I didn’t really cry until Son Heung-min was handed the trophy – the camera hadn’t cut to him enough at full time. Of all the players who look sad when they’re sad, Sonny really looks sad. Building up to the Europa League final all I could imagine was a disconsolate South Korean walking around the pitch applauding mournfully. The Harry Kane walk. His smile when shiny-shoed Aleksander Ceferin hands him the trophy broke me. Apparently the Uefa Cup weighs 15kg – the same as my three-year-old. That trophy certainly looked lighter than when young Ian demands to be carried home from the park.
As a very sleep-deprived middle-aged dad of young kids, the emotion of football back home hits a lot harder than it used to. I found myself weeping at the videos of Crystal Palace fans after the FA Cup final. Someone focused from person to person, pausing for just enough time on each of them to give you the impression that you could see the etched lines of disappointment they’d experienced over the years just evaporating into the air.
It cuts to a couple probably in their 60s. She’s in a Crystal Palace shirt, cartoon-shuddering up and down in tears, being pulled into a protective embrace by, I presume, her partner. Big grey beard, dressed like he’s off to the garden centre, he holds her close and stares into the distance. The hug unfurls and she wipes away a tear. Maybe they’d only just met – it’s a time to hug strangers – but I’d like to think these two have had a Selhurst Park routine for decades, struggling to process what was happening in front of them.
At full time in Bilbao one camera is trained on a section of the Spurs support. It focuses on an old guy, Spurs shirt over his jumper – the sensible way to dress for a summer evening game. The whistle blows and he is enveloped by a younger guy, his son you’d imagine. The camera pans left, and in and out of shot is the bald crown of a man bent double, weeping – bleating even – into his Spurs scarf.
As I wrote a few months ago after that James Tarkowski goal led one Evertonian to wave the corner flag over his head like a drunk pole vaulter, how lucky that something exists capable of liberating such happiness.
Perhaps the first column I wrote for the Guardian was about Spurs reaching the Champions League final after that breathless night in Amsterdam in 2019 – and realising in the exhausting tearful aftermath that despite having a ticket, I needed to watch the game with my dad. Who knew writing an article about loving football and your relationship with your father would resonate? If we’re honest, my dad was less bothered about the whole affair than I was.
Now 10,000 miles away in Melbourne, flying back for the game seemed a stretch. A lot of the week was stressing about finding my parents a TNT Sports login. “Eureka,” Dad WhatsApped on Wednesday afternoon. “Game tonight shown free for Virgin customers.” Perhaps the biggest hurdle overcome.
The second half consisted mainly of messages of increasing desperation at how deep the Spurs defence were getting, working out how many goals we needed before we could relax. We settled on four. “This might be a long 20 minutes.” “It’s already lasted 30.” “Agony.”
Weirdly the post-game call might have been the first which didn’t end up extolling the merits of Jimmy Greaves.
Watching from Australia at 5am, part of the emotion is clearly tangled up in a homesickness that hits you at moments when you feel like you’re in the wrong place, even if you know you’re in the right place for many more important, prosaic, life reasons.
But you could feel the reflected pride in the country. ABC breakfast radio (basically the Today programme) rang me for an interview while I was walking a pram up Northcote High Street at 8.15am. A man in full Spurs kit pushing a pram on the other side of the road cheered in my direction.
There is no objectivity here – we are all just a tapestry of our own biases – but my happiness for Ange Postecoglou is almost as great as my happiness for the club. This gruff, Greece-born Aussie is loved here for what he has achieved in the game; people (and not just football fans) are calling it the greatest achievement by an Australian coach in any sport.
He did it in the most demonstrably unequivocally un-Angeball way. Perhaps if Spurs had defended like that for a few games this season his job wouldn’t be under threat. The change from the high line, heart-stopping playing out, full-backs seemingly always out of position to this dogged, shithousing, controlled bus-parking over the final and the away games in Bodø and Frankfurt. All part of the plan, Ange claimed afterwards. It felt weirdly refreshing to see Guglielmo Vicario getting it launched and Sonny tucking in at left-back. Antonio Conte and José Mourinho would be proud.
One of the beauties of an early, early kick-off is that you can spend the whole day letting it sink in, and satiating the thirst for content. Watching the full time whistle over and over again, watching entire press conferences, actually enjoying X. The Ange biographer and Sydney Morning Herald football correspondent Vince Rugari had kept his receipts: going through the most over-the-top posts about how out of his depth Postecoglou is over the past year or so, and quoting them with increasingly smug petty satisfaction. One of the great uses of social media.
But to write off Postecoglou’s previous achievements is to write off football in Australia, in Japan, in Scotland. A man who arrived in Melbourne as a five-year-oldwith his family and nothing else … that he has ended up being managed by Ferenc Puskas, becoming a coach, winning and winning and winning and landing a European trophy is inspirational.
In the same way Palace winning the FA Cup is good for English football, Ange winning the Europa League is good for the world game. Even if he might have gone by the time you read this, I hope he stays. Yes Erik ten Hag won the FA Cup and Manchester United stayed hopeless. But Spurs aren’t United. Despite being “my big team that win things”, they don’t win things. Any trophy with Spurs should be rewarded.
A Tottenham fan called Bert messaged me on Instagram at 3.30am Spanish time with a question for the Guardian Football Weekly podcast. “Why are there no cabs in Bilbao?” A glorious image, wandering the streets, staring at anything moving that might be a taxi, finally seeing one and the light’s off and it’s full, walking again, but all the while safe in the knowledge that it has been zero days since Spurs won a trophy.
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