S
spurs2rise
Player in Training.
Hello all,
I am spurs2rise (currently known as Art_Vandelay for reasons you can ask @The Cryptkeeper) but will be changing my username when I can.
Thanks to The Cryptkeeper for the invite too! I've been wanting to get back on board a Spurs forum. I last frequented one many moons ago during the Redknapp era... for the life of me I can't remember the name of the forum however a few usernames here look familar... Dorset (did you used to be DorsetSpursFan?),Justinyidarmy and a few others, however it was a long time ago so might be seeing things. I think it was tottenhamhotspurs.tv/forum but I cant find any evidence of it.. I wonder if anyone here knows it?
Anyway, I live about 60 minutes out of Melbourne, Australia and I am about to go on a stupidly long rant to introduce myself and my story. Strap yourself in.
My Mums family is English and I was the first to be born in Australia. They don’t follow Football or sport in general, but she once said to me when I was about 6 in the early/mid 90s that she always said she 'followed' Tottenham due to one of her school teachers supporting the club. I decided to be a Tottenham supporter too – whatever that meant to a 6 year old in Australia where the round ball game was some distant, bizarre thing.
I grew up following England in the cricket, football, Olympics (any national event/sport, really) as opposed to Australia due to my family. I liked to be different and stir the pot with school friends. So I decided to tell people I was a Spurs supporter at a young age, despite not watching a game or knowing a player. I even graffitied my school pencil case with the word “Toptenham” to show my unwavering support (despite having a guess at the spelling and getting it well wrong).
From then on, whenever I could get a hand on a newspaper, I went to the sports section and tried to find the ‘world sports overnight results’ column in size 6 font which would list results from each match week, thrown in between Badminton results, ice hockey and everything else – what I’d call the general “other” sports not relevant to the Australian mainstream. I didn’t know which team was good, and which was bad, but I always got a thrill just seeing the Tottenham name printed in the paper win or lose. There was hardly ever a mention of the Premier League on the television news at that stage – and if there was, it was usually about Manchester United winning a match (or a title) and if I was lucky, there would be a throwaway line to “and in other results, Aston Villa defeated Tottenham 2-1. Now on the rowing where Australia’s Under 19 team....”
Living in a) Australia and b) a rural area as opposed to a city, we were a little bit behind in terms of accessible internet. I was 14/15 years of age for the 2003/2004 season when I got my first absolutely horrendous laptop and our internet was ‘good’ enough for me to find my way to the Tottenham website, the Premier League website and found out which were the key English newspapers so I could read opinion pieces and get an understanding of the ‘world’ of the Premier League and the football pyramid in general.
Fast forward a few years and most importantly.. I was able to find out how to stream matches. I landed on ‘SopCast’ as my go-to and was eager to watch when I could. If it was at a reasonable time I would waste 30 minutes trying to find a stream that would work (preferably in English) and I’d get a good 10 seconds of a live feed every 5 or 10 minutes before buffering kicked in. It was worth it. I was watching Tottenham play, and it meant everything to me. I was 16, it was 2005, it was the Jol years and Keane, Jenas and Lee Young-Pyo quickly become my favourite players despite only seeing them actually move on my screen for about 15 of the 90 minutes. I remember specifically reading about Lasagna-gate the morning after. I was gutted, but didn’t fully comprehend what it meant to the club.
Fast forward to better internet connections and better ways to stream when I was 17/18 from 2007 onwards and then later at University – I’d watch games every week. Then Football Manager (PC game) came into my life quite suddenly in 2008 and there was a clear correlation between the upturn in my knowledge of the squad, football tactics and the wider English Football System and my downturn in University results. I stand by decision to play ‘just more game’ about 45 times until I realised it was 4AM on a nightly basis. I regret nothing.
The time difference is well documented for overseas fans. For me, a 12:30PM Saturday afternoon kick off in England is either 9:30PM or 11:30PM on a Saturday night depending on daylight savings. You can do the math for the other kick-off times, and the result is a tough-but-doable early Sunday morning, or the more tricky Monday morning or midweek start depending on your professional working life.
