FanPost

A Tottenham Union / A Season Preview

Jon Durr-USA TODAY Sports

There were audible foot steps outside the door, plodding up the stairs. They were ponderous and inconsistent steps, and they grew closer. When the last, loudest step sounded through the apartment, making the entire floor of the old building creak, a shadow appeared under the crack of the front door. Metal hit metal as a key entered the deadbolt.

Click.

Click. Click.

Click.

The deadbolt turned. On to the locked door. The key entered the bottom lock, seemed to turn, and the door shook as the person outside attempted to push open the wooden thing thought unlocked.

My father-in-law, Mike, helping my wife set up our newly-acquired apartment, walked to the door and interrupted the rattling, turning the knob and swinging the door open. There stood some unfamiliar, beard-wearing, backwards-hat-rocking freak. "Uh, hi . . . I'm Tulson's friend from the internet," said the stranger, "he said I could sleep here."

My father-in-law stepped back slowly, aligning himself with the front door to allow the guy a path to the previously set up air mattress in the living room. He braced himself for any sudden movements. The stranger half-staggered, half-walked past him to the bed and flopped down without removing his hat. It flipped up in the air and off the head of the bed. Mike stood there for a second, unsure why this New York-accented guy who referred to me by a name he'd never heard and himself as my "internet friend" would be crashing in his daughter's living room. "Can we get you anything?"

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"Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football."

-Albert Camus

It was about midway through the second half when Tottenham's play began to lag a bit. Passes seemed to be squirming off the outsteps of even the more skilled players' shoes, further away than they wanted their first movement to take them. It would rebound off their feet and there'd be the instant recognition that their first touch had let them down, and they'd take a step and a half toward the on-rushing Fire player before pulling up and conceding possession. It was just a friendly, after all. That the opposing squad were about three leagues below Spurs, talent-wise, made the 2nd half sloppiness easy to overcome. And so did the overall ability to cover for teammates, especially emanating in the center of midfield. Both Ryan Mason and Etienne Capoue were covering just the right amounts of ground and at just the right times, both with where they ran and where they passed the ball. When Tottenham didn't have it, they cut down passing lanes, communicated, and took that extra step up the field or to the side to limit the options of the Fire passer and to tell his supporting teammates where to defend next. And the next teammate was there to defend nearly every time.

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Two weeks earlier, I had begun to cement plans to have strangers in from all over the country to stay at my modest Chicago apartment, to attend an exhibition match at Toyota Park, to celebrate Tottenham Hotspur in late July against the Chicago Fire. I sent out an email. It was a message partly of invitation, partly of explanation. The message had a breakdown of where I live and where they were going to be flying in and from where they were going to be taking public transportation. The dreaded L. Some walking would be necessary. But most of these AirBnB's that other fans were looking at were in Rogers Park ("downtown" to an outsider, "barely in the city limits" to us nose-up-in-the-air Chicagoans) or further. I live close enough to The Atlantic, the Chicago Spurs' bar and headquarters for all Spurs fans for the weekend, that it almost seemed silly to have decent enough guys pay over 100 bucks a night to crash with basically a suburbanite who doesn't have That ‘Itis. That Tottenham ‘Itis. The thing that keeps sane people all over the country subjecting themselves to emotional destruction every weekend, returning their eyeballs to screens from New York to Columbus to Chicago to New Orleans to Seattle to see a team fail in the most fatalistically humorous way possible. Spurs rarely win, you see. What they do succeed in is unnecessary tension and drama, letting leads slip away and throwing eleven behind the ball to scramble away desperately at least twice in the last five minutes before giving up a last-kick equalizer. 2-2. Brief bouts of exhilaration give to roller coasters of optimism before crushing realizations of reality open up the doors to deep pits of despair that we knew were there to be fallen through the entire time. Why do I do this to myself? Results elsewhere in a foreign country cause feelings of resentment when we see how easy some other groups of superhuman athletes playing for a different club with a different professional DNA can make it look.

We met at The Atlantic, on the north side of America's Pothole, IL, to drown our frustration (with $4 cans of PBR at the bar and High Life tall boys on the Pub-to-Pitch shuttle, I'd come to find out), to remember our triumphs, and to sing our throats hoarse for the team that keeps us hooked and together, from big signing to spectacular flop, from promising pre-season to ordinary final table standing, from upstart young manager to fired, down-on-his-luck bum.

