Scouting Report: Tottenham Hotspur

David Baddiel Will Not Like That

In consequence of being the only plain one in the family, Mary worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, and was always impatient for display. Yet she had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. A lot like Spurs really.

- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813

Due to a poisonous cocktail of happenstance, bad luck and poor life choices I happen to know an extraordinary number of Spurs fans. The archetype of course is the cab driver, making a nuisance of himself on Talksport while he runs the gauntlet of traffic lights and speed cameras on the northbound A10 at 2am on a Sunday morning, returning to the Spurs hinterlands of Cheshunt and Waltham Cross, but my researches are not restricted thus. I know Tottenham fans in all walks of life. Captains of industry, bricklayers, rent boys, those unfortunate bros who hand you paper towels in club toilets, I know them all, and they are all Spurs. And to a man, each of them is an utter, unremitting helmet.

By what design have the Lords of Football made it thus, that every Spurs fan should be afflicted by the same instability of mind, defective temper and ludicrous over-estimation of their own self worth? The answer, I fear, must lie with Arsenal. The meagre, twisted mind of the Spurs fan is forged by decades of oppression and subjugation to a near neighbour who is without question grander, superior and more successful in every possible facet. It must be mortifying. When your brother, given the same opportunities in life achieves greatness, your own miserable reflection unadorned by celebrity and acclaim will naturally become a cause of anguish and unseemly bitterness. Every small and hard-earned triumph becomes ash in the mouth of a cuckolded man. This is how it feels to be born Brian Messi, or Frank Ronaldo, or Spurs.

The situation of course is grossly antagonised by the actions of Arsene Wenger, who takes great delight in trolling the Spurs fans each summer. "What is this? Oh non! I have forgot to buy a defensive midfielder again! We will never make top 4 this season! Probably some other North London club will take our Champions League spot..."

That the Spurs fans unfailingly fall for this every year is as much credit to their enthusiasm as it is deleterious to their understanding. They are, in many respects, more to be pitied than censured. Every right-thinking football club should adopt a Spurs fan this Christmas, to show them that there is a better way to live your life, and that there is still joy to be found even in the bleak purgatory that persists below 5th.

The Manager

General Levy: He's Incredible

By some manouevre of cunning or fortune General Levy has managed to engender a reputation as a fearsome and implacable negotiator. The kind of man who shakes your hand and leaves you counting your fingers. Assuming the case is as stated we can only speculate what the fuck the original asking price was on Roberto Soldado, that this master manipulator could walk away thinking he had the better end of a £27m transfer. I doubt that the money wasted here is even compromised by 30 years of saved barber bills.

On a slightly related issue, there is a school of thought that the glistening top-dome is an irresistable aphrodisiac to ladies, the globular gateway to superior fanny. Indeed, it is only an opinion you hear expressed by pre-existing slap-merchants, but you hear it said nonetheless. I have thought about this a great deal, as my own father is in possession of a worryingly genetic-looking boiled egg, but as he himself expressed, "You will only ever attract a certain kind of woman, by looking like a dildo."

Note: There is also some other head-coach at Spurs this week. I shouldn't bother to learn his name though, if I were you. He won't last, and in any case I promise you, he hasn't bothered to learn yours.

The Cockerel

Cockerels make a lot of noise but ultimately, they don't produce any eggs*.

The other interesting thing I know about cockerels, and I'm not saying that this is necessarily common with Spurs fans, is that they exclusively partake in anal sex. I'm not even joking, this is a genuine fact! God laid a floater when he invented cockerels and designed them all gay. Not that I am opposed to gay cockerels per se, or gay anythings for that matter, but God ought to have thought it through. "Not all of them G," I should have said to God had he consulted me on this matter, "someone needs to make the babies. Maybe just make 20% of cockerels woofters, leave some cockerel cock for the chicks". But he didn't ask me. Dumbass. Luckily for God however, Charles Darwin came up with quite an elegant solution. What Charles Darwin did, right, was fix it so that girl-chickens keep their vagina in their bumhole.

Girl-chickens keeping their vagina in their bumhole is another highly interesting biological fact that I have not made up. It may be news to you however because the knowledge that all chicken porn is, biologically speaking, "D.P." is not something they teach at schools, even though it could save a lot of anguish and embarrassment in the future lives of avian gynaecologists, or whatever. They also never tell you that scrambled egg on toast is actually a hen's period served on a slab of leavened plant jizz, which it most certainly is. No wonder this country is in such a mess!

* Metaphor - ˈmɛtəfə,-fɔː/ - noun - The assertion that a subject is, on some point of comparison, the same as an otherwise unrelated object. E.g. Rooney's hair.

Player Bro-files

Emmanuel Adebayor

Sometimes, Adebayor looks like a really good player. Pace, strength, skills, he's got the lot! Other times it's like he's trolling Ron Atkinson. Inconstancy however, scores highly on the Bro-Scale, so he is our Spurs Bro Leader!

Verdict: Bro

Hugo Lloris

A slightly tough one this. I can't decide if he's more the quiet intellectual, or a kind of French pikey. His looks pull equally in each direction, I could imagine him reading Voltaire in a quiet cafe bar off the Seine, or just as easily in a trackie on a weekday hauling about an angry looking dog on a bit of string. Either way, he's not bro.

Verdict: Not Bro.

Top Wag

This sort is called Hazel O'Sullivan. She is getting rooted by Andros Townsend amongst, according to my researches (and it would be a sad thing if word were to get back to him, so say nothing about it), various others.

Townsend you should imagine is quite an unsatisfactory lover for an experienced wag like Hazel, his normal modus operandi being to dribble for a bit and then shoot widely off target. It's not much really, but at least he does it consistently. He could do it for England.