit jersey kicking a ball down the sandy streets of my home in Dubai, a lone figure in white amidst a sea of blues and reds. Being the last on TV, if we were shown at all. Being the only one in pubs across the world, from India to Canada, who requested that the channel be switched over to a game no one cared about. Getting quizzical looks from colleagues when I explained to them what a Hotspur was.
It's not the worst thing in the world - there are a lot of clubs even less known than we were, and are. And there is a certain sense of self-importance that comes with that - your club is your club, literally in certain places. You defend it to the end against all comers.
But there is also a sense of loneliness in that, and a yearning for us to prove the mockery wrong - to be the team that, for once, lets you shout in joy and happiness against 99 others in a pub built to seat 50, to turn the jeers and mockery right back at them and run down the street in delight, to do crazy things in the knowledge that our tide has turned - for one night, the sense of inevitability that came with us failing would be banished.
It's been with me for decades, and it has intensified every time we failed in painful, and occasionally horrific ways. It's the essence of what it means to be a Spurs fan - a yearning to be normal for once, to get our turn, like the other clubs do. It's not fair that we're always football's lovable losers, the butt of the joke and the background to the great football stories that happen elsewhere. Our turn would come - it had to come.
It's been a game of waiting, for years on end, for us to beat our nature. Waiting for something that never comes. Waiting, in other words, for Godot.