And Tottenham, while being the best club, are not the only one with a following like this. All over the country, groups of dedicated fans are packing into American soccer stadiums on what seems like a yearly basis now to see their teams from across the pond. Arsenal in New York. Liverpool in Boston. Man U in Miami. Man City in Kansas City. Even on Saturday mornings now, I have to be strategic about which bar I want to show up at and when. Can't go to The Atlantic. Too packed. Too hard to see. Too many awesome Spurs shirts on display. It's hard to handle. Can't go to The Globe. Too many Gooners. Seriously, way too many Gooners, to the point where I'd be standing up to watch 90 minutes while the entire bar starts to boo its own players. Can't go to AJ Hudson's. Too much Liverpool. I'd have to stand for the 90 minutes to hear about the five cool trophies they won those times. I can't remember what they look like. I'd slip the check to the waitress as fast as possible, then I'd slip out of there, trying not to slip on the pavement outside, before slipping into a bus to a not-team-affiliated bar. If all goes well, I can meet a couple other straggling Spurs fans there.

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We are Tottenham, Super Tottenham. We are Tottenham, from the Lane.

My head was pounding. Tottenham had beaten the Fire 2-0, handily, and we had been on the highway in the bus back to the bar for an hour already. Saturday, 10PM. Highway traffic. Love this city. My voice was all but gone. Vin started up another song though, so I piped up. Guy knows how to sing, and he wouldn't have put up with silence.

Spurs are on their way to Wembley. Tottenham's gonna do it again...

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"To be happy, we must not concern ourselves with others."

-Albert Camus

Over the past summer, we heard quite a few complaints about the sport that we wake up at six in the morning on a Saturday to watch. There aren't enough goals. Soccer players are weak. It's socialist. It's collectivist. Yes, these last two allegations were actually made by Serious People. It's boring. The arguments I mean, not soccer itself. We gladly await a well-played 0-0, as the ebbs and flows of a game, unlike basketball, are not always reflected on the scoreboard. It goes beyond the final score. We appreciate the movement of the game, where the calm stroking of the football along the ground leads to a too-small-for-all-other-sports magician bracing the ball with the outside of his non-dominant foot, pushing the ball just inches beyond the encroaching defender's lunge and sharply passing it to a teammate, almost inevitably to be played with an equal amount of skill. Sometimes, this style will give way to long balls over the top of the defense, inviting sheer speed, raw, ground-shaking power from some of the world's finest athletes, retrieving the ball and shimmying to get a yard of space before finding a teammate. At its very core, this is a sport where humans are mastering the movement of a ball with their feet, in order to beat eleven other players (one that can use his hands) and get the ball across a line. The amount of drilling necessary to replicate the technical ability shown by these guys every Saturday morning is incredible. The majority of us have caught on to this, and people who don't are quickly and swiftly being told to log off.

Yet there's no need to spend time and energy deflecting the columns, the rambling incoherence of the threatened, the regarded, the old, the lingering, the linked, the sad, with a stockpile of rebuttal statistics defending our sport. Ignore these people. Drown out, stifle, and defy the Ann Coulters and the Dan O'Shawwhatevers with a rousing rendition of "Oh When the Spurs Go Marching In" as our Argentinian wonderkid Erik Lamela bends a shot just inside the far post and into the corner of the net. Trolling us soccer fans is a business plan at this point, and we have made sure that it's a really good one. Those desperate for numbers, comments, shares, likes, links and attention will always get the better of fans who view their burgeoning game as vulnerable, a game whose popularity depends on the utmost dedication and a certain defensiveness from its fan base to garner any sort of credibility with People Who Matter.

Except these people don't matter. Let's trust the game that has brought people from all over the country, giving up vacation time, family time, and personal time for a "meaningless" pre-season game with strangers. Re-watch Berbatov's sublime finish against Middlesbrough in April 2007. Re-watch Bale's volley against Stoke for Tottenham in August 2010, before he added more than 50 goals for Spurs (hell, re-watch any Gareth Bale goal for Tottenham). Re-watch Luke Modric in any game he ever played for Spurs, coming to the ball, four brutes on his back, then taking a simple touch perfectly away from all of them, pushing the whole team forward. And make sure you're at the bar first thing in the morning tomorrow, arms slung around the nearest lilywhite-shirted fan you see, singing, regardless of the score. The game itself and the community that comes with it are the only rebuttals we need.

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