Whilst time difference for match days is usually the first line someone will use to try and flex their muscle and show how much of a diehard overseas fan they are, the biggest difference is the lack of involvement, culture and the immersed world of Football. I’m half a day behind. I always will be. All the interviews, injury and transfer news, news columns all comes out overnight. By the time I wake up and read them over breakfast, it’s 12 hour old news and Football has moved on. I learned that Poch was sacked AND Mourinho had taken his place in bed one morning in the space of about 10 seconds. That was a lot to digest over breakfast.
I also cannot immerse myself in it as hard as I try due to the geographical distance – I can’t live and breath it as it does not surround me 24/7 down the street, in conversations with every second person, on the news, on the radio etc. Australia is a sports loving country and Football and the Premier League is getting more popular on a year by year basis due to streaming/podcasts etc and the opportunities to keep up. We do still have the half-hearted fans who are happy to try and tell you everything about football. You know, the “I support Liverpool/Chelsea/Newcastle but cant name more than 4 current players – but look, I have a 3rd kit shirt from 2004 which shows how hipster and old-school I am” types.
One of the positives though – in an odd way – is that you end up creating and fostering relationships with like-minded people out of the blue. For example, there will be a guy at work who you never really speak to... you see them on their phone during a lunch break, and you happen to glance at their screen and see a Football App or a highlights video of a game. You ask them who they support, and then from then on you talk to them every day. The conversations each morning always start with the polite “have you seen the results or are you waiting to watch after work.” There is nothing worse than someone spoiling a result for you. Nothing. You can decide to skip the 4AM kick-off with a plan to watch the game in full that evening after work, and you can successfully avoid your phone almost all day only for some absolute dickhead Chelsea fan to pop up with a “that was a little Spursy last night” at 4:50PM to completely ruin it for you.
Through school, university, social media, workplaces and the likes I do have a solid network of Football fan friends (including bugalugs @The Cryptkeeper). We band together to create as much banter between ourselves as possible. We know it’s not like it is for those at the coal face in England, and I know it’s really just me and my mobile or laptop at 11PM on a Saturday, 4AM on a Sunday or 6AM on a work day for a midweek or European game.
In summary, I’d say that I started to follow the club to the best of my ability in the Jol years, and started being able to watch games when I could in the Ramos years. In the Redknapp, AVB, Sherwood and early Poch years, I’d watch close to 30 games live out of the 50 odd available. Thanks to new phone apps (Kayo, Optus Sport) my watching style has changed over the last 2-3 years. I still watch games live when I can, but this is probably down to 10-15 games a season depending on kick-off times, but I now have the ability to watch either full replays, 20 minute ‘mini-match replays’ or 40 minute ‘mega-match replays’ which can do the job for me.
I’ve been to White Hart Lane just the once – Spurs vs Bournemouth in March 2016. We were in a ‘loge box’ thanks to some family in England – They are all mad Arsenal fans, but I’ll never forget the gift they gave me so I could attend a game at WHL. They gave me relentless trash-talk for the week I was with them. I loved it. I felt like I belonged.
My bookshelf include many, many Tottenham books. I wear my scarf and beanie with pride in winter. My most used phone apps are all Football related. My go-to podcasts are all about Tottenham. The club is a pivotal part of my life.
To Dare is To Do, right? For me, ‘to dare’ is to get up at 3AM on a Monday morning knowing I have a long, tough work day ahead of me. ‘To do’ is going to bed at 5AM after watching some Norwich, West Brom or Huddersfield goalkeeper have an absolute blinder before they pinch a late one and we somehow lose 1-0 despite having 18 shots to 4. I ruined my nights sleep, and I’ll be in a shitty mood until the next match.
