It was another of “those” days. I’d been a bundle of nerves for the past week (past month if I’m honest) and as yesterday unfolded the knot in my stomach got continually tighter and tighter.

First the anticipation, then the disbelief as word started to filter through about players having food poisoning and the match might be called off then, initially, relief when I heard the game was going ahead. I really believed that if the game wasn’t being postponed then our ten players and staff who had been struck down mustn’t have been too bad. When the team news was read out and we were fielding the very side we expected a few days ago then things began to look a litttle rosier. How wrong could I be?

From the first whistle we all looked half a yard at least off the pace. When Teddy Sheringham was outpacing some of our players then I knew that something was wrong, terribly wrong, and when Carl Fletcher hit the back of the Spurs net on ten minutes it went even more pearshaped.

With the Bingo Club (copyright J. Duggan - Topspurs) fans singing about the Goons as if their own side wasn’t playing it was turning into a surreal day all round. So many of Spurs players were obviously struggling it started to become a competition to pick out which ones hadn’t been poisoned rather than the ones who had.

When Jermain Defoe scored to silence the Upton Park boo boys and Wigan made it 2-2 against the Goons it suddenly brightened but we should have known it wouldn’t last.

The effects on so many players of a night and day of vomiting and diarrhoea and the energy sapping loss of food and fluids meant that as the game went on and Spurs became more desperate we were in even more of a no-win situation. West Ham’s winner could have been predicted a mile away, Spurs players just had nothing left in the tank but they battled on and the performances from those players will go down in Spurs folklore as a shining example of the lengths today’s much maligned professional footballers will go to for the sake of professional pride.

Edgar Davids drove them on until the final whistle having been due to come off on the hour until Michael Carrick felt unable to carry on and Davids chased every ball and every lost cause until the final whistle. Michael Dawson, looking even paler than usual, was a shining beacon at the back and made countless timely interventions despite having collapsed on the pitch in the warm up.

There are eye witness tales of Spurs players vomiting in the tunnel before kick off and at half time and of two being taken to hospital after the game with severe dehydration. These players wore their hearts on their sleeves, putting their own health at risk to try and finish what they’d started all season and keep that 4th place in the Premiership but due to circumstances beyond their control they were foiled.

Tottenham Hotspur finished the 2005/2006 season under a cloud but they recorded their highest league finish since the Premiership began and are now looking at a UEFA Cup European tour next season as reward. It’s the very least those brave players and staff deserve after yesterday. The fans were exemplary as always. There will be questions asked about the poisoning, the Premier League and Richard Scudamore have questions to answer regarding their decision to force Spurs to play when they requested a 24 hour postponement and were turned down and the real questions about the level of fair play in our game will be asked and so they should. Just how far would people with ?30m riding on a fourth place finish go to nobble their rivals and stop them from breaking up the old boys club among the G14 and the Champion’s League?

I’ve got many questions and it’ll be a long summer for some people while I keep asking them.

Audere Est Facere
Come On You Spurs

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 9:32 am and is filed under Tottenham Hotspur. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.