Some final thoughts on the Europa League Final

It was their first European trophy in 41 years and their first of any flavour in 17. If I've been supporting them 45 years, I should probably say something about it, shouldn't I?

So, Spurs have won the Europa League, then. Didn’t see that coming.

But on the night, they deserved it. It certainly helped that Manchester United turned up and played as though attending a village fete, that much is true. They turned up to play the game that they needed to play in order to win the match, and they did it. It was tight, at times. But ended they up with a win, and that’s the only thing that really matters. The rest is detail.

The goal that won it was a perfectly apposite representation of what was a surprisingly incompetent match. The Manchester United defence had already been acting though they’d only just been introduced to the concept of football under no threat whatsoever from the Spurs ‘attack’, and the first time they were so much as prodded at, they folded.

An in-swinger from Sarr, Brennan Johnson prodded the ball onto the bouncy-castle-like Luke Shaw (who I last night described last night as “the springiest player in the Premier League”), and back onto Johnson, before rolling into the goal while Andre Onana considered the meaning of everything before scrambling across his goal as if walking on an oil-slick.

And then they shut up shop. If you haven’t got your midfield, why try and win through passing through the middle of the pitch? Sit back and absorb. Spurs have a Champions League quality central defence. Their delivery is terrible and they haven’t got a really dangerous striker. Try and hit on the break. Do what you have to do in order to win the game.

There were, it has to be said, hairy moments. Early signs are that a photo of Micky van de Ven’s overhead clearance taken from behind the goal is becoming the meme of the tournament on Spurs Bluesky. Vicario had to make a couple of excellent saves. And I’m not sure that I breathed for the entire seven minutes of stoppage-time.

But they won it, and that’s what the history books will remember. There is a practical value for Spurs, of course. That place in next year’s Champions League will bring in a lot of money. Add that too the prize money for winning this tournament and it could be worth a nine-figure sum, depending on how they do in the Champions League next season.

And the fact of the matter is that Spurs’ League season has been a catastrophe. Should they finish 17th, it’ll be their worst season since they were relegated in bottom place in 1977. They’ve beaten Southampton in the League the last three months, and that's all.

Many thousands of people pay many millions of pounds for season tickets at The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. If the idea really was to just sack the Premier League off and focus on the trophies, then it should go without saying that this would be an absurd policy to follow unless your position is desperate. It is not a necessary requirement for winning a European trophy that you should have to atrophy in the League in order to do so.

That League form hasn’t gone anywhere, and a similar level of performance next season might not be enough for 17th. Part of the deal with winning the Europa League is that being able to offer Champions League football improves the calibre of player who might be interested in going to the club this summer. And lord knows they need an overhaul.

Manchester United had just as much riding on this as Spurs and where, exactly, they’re headed next is just about anybody’s guess. A European final against Spurs at this particular time was an absolute gimme, and they fluffed their lines. They were lethargic and anxious at the same time. They looked defensively brittle, they repeatedly made bad decisions, and their passing and final ball delivery were largely atrocious.

They really did need a year’s worth of Champions League money, too. PSR has bitten at Old Trafford, and the boost in revenue was, it rather felt, something that the club had bet the house on. It looked like a good bet. They cruised past Athletic Bilbao in the semi-final with no need for any of that trademark Late Stage United drama to which we’ve all become so accustomed in recent years.

They’re at home to Aston Villa on Sunday afternoon, Villa are still chasing a Champions League place. It’s not difficult to imagine how poisonous the atmosphere at Old Trafford could turn, and what a way to sign off the season that would be. But this is what Manchester United are, now. It’s now been 17 years since they last won the Champions League, and it’s now been 12 since they won the Premier League. And if anything, things are worse than ever. European football has expanded to take in more clubs than ever, yet still they’ve contrived to find a way to miss out, and by a long way.

The best team didn’t win in Bilbao last night; the worst team lost.

***

Of course, I don’t really give a damn how it happened. If anything, it’s all the funnier for the sheer audacity of it. And regardless, this football club and I go back a long way. My first recollection of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is standing at the living room window of our flat in Edmonton and looking down to see my tiny fingers gripping onto the window sill, in the background a fuzz of light in the background on a leaded-petrol, yellow-green 1970s afternoon, as though an alien craft had just landed. It was the White Hart Lane floodlights.

