Spurs outgunned in North London Derby

It's a first visit for me to The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for me, so of course Spurs gonna Spurs.

I have a strange relationship with big football grounds. On the one hand, they’re familiar. I’ve been to the new Wembley and to the Old, to Parc de Princes in Paris, Le Velodrome in Marseille and both the Olympiastadion in Berlin and the Olympic in Tokyo. But these vast enormodomes are not my normal football habitat.

This time last week we were pitching up at a match in Brighton in front of a crowd which I estimated at 25, only for it to turn out that the official reported attendance was 20. Now that was a low, but regular readers will already be fully aware the matches that I attend are normally watched by hundreds rather than thousands.

But this week more than a thousand times as many people will be at the same match as us. The overground train across London is already standing room only by the time it gets to Bethnal Green. Within a couple more stops everybody who’s standing is getting rather better acquainted with those standing next to them than most probably wanted. Seldom before have I felt more relieved to get off a train.

The first women’s match I wrote about was all the way back in 2012, an Olympics semi-final between France and Japan at Wembley. Japan won the match 2-1, but the most noteworthy thing about the match was that a crowd of over 61,000 turned out for a women’s match that kicked off at 5.00 on a Monday afternoon. It was the first time I really appreciated the potential of women’s football.

But this is the first WSL match that I’ve ever attended. I’ve been to international matches—the last of those being a Euro 22 match between Austria and Norway at the Amex—and I’ve been to a handful of matches at my current local club, Worthing, but they currently play in the fourth tier of the women’s game.

And, it has to be said, the WSL is a bit of a monopoly. Chelsea have won it for the last five straight seasons, while Manchester City have been runners-up for six of the last eight. Chelsea are currently top with seven wins out of seven, City are currently second. This is all very nice for supporters of those two clubs, but from an outsider’s point of view it can look a little… stale, and it surely can’t be good for the league to be this way.

There are other issues for me, too. I’ve looked at Brighton season tickets, but they play their home matches twenty miles away in Crawley, not on a direct train line from where I live, and on a Sunday afternoon, which is the one time every week that I guarantee that I cannot be attending a football match at the moment. So even though the tickets were cheap, they were also never really a practical option for me.

This is a big game. This is a big occasion. It’s live on BBC1, on Match of the Day, no less. As we walk past the front of the stadium they’re outside interviewing someone. The crowd, it turns out, is almost 29,000. None of this is to say that there isn’t something missing outside the ground, the endless hawkers, the cloying smell of fried food, and the crackle in the air. But then, crackle can be good and crackle can be bad. I’ve been to Spurs home matches against both Chelsea and West Ham United at which the atmosphere has been poisonous. Sooner this than that.

Indeed, obviously the crowd for this match is noticeably younger, more diverse, and has a far higher proportion of women among it. At a big men’s match of this nature the smell of testosterone would hang heavy in the air like Brut 33, but at this North London Derby the supporters of the two teams can happily co-mingle and co-exist without having to be separated by fences, lines of stewards, or the police.

You can only imagine what it must be like inside here once there with twice as many people inside it. Underneath the stadium is an array of bars and eateries that make the place feel oddly like a halfway point between a newly built railway station entrance and the Markthal in Rotterdam. It is a notable improvement upon the last time I visited White Hart Lane, when I noted the extent to which the interior design matched that of a multi-storey car park. The lavatories are clean and plentiful. A crowd of people sit on rows of steps, eating, drinking and watching an array of televisions.

Truth be told, the omens don’t look good for Spurs. They’ve lost four of their last five matches and their defence has been leaking like a sieve. Arsenal had a difficultish start to the season and even parted ways with manager Jonas Eidevall in the middle of October. Renée Slegers was the interim replacement, and results have seen a marked upturn, to a point at which it seems at least as likely as not that he’ll be given the job on a permanent basis. They’ve been winning games and have scored nine in their last two matches. Ruh roh.

And sure enough, the actual stadium itself is indeed extremely impressive. We’re sitting nine rows back from the front, right behind the goal. They’ve even thoughtfully put out flags for us to wave, should we choose to do so. We do not. And then, a few minutes before kick-off, a live trumpeter plays that almost mournful version of When The Saints Go Marching In that you sometimes hear at Spurs—they should, of course, use the Louis Armstrong version; no other club could more appropriately take to the pitch sounding like a New Orleans funeral—and out come the teams.

