No, it is no surprise whatsoever that Spurs fans reacted in the way that they did last night

Wanting your own team to lose is often seen as a cri de couer from supporters, but in the case of Spurs last night the desire to keep them as a perennial punchline was too strong to resist.

I can’t and won’t speak for anything like the entire Tottenham fanbase on this subject, so bear in mind that this is an extremely personal take.

Perhaps, for all the acres of space given to telling Spurs supporters how they should feel ahead of last night’s game against Manchester City, it was all about a little bit more than that. Fans of other clubs are very quick to chastise them as being imposters among the “Big Six”, as though we’re unaware of the contradictory nature of that ourselves or even want to be part of it in the first place.

Supporting Tottenham Hotspur is, in some respects, to live a life in which that contradiction looms extremely large indeed. We’re told from the outset—and the biggest offenders in this respect are often the club themselves—that this is A Big Club, but it is also extremely obvious that there is something about this statement which doesn’t quite sit right.

I am 51 years old and have been supporting them for about 45 years. Over the course of that time I haven’t, of course, seen them win the league. I’ve seen them finish in third place in the table on five occasions and as runners-up just the once, in 2017. The cup record is a little better, with three FA Cups, two League Cups and a UEFA Cup over that same time period, but, as everybody knows, four of those six trophies were packed into the first quarter of those four and a half decades.

Spurs supporters are patient, because we have to be. Silverware hasn’t been a ‘demand’ for the entire time that I’ve been supporting them. Indeed, it always feels surprising to be lumped in with the expectation levels of ‘big’ clubs because there’s so little of any material value to back it up. That second-placed finish in the league was as high as they’d managed since 1963, before man landed on the moon or colour television started in this country.

But the fundamental ridiculousness of this particular football club is something that you have to embrace, because the alternative is to spend your whole life hating both yourself and them. Every so often, a new supporter will appear on social media, full of optimism for the future and a belief that this time, this time, things will be different. “My dear, sweet, summer child”, you find yourself thinking, with a furrowed brow.

So last night’s match between Spurs and Manchester City took place against a far richer tapestry of a backdrop than merely not wanting your rivals to win the league. It felt, for me at least, as though there was a broader feeling that if Spurs were going to put us into this impossible position at the end of a season—and only Spurs could leave their supporters with a last home league match of the season which they couldn’t win—then we might as well embrace it and enjoy being a pain in the arse.

That word ‘ridiculous’ comes up a lot when talking about Spurs, and here we all were again. Win the match, and the chance of being in next season’s Champions League remained alive-ish but Arsenal’s chances of winning the Premier League were also significantly enhanced. Lose and it would be the Europa League but at least we would be spared… well, you can all imagine how that might have been and, let us not forget, might yet be were City to stumble against West Ham on Sunday afternoon.

As things turned out, if you’re going to lose at home and blow your chances of qualifying for the Champions League, then this probably is the way to do it. Spurs put up a decent performance, certainly more coherent than anything seen over the last few weeks. The home season may have ended in defeat, but it also ended with a fairly creditable performance against one of the best teams in the whole of Europe.

Would it be Spurs’ ‘fault’, were Manchester City to win a fourth successive Premier League title? Of course not. It’s up to Arsenal to get the number of points needed to win the title, and no-one else. And no-one at The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is going to be taking lectures on the ethics of letting the oil money win seriously from the supporters of a club who wear “VISIT RWANDA” proudly on the sleeves of their shirts just as the government is trying to deport refugees there in apparent breach of international law. There’s no moral high ground to be found at the top of the Premier League.

The comments of the supporters of other clubs are fairly easy to dismiss. It has long been a contention of mine that no ‘rival’ club could ever cause me as much grief as the team that I support myself has over the years. But there was also a considerable amount of policing going on from the media; many of whom seem to have spent rather too long in the press box and could do with actually paying to get into matches for a while to serve as a reminder of what it actually feels like. Or maybe they’re just happier with Spurs as the perennial punchline. Who knows? When the handing out the coating down is Martin “Oil Money” Samuel, football journalisms equivalent to a club that you wouldn't want to be a member of, it doesn't really matter.

Because Spurs supporters have been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The club knocked down their stadium and built a new one with 25,000 more seats. Did they take a moment to make some of these tickets more affordable in a part of London which isn’t one of its wealthiest? Of course they didn’t. In the space of the last five years, they’ve brought in two Superstar Serial Winner Managers (both heavily identified with another rival club), only to see both of them fall flat on their faces. Small wonder that, when put in this position, the broad reaction was to take the piss out of it all, and more than a little.

The post-match reaction of Ange Postecoglou was as mystifying as it was ill-advised. It is absolutely understandable that the manager—and for that matter the players—should be focussed on winning at all costs, but fans are not staff and Postecoglou had previously shown a reasonable amount of emotional intelligence in understanding that. It was, broadly speaking, how he won over the supporters in the first place.

But a quick reminder is necessary here that Postecoglou came to Spurs from Celtic, a club at which the concept of ‘rivalry’ is felt more keenly than perhaps any other on the planet. We might have expected that he would understand this, and the question remains; would he have made the same comments after a match had he been talking about his former club and Rangers? Whatever, the result is the same. What we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that all that informal Australian bonhomie will be viewed with a somewhat more gimlet eye by at least a proportion of the fan base in the future. His KPIs are, frankly, not my business.

The idea that the supporters can do anything much to ‘change the mentality’ of a football club is obvious, demonstrable bullshit. Chelsea and Manchester United were pretty much ‘serial winners’ over the first decade of the 21st century. Was it the supporters fault that they’ve both fallen from their perches in recent years? Of course it wasn’t. The amount of control that supporters have over the way in which their clubs are run has never been lower.

Give us a reason to get behind the team and we will react. Put nine players up front against Chelsea when you’re down to ten men and end up on the receiving end of a 4-1 home shellacking, and you’ll get something quite different. Indeed, the reaction of the Spurs support to that season-altering evening was considerably more forgiving than it would have been from the supporters of some other clubs in the same circumstances.

But following his outburst last night, it’s unlikely that such abject, indisciplined and amateurish performances as that Chelsea performance (or the first half of the home match against Arsenal, just a few short weeks ago) will be as readily tolerated in the future. The message that both Postecoglou and the club itself should be taking from last night should be that perhaps if you lot, the people paid extremely handsomely to make Spurs not like *this*, did your jobs properly, we wouldn’t all find ourselves with our patience worn to such an extent that we end up feeling this way in the first place. It would be much nicer to be in with a shout of winning things, but that has proved beyond the ken of anyone within the club for literally decades, now.