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Camden New Journal - THE CROW by RICHARD OSLEY & DAN CARRIER
Published: 4 October 2007
 
Spurs...‘better to fail’ aiming for the Top Four

TOP Four Tottenham summed up 125 years of its miserable, underachieving, pointless history on Monday night when they set themselves up to celebrate the club’s birthday in style but ended with a naff reunion of former ‘stars’ that was so uninspiring that the team soon found themselves 4-1 down to mediocre Aston Villa.
What a remarkably stupid event this was, ­shocking in its level of tackiness. Welcome back David Ginola, part of a genuinely exciting Newcastle team that went closish to winning the league once but just a desperate diver by the time you reached Spurs. And hello again to Nayim, famous only for scoring against Arsenal and nothing else.
You really don’t have to do much to get in the Top Four Tottenham’s Hall of Fame, do you?
They might as well have invited Ruel Fox, Ian Hendon, Joey Dominguez, Jason Dozzell and Justin Edinburgh so nobody felt left out.
Then there were the Argentina flags. The tasteless Blackburn kits. The slapstick goalkeeping from the hapless Paul Robinson (We know, Robbo, it wasn’t your fault..). The manager who didn’t know whether he was coming or going. The chairman not knowing whether the manager should be coming or going. The euphoric celebration of getting a draw in a match they should have won.What a way to run a football club.
It was a million miles away from Arsenal’s classy winning run and their carefully crafted win in Bucharest on Tuesday night.

ANOTHER week, another pathetic display.
But enough about Chelsea, lets talk Spurs.
Martin Jol is a dead man walking, I know it, you know it, he knows it, the board know it and most importantly every opposing manager and team he comes up against knows it.
But no matter what being a Spurs fan may be, one thing it never is, is boring!
Only we give you those three or four goal comebacks, those nail biting finishes, ups and downs, highs and lows; no other team in the world goes 4-1 down at home and then snatches a draw in the dying seconds.
At their high point in the match the Villa fans sarcastically gave us a rousing rendition of “happy birthday to you”. Laugh? I nearly did.
In the end, though, a Younes Kaboul belter did ensure a happy birthday, not because we need to celebrate a draw at home to Aston Villa but because the game, the performance, the drama, the excitement and the spirit perfectly embodied everything we have valued above all else in 125 glorious years.
There is no other way to finish than to allow the man, the legend Mr Bill Nicholson to summarise: “It is better to fail aiming high than to succeed aiming low. And we of Spurs have set our sights very high, so high in fact that even failure will have in it an echo of glory.”
For the gooners reading this who cannot comprehend that simple statement – stop trying – you will never get it, your column of smug, egotistical bile is on this page too.

* Gary Smith is a Spurs fan from Regent’s Park

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