There have been times, such as when we hammered Man City recently, I may have briefly regretted giving up my Spurs season tickets after the best part of four decades.
OK, that was away. But some of the recent hell-for-leather football under Ange Postecoglou at what we used to call The Lane has been almost up there with Those Glory, Glory Days.
Bill Nicholson, the greatest Tottenham manager, part of Arthur Rowe’s legendary push-and-run side, and his Yorkshire disciple Keith Burkinshaw, would have approved.
Other tepid performances including the hopeless home defeat to Ipswich, not so much. But that’s beyond the point.
(And if I’m giving Ange the benefit of the doubt for now, it’s probably because we share a barber, Harry, who doesn’t have his work cut out with either of us these days. Though, to be fair, while he just runs the clippers over me, because I can’t be bothered any more, he does grease Ange’s receding barnet back over the bald patch.)
Then, last Friday, I remembered why I’d called it a day. Though I’m no longer one of Little Daniel Levy’s mug punters, nor a cash-cow Korean tourist, I’m still on the mailing list.
The following email dropped into my bulging inbox. Littered with hashtags, whatever they are, it featured a bunch of shiny, happy people posing behind the caption: ‘Proudly supporting Rainbow Laces.’ Hang on a minute, shouldn’t that be ‘Proudly Supporting Spurs’?
Apparently not. No wonder I’m Losing My Religion.
‘The Club is proud to show its support for the Rainbow Laces campaign at this weekend’s men’s home match against Fulham. The Rainbow Laces campaign celebrates stories of LGBTQ+ people within sport and aims to tackle discrimination at every level of the game.
‘During this Sunday’s match the campaign will be marked in a number of ways, including captains wearing rainbow-coloured armbands, rainbow-coloured corner flags and Tottenham Hotspur Stadium illuminating in rainbow colours after full-time.
‘This year, we will also be celebrating our Just Proud group, of which several are also members of the Proud Lilywhites.’
Say it loud, I’m white and I’m proud!
Er, not sure about that either. Claiming to be a ‘Proud Lilywhite’ may get you a dawn raid from the Old Bill’s Allison Pearson non-crime hate squad.
That email was a necessary reminder of why, as I have written here before, I hate virtually everything about modern professional football, apart from the football. And even that I can live without much of the time, especially the cheating, time-wasting, spitting and hideous Japanese gangster, right-up-your-neck tattoos.
I don’t go (or used to) to The Lane to be told what to think, how to behave, or how to vote.
Frankly, I’d grown sick and tired of the Premier League clambering on every passing ‘woke’ bandwagon, from ‘trans’ rights to climate change.
If I wanted to observe a minute’s silence before every game, I’d have gone to a funeral. I certainly don’t want to have to pay a few grand to be forced to suffer multi-millionaire players ‘taking the knee’ Starmer-style to Black Lives Matter – a fatuous gesture begun in the wake of the murder of serial criminal George Floyd by a police officer 4,000 miles away in Minnesota.
They don’t even take the knee at the Minnesota Vikings NFL stadium any more. That hasn’t stopped the Premier League and Sky, though.
And here, for the record, before the hysterical, screeching ‘racist, homophobe’ smear-mongering student union Guardianistas start jumping out of their boxes, I was presenting radio and TV shows back in 1990s with Paul Elliott of Kick It Out and arguing, on air and in print, in support of gays in the military. Some of my best friends, etc . . .
And I was appalled to read that the hugely talented comedian/actor Matt Lucas has been abused over his sexuality on his way to the Arsenal – or what we must now call ‘Keir Starmer’s Beloved Arsenal’ – and some of us from the Lilywhite bit of North London still call ‘Gillespie Road’.
That’s what the real hate crime squad should be concentrating on.
So, schtumm, the lot of you.
No, what this is about is the hijacking of ‘The People’s Game’ by pig-ignorant, Bible-burning, middle-class poseurs – something the great Julie Burchill, formerly of this parish, wrote about eloquently in the online magazine, Spiked, this week.
Anyway, if you don’t follow football, you may be wondering where all this is going. Bear with me.
When I read the ‘rainbow laces’ email a week ago, I had no idea it would blow up into a major news story – which the Boys (sorry, persons from the men’s game)) In The Football Bubble chose to ignore until a couple of days ago.
The balloon went up when Mark Guehi, the Crystal Palace captain and England centre-half, wrote ‘Jesus loves you’ in felt-tip on the rainbow armband he was told to wear. Guehi is a devout Christian whose dad is an evangelical preacher, not mad keen on same-sex relationships.
The Premier League were about to come down on Guehi like a ton of the proverbial until it emerged that a Muslim player for Ipswich refused to wear the armband, too. Headless chickens all round.
‘Islamophobia alert’. Dive, Dive, Dive! Anyway, they haven’t got a clue where to go from here. Does ‘homophobia’ trump ‘Islamophobia’?
Can they really discipline a black footballer for refusing to buy in to the ‘Glad To Be Gay’ agenda? And as for a Muslim, even if he does play for lowly Ipswich (or The Rainbow Tractors, as they’re apparently called these days), best not go there.
We’re talking Little Nell here. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
Then, yesterday, we learned that a Manchester United had had scrapped plans to wear Gay Pride warm-up jackets after a Moroccan defender refused to play ball and his team-mates did the same in solidarity.
You couldn’t make it up.
And the real scandal here is: None of the spivs who run football these days believe in any of this old pony. Remember how they ran a mile when England were threatened with sanctions at the World Cup in gay-hating, but oil-rich, Qatar if they insisted on taking the knee and wearing rainbow armbands?
Never mind ‘over ’ere on me ’ead’. More ‘over ’ere, we’re chopping your head off’.
They are only interested in money, which is why they are happy to sell out British football to Middle Eastern sports-washing billions.
The ‘rainbow laces’ rubbish is merely camouflage for their cynical, venal, money-grubbing opportunism. Look at us, we ‘care’. No, you don’t.
The Premier League is about the only organisation which still signs up to the MGBGTQWERTY+ shakedown artists Stonewall. Even the NHS has done a runner.
Most of us think Rainbow is that old children’s TV show, featuring Zippy and Bungle.
Certainly, Bungle would have made a better job of dealing with this latest own-goal than the two-bob chancers who dominate the Premier League.
Incidentally, I’ve just read a story about a ‘misgendered’ penguin. No doubt they’ll be taking the knee and having a minute’s applause for him at The Lane, too, shortly before banning chants of ‘Yid Army’ in support of Israel.
So, yes, there have been times. But as for me renewing my season tickets Somewhere Over The Rainbow!