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Ange Postecoglou and the unwinnable game

A Tuesday night a couple of weeks ago bore witness to one of the stranger games of football I've seen.m (thus was a slightly more contemporary piece when I started writing it, but life gets in the way). It wasn't so much the match itself, a hard-fought but ultimately fairly predictable 2-0 loss for my team, Tottenham Hotspur, to the oil-money fuelled soccertainment edifice that is Manchester City, but the discourse that collected around it.

Nothing attracts hyperbole quite like football, a rolling, roiling 24/7/365 soap opera of speculation, outrage , analysis and, if all else fails, pure speculation, so the set-up for this game, where a decent result for Spurs would have handed hated local rivals Arsenal a sizeable advantage in the title race, was catnip for the various pundits, columnists, youtube channels and podcasts that cling like barnacles to the vast hulk of the Premier League.

Most of the noise centred around the sizeable contingent of Spurs fans that actively wanted to lose (most of the Very Online ones, for sure, though I noted that a lot of those in the actual stadium were still cheering good play from the boys in lilywhite). The discourse flowed, if you don't want to win, are you a proper fan? If you want to win and thus help the despised Woolwich, are you a proper fan? It signified nothing, other than that trying to treat football fans as a homogenous group is a fool's errand. But obe on which a bewildering amount of people who really should know better still embark.

As longtime readers will have picked up, I am a football fan. But not of the die-hard variety, I follow my team, I'm pleased when we win, annoyed when we lose, but it doesn't dominate my existence. I wouldn't, for example, skip a mother's day meal because they were on the telly (you'd be amazed how often this happens, Liverpool having a lot of Sunday games is one of the banes of my professional existence) but I know who some if the youth team players are, I'm fairly engaged without being fanatical. And I was a little disturbed the week after the game by the opprobrium heaped upon Spurs manager, bear like Aussie Ange Postecoglou, for getting a bit shirty at the idea he should have lost the game. Footage of him turning around and snarling "!what team are you supporting?" at one fan urging him to lose has been widely pored over, as have details of his press conference where he described the club as having "fragile foundations", at which many fans have taken umbrage, presumably because they have nothing better to do with their time,

And into the heat of this debate I should like to interject my own two penn'orth, which is that I can't imagine giving a monkey's either way. It is a long-held theory if mine that if we could find a way of channelling the passion that people have for their football teams into something that actually matters like, say, climate change (I type this during a torrential downpour in late May) or social inequality, we might get ourselves a slightly better world.

Because it doesn't really matter, in the grand scheme of things. Spurs tried in that game, they lost. Some Spurs fans are angry at them for trying, sone Arsenal fans, against all available evidence, have convinced themselves Spurs didn't try, and "robbed" then of the title.

Perhaps this absolutism is a product of this nuance-free age, where how we consume news and media means hyperbole naturally makes it to the top. Anyone who watched Spurs City would have seen a team trying their best. Anyone who watched Fury v Usyk would have seen Fury comfortably beaten, but that doesn't stop him claiming he was robbed, because it drives more clicks, the outrage machine whirls ever onwards. In the Premier League, by its very nature, everything has to be "the most". Every game has to have unfathomable amounts of significance, as an entire industry relies on people convincing themselves that this is important.

And it is, to the players and managers, it's their job. And to the fans, yes, it's your community, it's your bragging rights at work or over the dinner table, in that sense it matters. If Spurs win something next season I'll be pleased. But if you've got to the point where you're spitting abuse over the internet at a man you'll never meet or know over a game of football because its outcome was more important to a team that isn't even the one you support, I's politely suggest that you've taken leave of your senses.



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