A Cup Final reminisce - Martin Cloake

yiddo

great article by Martin Cloakehttp://www.topspurs.com/thfccol-martinc.htm

21st February 2008 – Cup Final Preview

Notwithstanding the important UEFA Cup game on Thursday night, it’s Sunday’s Cup Final which dominates the thoughts. It’s all taken me back to the days leading up to another Final, when a Spurs team hungry for success faced one last hurdle to win a trophy that could take them on to a new level.

Much has changed since May 1981, although not the importance of winning the trophy. So what follows is a personal confessional that serves two purposes. First, to paint a picture of football in a different, and perhaps more rewarding, age. But second, and more important, to perform penance for a wrong left undone for too long.

The story, as is so often the case, begins some years before. I was a schoolboy in North London from a family with not much interest in football. Where I grew up, Muswell Hill in its pre-Liberal Democrat pushy middle class parent days, you were either Tottenham or Arsenal. I chose Tottenham because we won the week I looked at the results with any knowledge. My first football memory was Spurs winning the League Cup against Norwich, the first vivid memory watching the 1973 FA Cup Final when Sunderland beat Don Revie’s Leeds, my second is the tears of a nine-year-old listening to the 1974 UEFA Cup Final on Sport on 2 as Tottenham lost, Spurs fans rioted and Bill Nicholson appealed vainly to “stop the violence”. Pat Jennings was my first hero. with Steve Perryman not far behind.

Despite the team’s decline after the UEFA defeat and Nicholson’s bungled departure - what changes? - I was firmly Spurs. Because of the unhappy combination of regularly reported violence on the terraces and the fact that my best mates supported Stoke City and Leeds respectively - in North London! - I couldn’t persuade my Mum to let me go to White Hart Lane for years. And my Mum would no more have set foot in a football ground than she would’ve gone to a pub on her own - it was not what women did.

But by 1978, I was 13 and old enough to go on my own. What was more, Spurs had been relegated and we all knew we had a responsibility to rally round the team and get them back up. So I was one of the many thousands who poured back to cheer the Spurs back to the top flight, my first game a spine-tingling 1-0 victory over fellow table-toppers Bolton Wanderers in front of 52,000 at White Hart Lane (1-0 thanks to a Don McAllister diving header since you ask).

I was hooked on the live experience. I went to more home games, I celebrated promotion and gave it back to every Gooner and Hammer who had taken the piss in the playground when we went down, and I scraped my jaw off the floor when we signed to Argentine World Cup stars in the summer. I began to go to away games, all on my own, trips into unknown territory like Leyton Orient for a pre-season friendly, all the way to South London to Selhurst Park, and even a coach trip with the old Supporters Club to The Dell, where Southampton caned us 5-2 and the coach broke down en route.

I lived, as the cliche has it, for the weekend. I’d get to Spurs as the gates opened, sit on the empty terraces and watch the ground fill up, and worked my apprenticeship into The Shelf. Afterwards I’d wait outside the old West Stand entrance for the players to come out to get their autographs. One day I got Steve Perryman’s, the captain, Mr Tottenham to me. It was after a game against Bristol City in the First Division - it was that long ago! - and at that game I met Julie.

I was a bit of a teenage loner, with a bad haircut, Harrington jacket and monkey boots. She was grown up, she had a job as a nurse. We were both waiting for the players, and we started talking in the way fans do. Favourite players, who was doing what, who should play where, what teams we hated, where we’d been. We got our autographs, swapped addresses, and kept in touch. There was nothing more to it than that - we were Tottenham, and that was the only connection necessary.

I saw Julie a few more times, and we kept exchanging letters between Muswell Hill and Oxford, where she worked. By now I was going to evening games, revising for O levels, showing off by singing the lyrics to Cool For Cats as we queued for work during the teachers’ strike. They were, as they say, the best of times.

By now, I was going regularly with Annie from up the road and John from up The Broadway. All the normal teenage stuff was punctuated with meetings at the W3 bus stop at The Grove in Ally Pally and the journey to The World Famous Home Of The Spurs. We went to every game in the 1981 FA Cup run, helped by the fact we were drawn in London every time. The only game we didn’t make was the semi at Hillsborough. Shepherd’s Bush was one thing, but Sheffield was quite another for 16-year-olds with limited finances. Along with virtually every other kid in North London, we bunked off school early on the afternoon of the replay and rushed to Highbury, determined to get in and take over enemy territory. We got in, we saw one of the best Spurs displays of all time, we dodged the house brinks lobbed into our position at the back of the North Bank by marauding Gooners. We lapped up the atmosphere, we danced and sang… and then reality struck.

