Football Daily | Tottenham Hotspur: to boo or not to boo, that is the question

5 hours ago 5

THE TEMPLE OF GLOOM

If anything, Guglielmo Vicario almost certainly wasn’t booed enough. That was the view of one Tottenham Hotspur fan Football Daily heard venting on the wireless this morning, as he made the not unreasonable point that for an annual season ticket outlay of £1,400 a year, he expects to see his team’s goalkeeper demonstrate basic common sense by hoofing the ball into the sanctuary of a nearby stand while under pressure after a rush of blood to the head led to him charging out of his penalty area like a headless chicken. Conveying the impression that he would have happily followed Vicario home and spent Saturday night booing loudly through the letterbox of the Italian’s front door if he didn’t already have other plans, the caller was dismissive of the notion that Spurs’ fans relentlessly booing their own players after they make mistakes was unhelpful and hardly likely to boost the goalkeeper’s confidence. In his view, once Harry Wilson had capitalised on Vicario’s mistake to score a wonder-goal that put Fulham 2-0 up inside seven minutes it meant the jig was already up for Tottenham in yet another home game, so relentlessly taunting the man he held responsible felt like the most appropriate reaction.

A middle-aged man who felt compelled to use his post-match press conference to lay down clear parameters detailing when it is and is not acceptable for other adults to boo the players of the football team they support, Thomas Frank employed the kind of high-risk attacking strategynotable by its absence from his team’s playing style by criticising Spurs supporters. “They can’t be true Tottenham fans because everyone supports each other when you are on the pitch,” he fumed. “We do everything we can to perform. After, fair enough, boo, no problem. But not during. That’s unacceptable in my opinion.” While Frank is entitled to his opinion and it is one that is not entirely without merit, Spurs fans who pre-date his arrival and will still be turning up to watch their team long after he is gone are also entitled to theirs. And when the most impressive performances to have been witnessed at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in recent years have been put on by Beyoncé, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and the Minnesota Vikings, then maybe they have earned the right to boo perceived villains in the run-up to panto season, even if the resulting toxicity borne of this understandable frustration forges an uncomfortable and unhelpful disconnect between players and fans.

This us-against-them mentality was further illustrated at half-time when all 11 of Tottenham’s players assembled in the centre-circle before ambling en masse towards the tunnel in some sort of weird, choreographed show of solidarity, and again at full-time when Pedro Porro, who seemed visibly affronted by the lack of appreciation for the efforts of he and his teammates shown from the stands, appeared to criticise Lucas Bergvall for going through the motions of applauding the ingrates in question. “Football is emotions,” the Spaniard later posted on Instagram. “In football, as in life, there can always be mistakes. What I will not tolerate is hearing disrespect from the fan to my teammates, hence my frustration at the end of the game. And we will get up, we remind you six months ago everything was so bad and in the end it is not how it begins, but how it ends. To the true Spurs fans, I love you.” And deep down they love you too, Pedro. They just don’t like you very much at the moment.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“What happened in the stadium this evening [was] utterly outrageous. We offer our apologies to everyone who has been affected in any way. The safety of spectators and players has been put at risk. That is unacceptable. We emphatically distance ourselves from this misconduct. Fireworks do not belong in the stadium” – Ajax condemn fans for launching a pyro party that we’ll charitably call extreme, which led to the abandonment of their Eredivisie match against Groningen.

What can one say about the gentleman player Billy Bonds that most already do not know? Not only was he fit well into his forties but he hardly ever swore. If I have to identify one incident from his life that cements his clarity in thinking it is the fact that he refused an offer from Spurs” – Krishna Moorthy.

David Moyes likely has ruined it for all proper fitba supporters. After Friday’s Quote of the Day, Trump will likely ban Scottish residents from entering our USA USA USA” — JJ Zucal.

Send letters to [email protected]. Today’s prizeless letter o’ the day winner is … Krishna Moorthy, who wins a copy of Mary Earps: All In. It caused a bit of a stir, you may remember.

Need a Christmas gift for that special football-obsessed person in your life? Well the Big Website Bookshop has loads of great reads available. You can even just treat yourself. Get shopping here!

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Get your ears around the latest episode of Football Weekly!

BILLY BONDS (1946-2025)

As proper West Ham goes there was none more proper than Billy Bonds, the captain of two FA Cup triumphs in 1975 and 1980, the player who took the armband from Bobby Moore. Bonds played 799 matches for the Hammers, as one of Ron Greenwood’s most astute signings when arriving from Charlton in 1967. Bonds embodied the hard-bitten, working-class values of the club, a fitness fanatic who left it all out on the Upton Park pitch. He played until he was 41, later becoming manager, helming two promotion campaigns. The fallout from his 1994 departure, following a schism with his assistant, Harry Redknapp, meant Bonds, a private man, stayed in exile from West Ham for many years. Still, Hammers fans never forgot a player they voted the greatest in their history in 2018; he returned to the club in 2019 when a stand at the London Stadium was named after him. On Sunday, ahead of kick-off, Jarrod Bowen, his successor as captain, held up Bonds’ No 4 to that same stand to commemorate someone who with typical modesty, summed up his career thus: “I would’ve happily played down the local park for nothing but was fortunate enough to get paid to be a footballer.”