Bulletin from London: To be a Spurs fan is to be a true North Londoner
Nothing to crow about: Spurs just managed to avoid relegation from the English Premier League. Photo / Getty Images
In North London, where I was born and continue to live, there is a division that runs through and across all communities. It’s not ethnic, political or religious, but far more polarising than that. Because in this divide, no one ever crosses sides. Arsenal or Spurs, take your choice: you can’t be both.
I’m a Spurs fan from three generations of Spurs fans. All that is dark and evil in the world is embodied by our abiding enemies Arsenal, a football club located in Islington, four miles south of the Tottenham home of Spurs.
This rivalry has split apart friends, families and neighbourhoods for more than a century, ever since Arsenal, originally a South London club, orchestrated a secretive move across the river and then conspired to replace Spurs in the top flight through underhand means.
This piece of skulduggery has never been forgotten, even if no one can actually remember what it involved. So, to be a Spurs fan is to be a true North Londoner, whereas we see Arsenal supporters as arrivistes, interlopers, impostors.
What makes this essentially moral expression of geographical loyalty so much more charged with intense emotions is that, as painful as this is to admit, Arsenal are much more successful than Spurs.
Seldom has this unpalatable fact been more conspicuously apparent than during the course of the season that has just come to an end. Arsenal finished top of the Premier League, the champions of England and, as I write, one game away from potentially becoming champions of Europe.
By contrast, Spurs only just escaped, on the very last day of the season, from being relegated to the oblivion of the next division down, which is called the Championship but might more accurately be named the Purgatory.
In this hellish underworld we would have had to play embarrassing obscurities like Lincoln City and Preston North End, while Arsenal will continue to hobnob with the European aristocracy of Real Madrid and Bayern Munich.
Oh, the ignominy, the humiliation. I think I would probably have had to relocate to New Zealand, somewhere these indignities would not carry the same onerous weight, and where I wouldn’t be reminded of them every day by gloating Gooners – as Arsenal fans are known.
How has it come to this? A decade ago, Spurs were finally in a superior position to Arsenal after several decades in the doldrums. But then, as Spurs were on the cusp of greatness, the club sacked the most successful manager we have had in 40 years. It was a wilful act of self harm, which is something of a speciality of the Spurs hierarchy.