I don’t remember the first time I went to White Hart Lane, though I suspect that my dad first took me there after that 1977 relegation. I have a vague memory of emerging into the light from a tunnel behind the goal and sitting on a terrace step, marvelling at how small everything looked after having first seen it on the television.

But I’ve talked about my relationship to Spurs on here before, and it’s intensely personal. My relationship with my dad has been defined by it. We were always otherwise half a step removed from each other. He is of the silent generation and I am of the confessional generation, and I always confided in my mum when I was younger. But Spurs was the thing that brought us together.

I thought about him a lot on Wednesday evening. He’ll have watched the match, but he has dementia nowadays so there’s every possibility that he won’t have remembered anything about it the following morning. Yet he’ll have sat in his armchair, Spurs polo shirt on, watching the game. He’ll have enjoyed beating Manchester United because they were my sister’s team when she was a kid. I miss him.

My entire life has been surrounded by Spurs supporters. When we moved from North London to Hertfordshire, I found a broader spread of teams supported among the other kids at school; West Ham, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Watford and Luton supporters.

But Spurs still made up the majority, both at junior and secondary school. My friend group when I was 15 or 16 were all Spurs supporters. I remember careering through town with them, hanging out the back window of a yellow and black Datsun car dangling a white and navy bar scarf behind me, after the 1991 FA Cup final. When I played football, it was still most of the people in the same team as me. It felt, in a way, that their presence justified me supporting them at a time when they frankly weren’t very good.

Spurs never interfered with my romantic life, until they did. I had a long history of dating women with zero interest in football whatsoever - my ex-wife, for example, asked me during the 2014 World Cup why Manchester United and Barcelona weren’t taking part in it - but who tolerated my interest in the game.

But then there was one who did, and I thought of her a lot on Wednesday night, about how had our stars aligned better I’d have insisted we watch it together, moving heaven and earth to do so, and how special that would have felt. There was no “COYS!!!!” message. I wondered whether she might have thought of me, and realised that she probably didn’t.

I watched the match alone, live-blogging it. To be able to do this, I have to put my work hat on. I have to focus on the task ahead and approach it with a degree of concentration that doesn’t allow for jumping around the living room. I’m off the booze at the moment because it makes me miserable - there was no ‘celebrating’ to be had - and I’m willing to concede that I live-blogged the match at least partly in order to not be alone with my thoughts. My own kids still have no interest in football, so they were asleep upstairs. The house, in other words, was as peaceful and quiet as ever.

At the final whistle, I felt something. Disbelief, perhaps? A certain type of melancholy? Shock? Whatever it was, it wasn’t quite happiness, though looking at social media was a reminder of how much this all meant to people that I do care about, even from a distance. There was certainly none of the visceral thrill that I remember feeling six years ago, when they scrambled their way improbably past Ajax and I watched from an AirBnB in Utrecht, about thirty miles away.

It was also a reminder of a broader family of Spurs supporters who I only know through social media, the majority of whom might not even recognise me if I walked past them in the street. I was happy for all of us. We did deserve this. We’ve all waited a long time for it. For a lot of them, it’ll have meant far more than it did to me. And it’s hardly as though it doesn’t mean anything to me.

Supporting this particular football team has, in recent years, been something to keep under my hat because really, there has been no defending it. This very season has seen them raise the concept of Spursiness to something approaching the level of (a lack of) performance art to the extent that I no longer feel any need to put inverted commas around that particular word.

In some respects, Ange is the perfect Spurs manager, an idealist who wants to entertain. I’ve always considered Spurs to be fancy but brittle, entertainers with a spine suffering from osteoporosis. But with all their imperfections, all those asterisks, they’re still mine and I love them as I would an imperfect family member. They won’t build anything from this, They’ll revert to their mean by the start of next season, perhaps sooner.

But that’s for another today. This morning the sun is shining, and the Spurs have won more trophies this season than Arsenal, even though they seemed to genuinely believe that this would be their year. In some respects, none of it matters a hill of beans, but in others it really does. That imperfect bunch out there on the pitch are my people. I’m stuck with them, and they’re stuck with me. And I might not have felt it to the extent that I probably should, but I did feel something, and that will have to do, for now.

It’s not often that I get to say this and actually feel or truly mean it, but…

Up the Spurs.