We have a three month old baby. Recently, ‘to dare’ was a 2:30AM kick-off (timed well by our 5 day old baby who conveniently woke the household up at 2:15AM). Baby and myself both decided we had had enough at half time, falling asleep in an armchair in a sleep-deprived state but content with a 3-0 lead. I was looking forward to spending some dad-and-daughter time watching the second half later that morning so I could always say her first game we watched together was a walloping of the insignificant, pointless club we call West Ham. That morning ‘to do’ was a second wake-up at 5:00AM by our 5 day old baby and my sleep-deprived state trying to figure out why my phone app said the result was 3-3. Surely not.
I wasn’t born into the Tottenham religion – I chose to be part of it - and I don't get to stand with 50,000 people every week. But I cried in the passenger seat of the car on the 60 minute commute to work as Moura worked his magic vs Ajax at 7:30AM in the morning. I waited for Leandro Damiao like the rest of us. I’ve shaken my head and chuckled to myself in utter disbelief at some of the things I have seen Berbatov, Modric, Bale, Van der Vaart, Dele, Kane and Son do. I ranted and raved to anyone that would listen that Mousa Dembele was criminally underrated (I still do that, too). I’ve woken up many households with screams of utter delight and anger of the last 15 years. I got yelled at by a housemate once for going ballistic watching Danny Rose hit *that* goal – Ditto David Bentley.
I’m a 31 year old Spurs fan. I may not have been born into it or have 31 years of support notched on my belt, but I made a smart and logical choice about 15 years ago that I wanted and needed to be an active part of this club. I know some in Australia, USA and all over get up and go to a pub to watch games at ridiculous hours with 50 other fans. I’m happy to just curl up on the couch with a blanket, midnight snack and some headphones as to not wake up my wife. I always wonder what those fans at the pub would think of me. Am I not a real fan or hardcore enough because I can’t be assed travelling to a pub at 4AM on a Sunday morning? Maybe. Maybe not.
Anyway, that’s my story. I'm looking forward to getting to know you.
Now go on, ask me if I am pro or anti Mourinho.
I am spurs2rise (currently known as Art_Vandelay for reasons you can ask @The Cryptkeeper) but will be changing my username when I can.
Thanks to The Cryptkeeper for the invite too! I've been wanting to get back on board a Spurs forum. I last frequented one many moons ago during the Redknapp era... for the life of me I can't remember the name of the forum however a few usernames here look familar... Dorset (did you used to be DorsetSpursFan?),Justinyidarmy and a few others, however it was a long time ago so might be seeing things. I think it was tottenhamhotspurs.tv/forum but I cant find any evidence of it.. I wonder if anyone here knows it?
Anyway, I live about 60 minutes out of Melbourne, Australia and I am about to go on a stupidly long rant to introduce myself and my story. Strap yourself in.
My Mums family is English and I was the first to be born in Australia. They don’t follow Football or sport in general, but she once said to me when I was about 6 in the early/mid 90s that she always said she 'followed' Tottenham due to one of her school teachers supporting the club. I decided to be a Tottenham supporter too – whatever that meant to a 6 year old in Australia where the round ball game was some distant, bizarre thing.
I grew up following England in the cricket, football, Olympics (any national event/sport, really) as opposed to Australia due to my family. I liked to be different and stir the pot with school friends. So I decided to tell people I was a Spurs supporter at a young age, despite not watching a game or knowing a player. I even graffitied my school pencil case with the word “Toptenham” to show my unwavering support (despite having a guess at the spelling and getting it well wrong).
From then on, whenever I could get a hand on a newspaper, I went to the sports section and tried to find the ‘world sports overnight results’ column in size 6 font which would list results from each match week, thrown in between Badminton results, ice hockey and everything else – what I’d call the general “other” sports not relevant to the Australian mainstream. I didn’t know which team was good, and which was bad, but I always got a thrill just seeing the Tottenham name printed in the paper win or lose. There was hardly ever a mention of the Premier League on the television news at that stage – and if there was, it was usually about Manchester United winning a match (or a title) and if I was lucky, there would be a throwaway line to “and in other results, Aston Villa defeated Tottenham 2-1. Now on the rowing where Australia’s Under 19 team....”
