Straining Relations

It can be tough for a Greek boy in London. As if following Spurs wasn’t traumatic enough, your extraction gives you almost as many boyhood clubs as Robbie Keane, meaning you get three times as many teams to worry about as everyone else. A few years ago, Spurs were drawn against Anorthosis from Cyprus, who I try and see whenever I’m over there. On Thursday it was Panathinaikos uniting and splitting the family at the same time.

You might say a draw would be the best possible result for the sake of maintaining family relations – like the one in Larnaca in 2007 when the tie was already won – but on Thursday night, Spurs managed to make that draw as infuriating as possible. This is one that should have been all over well before the end, giving us the opportunity to take off a few of the big guns. Instead, many of us decided to have that rest during the game. To be honest, I’m surprised we played such a strong side, even though this was, on paper, one of the hardest games in the group. Maybe a team containing more youngsters would have been more likely to put everything into getting the win, rather than apparently trying to do enough while saving themselves for the weekend. In the end, without the win or the rest, we didn’t get the best of either world.

The equaliser, as unlikely as it was, provided a microcosm of our second half malaise, Caulker hesitating and Daws undoing the good work of his goal by allowing the striker to ghost past him. It’s all very well knowing you’re the better side, but proving it is something else. If you want to coast and save yourself for the challenges ahead, at least win the damn game first. Add the fact that we’d beaten Man Utd only days before and it’s typical Tottenham.

At least it keeps family relations on an even keel until the meeting at the Lane, when we’ll all be wishing each other well and resuming our unflinching support for each other’s domestic teams as soon as hostilities are over. In the meantime, you can only hope we saved enough energy for the visit of Villa on Sunday.