Dakota

I’m sure there are many songs that Spurs fans could attribute to this season.

However, the club’s choice of playing ‘Dakota’ by the Stereophonics after yet another collapse in Tottenham’s last home game of the season really got to me.

It isn’t just the new stadium’s state of the art sound system that is used more nowadays to drown out dissent towards ENIC.

It made me reflect on a time and a place when I was more rounded as a human being.

The song was originally released when I was in my early twenties and just coming out of university.

I had the time of my life, was confident, forward thinking and met a wonderful woman who is now my wife. I had the whole world to look forward to.

Tottenham Hotspur Football Club was my release. As someone who isn’t brought up as religious, Spurs are the closest thing I have to that kind of experience.

My family home backed Silver Street Station in Edmonton, a mere ten-minute walk to White Hart Lane.

My mates and I would regularly drink in the surrounding pubs to catch up, moan about work or whatever stupid disagreement we had had with our partners.

Conversations would inevitably turn towards the game the closer you got to kick-off. But for the most part, the football was secondary. Spurs winning was a welcome bonus.

If Spurs lost, well that’s football. We would commiserate into a post-match pint for a bit and then get back to hanging out.

However, in the last few years it’s all felt a bit different. I can attribute this to a few things.

Firstly, I suffered the first loss in my life when my Spurs-supporting grandad passed away. If I couldn’t get to White Hart Lane, I would visit the family home and watch the matches with him and my dad on television in his downstairs front room.

He told his grandkids stories about how Jimmy Greaves was the greatest player he had seen. How he saw Spurs win the double in 1961 and took my mum on his shoulders to watch the parade down Tottenham High Road.

His most outrageous story is when he went to watch Spurs play Preston North End at White Hart Lane hours after my nan gave birth to my mum. Maybe it was just a sign of the times but I’m not sure how he or his fandom would have survived in today’s world!

Towards the end of his life, my visits became a bit more painful. Whether it was forgetting family members’ names or asking who was playing every two minutes, it became clear that his illness saw him become less of the person we knew and loved.

Two months after he died, my oldest son was born. Despite a traumatic birth and a five-day stay in hospital, it felt at the time life had rebalanced itself.

A new Spurs fan in the family for me to mould. “The lord giveth and the lord taketh away,” so to speak.

18 months later, we welcomed twin boys to the family. Two bundles of joy and energy who have continued to shock, awe, and tire us out three years later.

They were born the day before Mauricio Pochettino’s sacking as Spurs manager and perhaps fired the gun towards Spurs’ decline and by coincidence the decline in my personal and mental health.

Shortly after, the world was turned upside down by the global pandemic. Covid robbed us of interactions, going to football and socialising with friends.

I spent most of it bringing up three under-fives after being furloughed and later leaving the job of thirteen years to become a stay-at-home dad. Despite having good friends whom I still talk to on a regular basis, I hated the job, particularly the management.

Week after week, they made appalling decision, after appalling decision to the detriment of good people and workers who were doing their best to support the company (does this sound familiar?)

In the end, I could no longer wait for an imaginary redundancy package, so I made the leap. It was of course the right decision for my family.

Naturally, having three young kids – one later diagnosed with autism – meant that there was little time or money available to go on wild nights out or spending 60 plus quid on watching football once the world opened.

Other things happened as well. My nan died, disappearing much the same way my grandad did and an issue that had previously plagued my 19-year relationship with my wife remerged.

I’m not too sure why I didn’t allow myself to grieve. I think I just convinced myself that there was too much going on.

Football was still a welcome distraction. It was just that I consumed it in other ways. I began to watch it through the lens of television, podcasts, and social media where opinions and tribalism were on tap.

If the children or my wife were giving me a hard time, I was always just a few clicks away from the Dopamine hit that would take my mind elsewhere for a bit.

I stopped exercising for a time. Piled on weight. I started drinking too much, on my own mostly, writing or scrolling through feeds with different takes on how badly Spurs had messed it up this week.

I engaged in an addictive culture war between different factions of the Spurs fanbase who were at odds with each other and the board.

But it wasn’t just a bit. According to my phone usage report, I spend an average of 14 hours on Twitter, 7 hours on WhatsApp and 7 hours on my browser a week.

Not all of this is football related of course. Some of it I am chatting to friends or doing research for my sports journalism course that I am halfway through.

However, I would wager that most of that was on football opinions that I thought would just take my mind off what I deemed to be mundane.

Except, it wasn’t mundane. My ability to suppress real feelings of depression, grief or self-loathing in consuming social media or news content was now severely affecting my mood and relationships.

I would wake up the mornings in a bad mood and inevitably take it out on my wife or the kids.

Any slight hint of negativity or criticism towards myself was met with a prime Mourinho defensive wall that I had built up over years to repeal any further damage or pain.

Why was I getting so much shit when I believed myself to be a nice guy? The problem was that I wasn’t and hadn’t been that guy for a long time.

Finally, at her wits end, my wife threatened me with divorce unless I sought help in some way. I haven’t quite gathered up the ‘bottle’ to seek counselling yet, although talking to those who have, it has changed their lives.

However, being an avid listener of podcasts - sometimes to my detriment - I have been getting into self-help audio books. “This is how your marriage ends” by Matthew Fray was the first.

A provocative title that had me screaming, “oh, fuck off” at first glance. But once I realised how destructive the habits and behaviours I had constructed were as a defence mechanism to suppress real feelings of pain, my eyes had opened.

David Hillier’s article in the Guardian and appearance on the Fighting Cock podcast discussing how he quit watching and consuming football media for six weeks was also an important moment of reflection for me.

Where would I be now if I had taken the time to look after myself? To consult close friends and loved ones about feeling grief for the first time in my life or a collapse in my identity or self-worth?

I would hope people aren’t mad at me for writing this. I don’t really know why I retreated. I guess most men pretend to shrug it off and bury our heads in the sand at any sign of weakness or vulnerability.

I guess going to football teaches you that. It’s a vehicle to get away from everyday life. It seems to be the one bastion of society where men are comfortable at expressing themselves emotionally.

Unfortunately for Spurs fans, that anger is normally then aimed at the ref, Daniel Levy or an inept defence.

Perhaps it’s why they still turn up in their thousands each week despite the state the club is in because ultimately, you just want to go see your mates and have a laugh or a moan.

So, in the now immortal words of the Stereophonics, where do we go from here? For the club, who knows?

The old me was an optimist so I will say that football has a funny way of turning itself round very quickly if we can get key decisions right.

Now that the season has ended, I am going to attempt to turn most of the noise off for the summer. This is somewhat problematic for someone studying sports journalism.

And let’s face it, I will still dip back in when we finally appoint a manager and make some signings.

However, I have long needed to ‘take a look at me now.’ That means being more open with my wife and my parents, giving more attention to my kids, reconnecting with my mates, listening to songs that I have long forgotten and enjoying the sun.

As for my club, like me, they just need to get back to basics.