Living in a) Australia and b) a rural area as opposed to a city, we were a little bit behind in terms of accessible internet. I was 14/15 years of age for the 2003/2004 season when I got my first absolutely horrendous laptop and our internet was ‘good’ enough for me to find my way to the Tottenham website, the Premier League website and found out which were the key English newspapers so I could read opinion pieces and get an understanding of the ‘world’ of the Premier League and the football pyramid in general.
Fast forward a few years and most importantly.. I was able to find out how to stream matches. I landed on ‘SopCast’ as my go-to and was eager to watch when I could. If it was at a reasonable time I would waste 30 minutes trying to find a stream that would work (preferably in English) and I’d get a good 10 seconds of a live feed every 5 or 10 minutes before buffering kicked in. It was worth it. I was watching Tottenham play, and it meant everything to me. I was 16, it was 2005, it was the Jol years and Keane, Jenas and Lee Young-Pyo quickly become my favourite players despite only seeing them actually move on my screen for about 15 of the 90 minutes. I remember specifically reading about Lasagna-gate the morning after. I was gutted, but didn’t fully comprehend what it meant to the club.
Fast forward to better internet connections and better ways to stream when I was 17/18 from 2007 onwards and then later at University – I’d watch games every week. Then Football Manager (PC game) came into my life quite suddenly in 2008 and there was a clear correlation between the upturn in my knowledge of the squad, football tactics and the wider English Football System and my downturn in University results. I stand by decision to play ‘just more game’ about 45 times until I realised it was 4AM on a nightly basis. I regret nothing.
The time difference is well documented for overseas fans. For me, a 12:30PM Saturday afternoon kick off in England is either 9:30PM or 11:30PM on a Saturday night depending on daylight savings. You can do the math for the other kick-off times, and the result is a tough-but-doable early Sunday morning, or the more tricky Monday morning or midweek start depending on your professional working life.
Whilst time difference for match days is usually the first line someone will use to try and flex their muscle and show how much of a diehard overseas fan they are, the biggest difference is the lack of involvement, culture and the immersed world of Football. I’m half a day behind. I always will be. All the interviews, injury and transfer news, news columns all comes out overnight. By the time I wake up and read them over breakfast, it’s 12 hour old news and Football has moved on. I learned that Poch was sacked AND Mourinho had taken his place in bed one morning in the space of about 10 seconds. That was a lot to digest over breakfast.
I also cannot immerse myself in it as hard as I try due to the geographical distance – I can’t live and breath it as it does not surround me 24/7 down the street, in conversations with every second person, on the news, on the radio etc. Australia is a sports loving country and Football and the Premier League is getting more popular on a year by year basis due to streaming/podcasts etc and the opportunities to keep up. We do still have the half-hearted fans who are happy to try and tell you everything about football. You know, the “I support Liverpool/Chelsea/Newcastle but cant name more than 4 current players – but look, I have a 3rd kit shirt from 2004 which shows how hipster and old-school I am” types.
One of the positives though – in an odd way – is that you end up creating and fostering relationships with like-minded people out of the blue. For example, there will be a guy at work who you never really speak to... you see them on their phone during a lunch break, and you happen to glance at their screen and see a Football App or a highlights video of a game. You ask them who they support, and then from then on you talk to them every day. The conversations each morning always start with the polite “have you seen the results or are you waiting to watch after work.” There is nothing worse than someone spoiling a result for you. Nothing. You can decide to skip the 4AM kick-off with a plan to watch the game in full that evening after work, and you can successfully avoid your phone almost all day only for some absolute dickhead Chelsea fan to pop up with a “that was a little Spursy last night” at 4:50PM to completely ruin it for you.