Just as the men did when they recently played here, Arsenal are in their change kit of all-black. If anything, it clashes considerably more with Spurs’ navy-blue sleeves (no seriously, don’t even get me started on those) and shorts than their normal red and white would, but that sort of thing seldom seems to be a consideration these days. A shop window is a shop window.

It takes just 64 seconds for the pre-match portents to start to materialise before our very eyes. Arsenal sweep forward straight from the kick-off before being pushed back. They move the ball forward again, and some chaotic marking allows Alessia Russo a lot of space to shoot across the goalkeeper and in after a through-ball is deflected into her path.

Twenty minutes later it’s two, Frina Maanum allowed so much time and space inside the Spurs penalty area that she might as well have been taking a penalty to roll the ball calmly into the corner of the goal. At this stage, it’s been pretty much one-way traffic and the prognosis for the rest of the afternoon looks very, very bad indeed. Arsenal are completely dominating the game, to the extent that it almost feels at times like a training game. Some would say it’s the Tottenham way. I couldn’t possibly comment.

But things do level off a little, and Beth England has a shot acrobatically tipped over the crossbar by the acrobatically-named Daphne van Domselaar shortly before half-time. But that’s about as good as things get for Spurs. The second half is played at a far more sedate pace than the first. Stina Blackstenius replaces Russo, hits the top of the crossbar, and is then put through to poke the ball past Becky Spencer and put the result beyond any doubt whatsoever at 3-0.

The players get a round of applause for their efforts at the final whistle, but the truth is that the gulf between these two teams was evident from within the opening minute of the match. Arsenal were simply superior in every department, as you might say befits a club which has been taking its women’s team seriously for years rather than one which only arrived in the WSL for the first time in 2019.

Spurs are probably too good to go down from the WSL this season, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen if these defensive issues aren’t resolved. They conceded in 29 seconds in their last match, this time it was 64. In the here and now, that defence needs plugging. True enough, their matches have been against the better established teams in the division, but defensive headless-chickening is a bad habit to get into and needs to be addressed.

Arsenal were impressive. But they’re six points off the top of the table with seven matches played. When Chelsea won 2-1 at The Emirates in October, that was a big win. The chances to close that gap against a steamroller of this nature don’t come around often, and they have to be seized when they’re directly within your control.

We head to the pub up the road for a pint in a pub that has a wall of dogs they’ve met. It’s been a lovely afternoon, again. We met a friend and his sister both before and after the match for a drink. Mat has a season ticket—we last met at Walthamstow, last month—and was in his assigned seat, but it’s a pleasure to interact and be sociable again. One of the biggest pressures I’ve felt with parenting has been the sudden and jarring loss of anything resembling a social life. It’s only now I’m starting to regain one that I really see what it was that I was missing all those years, and I’m lucky to have good people around me.

My relationship with Tottenham Hotspur is not something that I can easily explain. I was never a particularly regular visitor to White Hart Lane, not even when you could pay on the gate, so the old ground being replaced with something shiny and new doesn’t feel like a great sentimental loss to me. I loved that old place when I was growing up, but what the club did to it in the rush to go all-seater was an abomination from which it never quite recovered.

The new stadium is a pleasant place to visit. It’s clean and, albeit working at half-capacity, extremely orderly. There isn’t anybody who I speak to all day who isn’t polite and friendly. But this isn’t really me, is it? My football is covered in spit and sawdust. It reeks of deep heat and it ends the game with one shin pad on and one sock rolled down round the ankle. It’s not a boutique experience.

And that’s fine. Horses for courses, and I know that I’m in the minority on this one. It just felt a bit too much like an experience to feel like home. As such, just as no-one in their right mind would want to live in the Lakeside Shopping Centre, this place really remains the home of those poor souls who throw hundreds of pounds at season tickets in the agonising hope that some day things will be different. They won’t be, and perhaps that really is the Tottenham Way.

There was a time when I would be optimistic about Spurs. When they won the FA Cup in 1982 I surmised that they must just win this thing every year, and that this must just be the way of things. Oh, the innocence of youth. They have, of course, won it once in the 42 years since then, and came 33 years ago. That sort of youthful exuberance was beaten out of me years ago, but this afternoon the perpetual fatalism that has come to replace it was fairly well-founded and did indeed come to pass. Still, at least it was a pleasant afternoon out in a top class venue and with excellent company. Back to the middle of nowhere, next week.