Psst… MLS All-Stars VS. Tottenham Hotspur

On July 29th 2015,  the MLS All-Stars team will be playing Tottenham Hotspur FC at the home of the Colorado Rapids, Dick’s Sporting Goods Park and even if no one else cares, I’m super excited.

For me this is rare opportunity to be reunited with my true love, the famous Tottenham Hotspur (ok, so the famous bit is debatable!). I moved to Denver about a year and half ago from London and I am loving life here. No more spending nine months a year in endless grey and rainy days and no more traffic filled, two-hour journeys to a work place that is only fifteen miles away.

Yes there are many things I miss from home, like a good cup of tea and decent chocolate, but these are compromises I am more than happy to make, there is only one thing I am struggling without and that is my football club.

Yes I said football, not soccer and I will continue to, so please just bare with me. I just cannot accept the American offspring of association football and rugby running off with the name, especially when it makes no sense considering how few times in American Football, a foot actually connects with the ball…. but I’ll leave that rant there, before I get too side tracked.

My connection with Tottenham goes all the way back to my childhood, growing up in a room I shared with my older brother, who had adorned the walls with images of legends such as Osvaldo Ardiles and Glenn Hoddle. Just like the majority of you, I had no idea who these people were as a child, but I grew up with an affection for them and the club even though I really didn’t care about football. Up until I was 14 years old, I liked to play football, even though I was and still am a terrible player, but I never really understood the passion that most of my friends and family had for a club or the professional game.

As a close friend of mine used to ask “ why do you care so much about how well a bunch of other people, that you don’t even know, do in a game?”. That was pretty much my attitude to it until in September 1990, my cousin more or less dragged me to my first live match.
The venue was White Hart Lane and the opponents were Hartlepool United FC, a lower division club that Spurs were expected to beat. The competition was the League Cup second round-first leg , the least valued of all the competitions that the top division clubs take part in, but none of that mattered. What I mean is, I didn’t get hooked by seeing Spurs blow Hartlepool away 5-0, or by seeing Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne, one of England’s greatest ever players and the iconic hero of England’s defeat to West Germany in the Italia 90 World Cup, scoring four of those goals (the fifth incidentally being scored by maybe an even bigger England legend in Gary Lineker).

I was hooked before the game even kicked off, in fact before I even entered the stadium. It was an evening game, something that I have come to realize always creates a special feeling at “the Lane”. The roads were crowded with thousands of Tottenham fans, there was unforgettable smell of burgers coming from the food stands while the chants of the fans could be heard over all this. It was all a bit overwhelming for a shy boy who hated crowded places.

Then all of a sudden, from amongst the shops and houses of the High Road, raised what seemed to a 14 year old boy, a behemoth of a stadium, it’s floodlights illuminating the sky.  The effect of the songs already coming from the stadium, like the song of the Sirens, luring me to a shipwreck (a quarter of a century on, there is a certain truth and irony to that statement).
Somewhere in that semi hypnotic walk to the stadium, something happened at my core and I found myself under its spell. We entered the stadium through the tiny turnstiles and made our way to the East Stand. We were only kids and this was still when stadiums still had standing areas, after the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies, but before the repercussions of these terrible events had changed the way English fans watched football forever. We were let through the crowd all the way to the front, the site from pitch side no less burnt into my memory than what I had seen outside the stadium.
There I was in this huge crowd of people, so tightly packed in that you could not physically move, but for some reason I was actually enjoying it instead of being desperate to leave. When the first goal went in, the crowd started jumping and everyone started hugging whoever they were next to, regardless of if you know that person or not. It was a magical moment that confirmed what I was already suspecting, that I had found a new home and family that would stay with me for life.

It’s a passion I cannot let go of, even though it brings more pain than joy, as I alluded to earlier.

My love for the beautiful game is a complex thing that has evolved over the years. It’s about hope and despair, tribes and rivalry, community and belonging.  It’s about the fans with their songs and the dark humor that is contained within them.

I recently had a conversation with an American friend who is a true Middlesbrough FC fan (she really has to be, Middlesbrough is not a club for glory hunters!), and I asked her how she and her now husband got hooked and why on earth would they adopt an unfashionable club like Middlesbrough?

She replied that when she was younger, she came to Middlesbrough to study. On the weekends all her friends at the university all used to go to the games, so she thought she would go along to see what it was like. She too got hooked, but her reasoning was the humor in the fans and their songs.

The humor of the British people and their football fans tends to be quite dark, often self-depreciating and usually not very politically correct. If you are not used to it, it can be quite shocking, but once you realize and understand that its all just what we would call ‘banter’, it can be very funny.

I could go into why I still love Spurs even though they ruin more weekends than they improve, but that’s another much longer story and I don’t think I have the space for it here. Maybe if this gets enough likes, I will write more articles about it, but I’m pretty sure no one cares about my mini online therapy experience.

If you get the chance, come to the game and see for yourselves the sport that is number 1 in the rest of the world, and just maybe you’ll get hooked too.

I will leave you with a quote from the great Bill Shankly, legendary Liverpool FC manager, which I think sums up how most true football fans feel about the game.

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

MLS All-Stars vs. Tottenham Hotspur

Wednesday, July 29th 2015 at 7pm

Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, 6000 Victory Way, Commerce City,  80022

Ticket prices start at $40 and can be purchased online.

*2015 AT&T MLS All-Star Week events:

From Friday July 24th 2015 through Wednesday, July 29th 2015, you can experience FREE concerts, player appearances, soccer games, and more at Skyline Park in downtown Denver and at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. For the complete schedule of events, dates and times check out the webpage.