Spurs Article

Intresting & different perspective about the playing traditions of Spurs . . . . .

Tottenham steeped in a dazzling tradition
I spent Tuesday night not in the cauldron of a Tottenham triumph at White Hart Lane but in the warm glow of The O2's Indigo Room

Dougy Mandagi, frontman for Melbourne's endearingly self-effacing indie band The Temper Trap, was wrapping up the last show of a UK tour by muttering how their fans were "probably sick" of their ubiquitous track, Sweet Disposition.

The song, described by NME as a "beatific, calm-evoking four minutes of lingering, floating melodies", has indeed been everywhere: in a catalogue of car commericals, even as a persuasive device to drink Diet Coke.


But I spent the bus journey home, plangent chords rattling around my head, thinking I had heard it somewhere else. On Wednesday morning, in catching up with the highlights of Gareth Bale's mesmeric sorcery against Inter Milan, I remembered where.

Mandagi's smooth falsetto, set against swelling guitars, also forms the soundbed to a Sky Sports advert for this Premier League season – one over which Jose Mourinho magisterially intones: "Football is special".

Back in a summer dampened by England's miserable World Cup, it seemed like a ludicrous, premature attempt to glamorise the return of the domestic action. But on the grand stage of the Champions League, and in light of Tottenham's glorious eclipse of the holders, we find affirmation that Mourinho may be right.

There is no television montage glossy enough to convey what Harry Redknapp's 'legends of the Lane' accomplished this week.

In the mazy running of Luka Modric and Rafael van der Vaart, Sky have the perfect overlay for their choice of anthemic music. In the photogenic young wizard that is Gareth Bale, they discover the poster boy of their dreams.

If this latest Bale-inspired filleting of a great team cannot convince non-believers of football's beguiling aesthetics, nothing will.

The manager's effect on such artistry has widely been described, perhaps for convenient alliteration, as the 'Redknapp revolution'. But the change wrought by this grizzled 63 year-old – a shoo-in as the next England head coach – appears more evolutionary.

Redknapp has merely tapped into the same qualities that made either the casual or committed fan enjoy watching Tottenham in the first place.

A browse through Ralph Finn's out-of-print tome, Tottenham Hotspur FC: The Official History, proves instructive. Published in 1972, near the end of Bill Nicholson's 16-year reign, the book sets out to defend the club against traditional allegations of 'swank', or showing off.

"If this is swank, it is the kind of swank that has made the great Spurs sides supreme", the author writes. "Spurs are wedded to ball-on-the-floor football, to sweet-passing movements, to fluidity in play, to carving out patterns that dazzle the opposition, to blending individual skills with united teamwork".

If you sense Finn warming rather frenziedly to his theme, just listen to the next sentence.

"There is something about a Tottenham side that is fine, fine, fine". But the beneath the hyperbole, we can see direct anticipation of what happened on Tuesday, particularly in the flourishing of Bale.

"The cross from the wing is a now a frequent Tottenham ploy, used not only more frequently but more scientifically than it used to be". It is fitting that a spiky-haired 21 year-old, already Redknapp's most prized possession, should be taking a tactic forged in the heyday of 'Billy Nic' to levels of geometric precision.

So, Tottenham's expansiveness is not so much an innovation as a tradition, to which Redknapp's stars are the dutiful heirs. Bale's tormenting of Maicon, the befuddled Inter right-back, recalls the destructive turn of pace of another Welshman, in Cliff Jones.

Modric's ability to pick out the optimum path to goal has marked him out as a successor to John White, alumnus of the double-winning class of 1962.

The instinct to surge forward lurks everywhere. Even Heurelho Gomes, the zany goalkeeper, started out his career as a striker in Brazil.

Incorrigibly committed to a beautiful game, Tottenham need now to curb their other habit of flaking out in the final reckoning, if their Inter achievement is not to become a glory in isolation.

Against all odds, they have the chance to be Champions League contenders.

But they could also do with a change of walk-on music at the Lane – their choice of the soundtrack to Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith has seemed to me to portend a certain doom.

So how about the soaring strains of The Temper Trap? Attack, after all, has always been this club's own sweet disposition.


(Written by Oliver Brown)

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