Tottenham Flashback: That Night in the San Siro

We don’t often like to get too editorial here at Hotspur HQ but here goes: there are few more formative moments in my soccer/footballing fandom than the one in which I heard the result of Tottenham’s trip to the San Siro in October of 2010.

My infatuation with Spurs had begun barely two months earlier with the 0-0 draw with Manchester City in the opening day of the season. It wasn’t a new sport to me; I had followed the World Cups and had a vague understanding of the English game for a while, just never had a specific team to follow. Why Tottenham ended up being the one I choose is hard to figure. It helped that a good friend was a City fan and at the time I enjoyed a good troll. The fact that I knew who Peter Crouch was and that he shared my grandmother’s maiden name also, inexplicably, bonded me with the team. My well-ingrained affection for the underdog also likely played a big role.

All those things each contributed in some way to my slow descent into obsession. By October I was hooked enough that I began to resent my plans to go camping in the California desert right when the Tottenham’s biggest match yet in their inaugural Champions League campaign was to be played. My flight to Los Angeles took off right when the whistle blew for the start of Tottenham’s game against the Champions League trophy holders Inter Milan.

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I successfully remained in the dark about the game all through the deboarding process and baggage claim. By the time we got on the shuttle to the rental car lot and I had successfully tucked my phone away in my bag to stop myself from checking it, I figured I was in the clear.

Just as the shuttle bus began to turn into the lot, however, the radio crackled with highlights from the day’s playoff baseball games, the latest injury reports from the NFL, basketball preseason, et cetera. And then, right at the very end, a name came through the static: Gareth Bale.

My ears burned. I strained to listen but the report ended before I could justify believing what I heard was anything more than a product of my exhausted, soccer-starved imagination.

Even in the moment this all seemed improbably dramatic. How could some American radio station piped through a rental car shuttle be speaking about my Tottenham, my Gareth Bale? Of what concern in any part of America was some soccer game being played thousands upon thousands of miles away? I had half convinced myself that it was a waking dream by the time I pulled my phone out and searched for the app I had deleted from my homescreen in fear of absent-mindedly pulling it up before I could return home.

There it was. Inter 4, Tottenham 3. Heurelho Gomes had been sent off in the eight minute for a stupid challenge and the hosts had piled on the goals. Then, in the 52nd minute and not letting up to the final whistle, Gareth Bale became Gareth Bale.

I didn’t see the highlights until much later, and I don’t include them here because obviously that’s not how I remember the game. I remember reading report after report on my phone, each one detailing how the then-21-year-old former left-back had lit up the hallowed ground of the San Siro and made a fool out of Maicon and the entire Inter team. I read about the first goal hit off the post, the second scored in the heart attack palpitations of the final minute of regulation, the stutter step of the third taken in stoppage time.

Forgive the hyperbole: at that moment I felt as if an infatuation had finally whispered I love you to me and, exhausted from holding back the torrent of my emotions for so long, I had screamed it right back.

Before and since there have been plenty of numbers tallied, plenty of money spent, plenty of miles run, but by my reckoning there is no better example of what makes Tottenham great than Bale’s grace in chasing that game. I didn’t know the quote until much, much later, but words often attributed to Bill Nicholson say it best: “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.”

It was the moment I knew Tottenham – and soccer as a whole – were not just a passing hobby for me. It was never going to settle into the background of my life, becoming something I would watch or engage with only when I had the spare time. No, it was from that night on to be a perpetuation obsession, one that I have carried with me to this day.

Tottenham took on Inter at home two weeks later. Bale didn’t score but he set up two of the goals in the 3-1 win. I watched that game live and, I have to admit, it somehow wasn’t the same. It was great, of course, and I was thrilled at the result. But it didn’t hit me the way that 4-3 loss did. Nor has any other Tottenham game I’ve watched since. I’ve been chasing that game for five years and, should I be afforded the time, will be for another fifty.

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