Went out for dinner last night. With some friends. So when Harry Kane scored the first goal for Spurs, a beautiful, stunning wonderstrike, I immediately called our local fish’n’chip shop to book a table. Then Lucas Moura hit a second. So I cancelled the chippie and booked El Vaquero instead. Seemed only fair. But then Son scored. No, that doesn’t do it justice. Son scored the goal of the season, possibly the decade, maybe even ‘the best goal of forever!!!!!’, not wishing to overstate things. So I cancelled the Brazilian place and immediately booked Asian Fusion. Just glad that it hadn’t been scored by Jan Vertongen or we’d be eating fucking waffles again. If we don’t score, we don’t eat.

And just casually, in conversation with Scary Mark, the talk moved over to that of Tottenham. The victorious, the glorious, the supercalafragilisticexpialidotious, at least for the last few weeks, except on Wednesday. And, inevitably, to our new manager. The ‘special’, the modest, the grinning, smiling, ever-charming Jose Morinho. In reply to my notifying Scary Mark of Jose’s appointment, he replied with but one word: ‘toxic!’ And that sentiment was felt by all Spurs fans. We’d LOVED Pochettino, almost as much for being the nicest person in the universe as for the amazing way he’d transformed our club. And everyone hates Jose because he’s… Jose. If not for the arrogance, the conceit, the tantrums, the mood-swings, the petulance, the… downright Portugueseness of the man, then for the Jose ‘style’. The parking of buses.

But he came. And we won. And not just won, but won in a Spurs way. With style, with panache, with the kind of beautiful football which had been absent in our lives since January. Other than when watching fucking Liverpool on tv. But we leaked goals. Then we won again. Same thing, beautiful but flawed. Then we lost. And then came Burnley yesterday. The synthesis of all our dreams. And Jose has Alli playing back at his best. Kane more lethal. Sissoko scoring two goals in two weeks when previously he’d scored none in 2 years. A clean sheet. The defence strong. And Son. The only player who gave his all even through the ‘dark days’. Who only gives 100% at all times. And does it with a constant smile.

So is Jose winning us over? Is that disloyalty to Pochettino? Can we be that fickle? To abandon the man we loved deeply for this… interloper. This mercenary pretender to the throne of king Mauricio?

And yet Spurs were ‘broken’. Not working. Since January we’d struggled terribly. Made to look acceptable by the shabby form of other teams.

That’s why God invented Daniel Levy. The heartless one. A pure businessman who looks at things with objectivity and dispassionate calculation. And it didn’t take an Einstein to know things were wrong. But it took a Levy to do something he knew would be unpopular with every single Spurs fan, even though none of us were happy. So, coldly and clinically, he excised the problem and implanted a new, working, fully-functioning organ into the patient. And we thought him to be evil and morally wrong to do so.

But it was, as can be seen by all, the right thing to do. For the club. Levy’s only concern. We didn’t get a vote. As usual.

So do we ‘love’ Jose? No. But we do love what he’s doing at our club. That must be half way there, surely??

Happy Days

A xxxx