Through school, university, social media, workplaces and the likes I do have a solid network of Football fan friends (including bugalugs @The Cryptkeeper). We band together to create as much banter between ourselves as possible. We know it’s not like it is for those at the coal face in England, and I know it’s really just me and my mobile or laptop at 11PM on a Saturday, 4AM on a Sunday or 6AM on a work day for a midweek or European game.
In summary, I’d say that I started to follow the club to the best of my ability in the Jol years, and started being able to watch games when I could in the Ramos years. In the Redknapp, AVB, Sherwood and early Poch years, I’d watch close to 30 games live out of the 50 odd available. Thanks to new phone apps (Kayo, Optus Sport) my watching style has changed over the last 2-3 years. I still watch games live when I can, but this is probably down to 10-15 games a season depending on kick-off times, but I now have the ability to watch either full replays, 20 minute ‘mini-match replays’ or 40 minute ‘mega-match replays’ which can do the job for me.
I’ve been to White Hart Lane just the once – Spurs vs Bournemouth in March 2016. We were in a ‘loge box’ thanks to some family in England – They are all mad Arsenal fans, but I’ll never forget the gift they gave me so I could attend a game at WHL. They gave me relentless trash-talk for the week I was with them. I loved it. I felt like I belonged.
My bookshelf include many, many Tottenham books. I wear my scarf and beanie with pride in winter. My most used phone apps are all Football related. My go-to podcasts are all about Tottenham. The club is a pivotal part of my life.
To Dare is To Do, right? For me, ‘to dare’ is to get up at 3AM on a Monday morning knowing I have a long, tough work day ahead of me. ‘To do’ is going to bed at 5AM after watching some Norwich, West Brom or Huddersfield goalkeeper have an absolute blinder before they pinch a late one and we somehow lose 1-0 despite having 18 shots to 4. I ruined my nights sleep, and I’ll be in a shitty mood until the next match.
We have a three month old baby. Recently, ‘to dare’ was a 2:30AM kick-off (timed well by our 5 day old baby who conveniently woke the household up at 2:15AM). Baby and myself both decided we had had enough at half time, falling asleep in an armchair in a sleep-deprived state but content with a 3-0 lead. I was looking forward to spending some dad-and-daughter time watching the second half later that morning so I could always say her first game we watched together was a walloping of the insignificant, pointless club we call West Ham. That morning ‘to do’ was a second wake-up at 5:00AM by our 5 day old baby and my sleep-deprived state trying to figure out why my phone app said the result was 3-3. Surely not.
I wasn’t born into the Tottenham religion – I chose to be part of it - and I don't get to stand with 50,000 people every week. But I cried in the passenger seat of the car on the 60 minute commute to work as Moura worked his magic vs Ajax at 7:30AM in the morning. I waited for Leandro Damiao like the rest of us. I’ve shaken my head and chuckled to myself in utter disbelief at some of the things I have seen Berbatov, Modric, Bale, Van der Vaart, Dele, Kane and Son do. I ranted and raved to anyone that would listen that Mousa Dembele was criminally underrated (I still do that, too). I’ve woken up many households with screams of utter delight and anger of the last 15 years. I got yelled at by a housemate once for going ballistic watching Danny Rose hit *that* goal – Ditto David Bentley.
I’m a 31 year old Spurs fan. I may not have been born into it or have 31 years of support notched on my belt, but I made a smart and logical choice about 15 years ago that I wanted and needed to be an active part of this club. I know some in Australia, USA and all over get up and go to a pub to watch games at ridiculous hours with 50 other fans. I’m happy to just curl up on the couch with a blanket, midnight snack and some headphones as to not wake up my wife. I always wonder what those fans at the pub would think of me. Am I not a real fan or hardcore enough because I can’t be assed travelling to a pub at 4AM on a Sunday morning? Maybe. Maybe not.
Anyway, that’s my story. I'm looking forward to getting to know you.
Now go on, ask me if I am pro or anti Mourinho.