Spurs were in a Cup Final, THE Cup Final. And we probably wouldn’t be there. Once all the hangers on had got their tickets, then the grown-ups in the Supporters club, the long-time loyal fans, the players and their families, there would be little left for the spotty herberts like us. We remembered the previous season’s quarter final against Liverpool, when tickets were like gold dust. black market prices were as much as £2, and our only satisfaction was seeing one of King of the Touts Stan Flashman’s men get decked on the High Street as a posse of geezers made off with the tickets that flew from every pocket.

We tried everything to get tickets, but it was not to be. As I went home after school on the Friday before the Final, it was with a mixture of expectation and resignation. Spurs were in the FA Cup Final the next day. Ossie’s Dream was riding high in the charts. And I would be watching it on TV in my front room, away from the crowd, and with my mum and nan popping their heads out of the kitchen periodically saying “how are they getting on, love?’. It was, as they say, the best of times, and it was the worst of times.

As I let myself in, my mum said “You’ve got a letter from Julie.” I knew Julie was a season ticket holder, which meant she had a ticket. I was pleased, but in vintage 16-year-old style I was also feeling grumpy that her good fortune wasn’t mine. I dropped my bag on the floor, threw my jacket on the sofa, kicked off my shoes and sat down with the letter. Let’s just read this and get it over with… looking forward to the final… going to be great… hope Steve scores… yeah, yeah, yeah.

As I opened the envelope, a small, blueish object fell out from between the folded sheets of notepaper. I opened it up and read. Dear Martin, I’m so annoyed, my boss won’t let me change my shift for Saturday, so I can’t make the Final. The other people I know have got tickets, so I thought you’d like to have mine. lots of love, Julie”.

Ticket… Can’t go… Have mine. JESUS CHRIST! I fumbled under the sofa where the blueish object had dropped. It was a ticket. Standing. The English FA Cup Final. Tottenham Hotspur v Manchester City. YEEEESSS!

I spent the evening customising a pair of jeans with Spurs graffiti and an enormous Spurs cockerel. I wore them for my paper round at 6am next morning, prompting the comedian who ran the newsagents to observe ‘You’ve got yer cock hanging out.’ I went to Wembley with my quartered cap and my silk flag, I sang ‘Spurs are on their way to Wembley’ down the microphone of the bloke from Piccadilly Radio on Wembley way, I sang and cheered and left in a state of confusion when the game finished in a draw.

I went back to Muswell Hill and met my mates, talked excitedly about the day, and had a fight with a West Ham fan in a biker’s jacket with Adam and the Ants Tippexed on to it after an argument in the Wimpy bar. Over Coke and burgers, me, Annie and John arranged to meet early next morning to get tickets for the replay, and at 4am they knocked on my door and we started to walk to Tottenham.

We reached the Fishmongers Arms on Jolly Butcher’s Hill in Wood Green at about 5am when a police van drew up alongside. “You lot going to Tottenham?” said the copper in the front. When we said yes he told us to jump in the back and we got a lift the rest of the way. The British police are the best in the world I thought (although I had second thoughts three years later during the miners’ strike).

We queued through the night, having joined when the line stretched all the way around the ground and back down Park Lane towards Northumberland Park. It was a wild night with hung over fans swapping stories and the bloke behind us reading bloodcurdling horror tales from a dog-eared pulp fiction volume he produced from one of the many pockets in his trousers.

We made the window with a few hundred tickets to spare, we went back to Wembley for the replay, we saw the best Cup Final ever and the best Cup Final goal ever, we celebrated long into the night and I don’t know how we got home from Wembley. But I never do.

That night cemented my attachment to Spurs. How could it not? That team is still my team, those two finals the highlights of my life at the time and, I now realise, the symbolic crossing of the line from young boy to young adult. I got streetwise, I began to realise who I was.

Even though the following season saw my attendance tail off as the necessity of having a Saturday job and the distractions of girls and gigs kicked in, I still kept in touch with the results, the team news, everything Tottenham. Who I supported was one of the first things people knew about me. The foundations laid then eventually brought me back even more regularly than ever, and brought me, for better or for worse, to where I am today.

But I never thanked Julie, Julie who started it all. Typical teenage boy, self-interested, attention all on the immediate and not on the bigger picture. And, if truth be told, the teenage boys’ awkwardness about having a penfriend, especially a female one, also played its part. It seems unbelievably ungrateful now that I look back, but it was what I did. So why do I bring it up after all these years?

Partly to illustrate, in this age of maximising profit potential, hard commercial decisions. international rounds, membership tiers, talk of the football family and all the other corporate, patronising bull****, what football can really mean and really do. And partly in the hope that, somewhere out there, Julie who was a nurse in Oxford and a Spurs season ticket holder in 1981 will get to read this and finally hear what I should have said all those years ago. Thank you so much for your generous act. And please get in touch so I can buy you a drink.

galinka

Getting me all excited for my first Wembley final trip with Spurs on Sunday.

A winning one i hope:D

KingdomYid

So wish i was going, but enjoy yourselves and cheer our boys on to victory COYS