Today I’m going to introduce a new word. A Yiddish word. Rather appropriate as today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Which also represents possibly the last time anyone was ever happy and relieved to see the Russian army coming. And Yiddish is such a rarity now, after 6 million predominantly Yiddish speakers were murdered. Very few now speak it as a language, but a lot of the words are used because they can say so much more than English words can.

And today’s word is: tsurus. It means ‘trouble’, or ‘aggro’ or ‘problems’, but in a way that would always be accompanied by a sigh of such magnitude that the listener would never underestimate the extent of the troubles. Which, as with all Yiddish words, is very contextually dependant. So you might have a big tsurus (they’re always ‘big’, there’s no other sizes on offer) because a bunch of Cossacks just rode into your shtetl on horseback to rape and pillage, or you might have big tsurus because you’re ingroing toenail is a bit inflamed. Either way, no ‘tsurus’ can ever be overstated.

My tsurus is with my football team. Tottenham Hotspur. Who have now gone the entire slippery slope from unlucky, inconsistent, unpredictable, through awful, dire and abysmal, to tragic, WTF and today: big tsurus.

We gave up on winning the league when the season was 90 minutes old and we hadn’t beaten Leicester. (Who then went on an even more abysmal run than Spurs, only to find some minor degree of security and hope by beating us yesterday).

So it was ‘top 4’ for us then. That’ll do. Champions League next year!!, as Arsenal and Liverpool were already working out who would win and who’d be runner up.

Then top 6 as we kept losing to bottom 3 teams and our aspirations had to downgrade somewhat. Then as the losses kept coming to ‘bottom 3’ teams, two things happened. Firstly, those teams were lifted out of the bottom 3, and secondly, we plummeted to mid-table.

And now, we are where we are. There are no more bottom 3 teams to beat. We’ve ‘undertaken’ them all and appear to be fighting for a place in the relegation zone. And doing it very convincingly.

Arsenal had their own tsurus too, on Saturday. Had a man sent off. As they often do. And, as they always do, they complained like fuck about the unfairness of it. It was never a foul/free-kick/penalty/offside/whatever we’re supposed to have done. But this time, they actually had a point. Of course no refs listen to Arteta because he complains about every single decision every week. So he’s the boy who cried ‘lobo’. (That’s ‘wolf’ in Spanish, in case you only speak Yiddish). But, much as I was happy for them to go down to 10 men, I can’t see how the ref chose that colour card. There ya go. Not my tsurus. I got enough of my own.

Happy Monday

A xxxx