Monday night appointment with Doctor Tottenham made even worse by VAR

Premier League football matches are not character-building work retreats, and losing 4-1 at home to one of your biggest rivals matters, especially when they were there for the taking.

There are arguably reasons to be cheerful, but the stark fact remains that it was a 4-1 home defeat against one of their biggest rivals, and rivals who were, quite frankly, there for the taking. As the dust starts to settle on Spurs’ monumental match against Chelsea on Monday night, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the team had better have learned something profound about themselves from it all in some way, because they inflicted much of the need for all that character and heart they ended up showing upon themselves in the first place.

It could have been much more comfortable, because Chelsea were there for the taking. With a two player advantage, they might well have been pegged back to 2-2 before two late stoppage-time goals gave the result a veneer of comfort that their performance hadn’t merited, while leaving Nicolas Jackson as one of the lowest marked out of ten hat-trick scorers of all-time. Perhaps this will now unlock him, like a genie from a bottle. Doctor Tottenham seems to have moved into preventative medicine, too.

The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that it had been evident from the first couple of minutes that this should have been Spurs’ night. At 15 minutes, already a goal up and having had a second disallowed, all they needed to do was what they’d already been doing. But they didn’t. Destiny Udogie was the first to lose his rag and was lucky to avoid a red card that he picked up later regardless. I’ve seen tiny hints of that from him before already this season, but the first-half Spurs head-loss felt collective; for all the talk of regeneration that has followed the match, that first half felt very familiar indeed.

Cristian Romero has got this sort of thing in him, and everybody knows it. He, again, was given a second chance. He, again, didn’t take it. There was little arguing with either red card. And then there were the injuries, which you probably have to ascribe to plain bad luck, though even those come with the caveat that they exposed the thinness of the squad beyond the first 12 or 13 players. And it should be reiterated that it wasn’t complete one-way traffic. Reece James could have been sent off for leading with a forearm, but wasn’t. But ultimately, Spurs deserved to lose this match.

The concept of football club ‘DNA’ is something of a misnomer, because ‘DNA’ suggests that a character trait that simply cannot be removed by any means at all because it is inherited. But that’s not true. The first 130-odd years of Manchester City’s history have been pretty much wiped away by the last ten or twelve. The first 70 years of Liverpool’s existence were very different to the 60 that have followed them. The same could be said in the opposite direction about, say, Sunderland or Preston North End. Football has been evolving constantly since the game was first played, and there have been no clubs which have been successful in perpetuity in England.

A winning ‘DNA’ isn’t about money. It is about the culture within the club. It is about the structures it has in place. It’s why clubs can fail in such similar-looking ways under quite different managers. But though this ‘DNA’ can be altered (and money is the obvious driver nowadays), the very evidence of that first half between Spurs and Chelsea suggests that some stains are harder to rub completely clean than others. Because we’ve all seen this sort of conflagration before. And yes, the reaction to it was positive and it is a good thing that the fan base hasn’t started tearing itself or the club to pieces in the couple of days since then. But it would be altogether more beneficial if the team didn’t find themselves in that sort of position in the first place.

People can argue about this sort of thing all they like, but if there is one thing that does seem to increasingly be uniting supporters of all clubs, it’s revulsion over the ongoing implementation of VAR. Decision after decision being referred in this case resulted in more than 21 minutes being added across the two halves. Almost a quarter of the game added back on—yes, some due to injuries, but a considerable amount due to this back and forth fannying about with VAR.

At this point, it’s not even really a matter of whether the decisions are right or wrong. Who cares if they’re right or wrong, if the actual match that you’re watching has been reduced to a bunch of men in brightly-coloured polyester standing around on a patch of grass looking slightly lost while, several miles away, a bunch of other men sitting in front of a bank of television screens dressed like referees decide whether something that happened actually happened because literally none of the players can be trusted to be remotely honest—to a point that it’s not even expected; it’s expected that they’ll try and cheat—and this decision may, by the end of May, be worth £150m?

I know I sound like WG fuckin’ Grace, or some other ossified relic from a bygone age, at this point but it can feel at times as though it’s a form of gaslighting, that no-one in a position to do anything about it sees this as a problem. At this stage, they’re like the This is Fine dog. But what a spectacular act of cultural vandalism. To take football—football!— and turn it into this. The simplest and most beautiful of the games. A game so contagious it infected most of the planet. I’m lucky. On a Saturday afternoon, I’ll be at some small ground somewhere or other, where all this bullshit doesn’t start inevitably start breaking out as soon as kick off occurs and a football match breaks out. But for thousands—hundreds of thousands—of people, that outlet doesn’t exist. This is the entirety of their football universe.

Current interpretations of laws of the game don’t help, either. By making something so simple so complex, the need for VAR and the current, obviously unsatisfactory, laws of the game have formed a codependent relationship. The laws of the game require VAR because millimetres matter. Millimetres matter because that’s how the laws of the game are being interpreted. And so the virtuous circle is complete. There are conspiracy theories floating out about this. These remain in the ‘conspiracy’ camp, but it doesn’t help when you start wondering what the point of having the rules like this could even be. 

Offside is broken to the extent that you might start to wonder whether it would be worth abolishing it altogether. The same could be said for handball. Why is the arm verboten? The arm isn’t the hand. The aim of the handball law should really be to prevent someone catching it and running with it, thus turning it into rugby without the tweed jackets, or swatting at it with the hand. If the ball is played with the arm and everyone is permitted to do it… what is such a massive issue about this that it has to result in a penalty kick being awarded? 

The one aspect of Spurs’ defeat to Chelsea that I am fully on board with is doubling down on ridiculously high lines in already near-impossible situations. It’s death or glory, and ‘glory’ is written into the club’s culture just as much as that also apparently unshiftable Spursiness. I would sooner that under most circumstances than sticking everyone behind the ball and trying to play anti-football for as long as you can get away with.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the twin deaths by a thousand cuts that were Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte was just what a betrayal it felt, not only that the club were hiring these mercenaries, but they were managers who betrayed attitudes that I didn’t want my club embodying. I’m fully aware of how precious that sounds and if other people are into that then you do you, boo, but it really isn’t for me. I understand that professionals take it incredibly seriously and that a lot of money may be riding on it, but it isn’t my money. Entertain me. I don’t even expect to win much.

Given that I’ve now supported the club for something like 45 years, I do sometimes wonder about the extent to which it is a happy coincidence that my ‘winning isn’t everything’ mentality aligns with the club’s, and how much of it has been quietly injected into my veins by Doctor Tottenham over those intervening four and a half decades by sticking to their end of what is, let’s face it, the world’s worst Faustian pact. Because I couldn’t support any other club. Wouldn’t want to. I have zero ‘jealousy’ towards others who win more—okay, any—trophies. I’m in it for life and there’s nothing I can about it. Sometimes all you can do is shrug your shoulders at the inevitability of it all and get on with your day. 

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what I think. It doesn’t really matter what any of us think. Even in the event of legislation, loopholes would be found, obvious connections would be ignored, and money would get its way. There’s no will to ‘fix’ elite level football. That much should be obvious by now. And unless money—in the form of match-fixing—gets its way again and destroys non-league football too, I’ll at least continue to have that couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon when I can get away from it all, a nice reminder that actually yes, there is a reason why I love doing this in the first place. I do sometimes wonder how others do it, without that bolthole. In all honesty, I could have done with one myself, by 10.15 on Monday night.