Let us never speak of Tottenham’s ‘successful mess’ again

Matt Stead
Tottenham v Everton

I can’t be sure, but I think I built Milton Keynes on an early version of SimCity. All those compulsively straight roads and well-zoned commercial areas certainly remind me of something. My lack of imagination perhaps. Maybe even a lack of friends.

A normal town develops organically. It spreads logically out from industry centre points and, in most places, the result is something which – in theory – makes little sense. In fact, almost every mid-sized town in Britain
is a mess of overlapping architecture, bad traffic planning and industrial decline. Barely half a century old, Milton Keynes isn’t like that. It has no real history and it hasn’t had to rebuild after any wars. Walk the streets here and you can almost feel the strokes of the architect’s pencil: shops – here, houses – there, schools and greenery – somewhere else. Everything is logically placed and positioned.

Stadium MK is a good walk from the town. It’s a three-mile hike, but an easy one: just follow the well-trodden cycle paths and footways, cross over and under a couple of dual-carriageways, and walk through some light forestry. Most people come here determined to hate it. Me too, actually. This place has a reputation and its football club is associated with the British game’s most notorious act of treachery. Take that walk, though, and you find your resolve melting ever so slightly. It’s nice, pleasant – like walking across the manicured landscape of a model train set.

But it was only possible to avoid the evening’s bizarre frame for so long. Tottenham’s failure to ready the successor to White Hart Lane is having far-reaching consequences. With Wembley unavailable and Watford’s offer to host this League Cup tie declined, Spurs chose to send their supporters an hour out of London on a weeknight. Here, to Pete Winkleman’s Death Star. It’s a bold move. Relations between the club and its fans are fractious
at the moment, the legacy of an idle summer and manipulative ticket pricing, and in that context this feels like a middle-finger.

Maybe not a deliberate one, but still the sort of low-IQ blunder that football clubs make far too often. The inconvenience is one thing, the act of being here is quite another; whether it threatened their chances of progress or not, one suspects that a healthy percentage of the Tottenham fanbase would rather have headed to Watford for the evening. It may have been fourteen years since Winkleman transplanted football into this part of the world, but it’s also been 32 since that reactor exploded at Chernobyl; in both cases, there’s an exclusion zone for a reason.

The deeper irritation, though, is in knowing that Spurs should already be home. No matter what lengths the club go to create a sense of familiarity or how many banners and insignias they hang in foreign stadiums, their suitcases aren’t going to get any lighter now. But to see Danny Blanchflower’s famous quote decorating this ground is something else entirely.

By the time the game started, around a thousand MK Dons season ticket holders have crept into the upper tier above the Watford fans. Add another curious theme to the evening: displacement, irritation, and a curious voyeurism. The natives looked down silently throughout as the two sets of fans trade their chants, sulk and scream. There’s certainly a metaphor somewhere in there and, even by that point of evening, everyone here knew that, decades from now, this fixture will provide some cheap anecdote for whomever’s writing football’s history in 2050.

“…and that was also the season in which, bizarrely, Tottenham decided to…”

Yes, this is going to take some living down.

Here’s a chilling thought though: this is the kind of situation which some very powerful people are actually encouraging. As revenues increase and clubs become ever more greedy, the shadow of a Super League continues to grow. To that small army of charmless bureaucrats, the International Champions Cup mob, clubs playing in their community is just a quaint ideal. When Arsenal are playing in Tampa and Manchester United are flying in to Taiwan three times a year, maybe Tottenham and Watford playing in Milton Keynes will seem wonderfully nostalgic.

On the pitch, it was all quite listless – as if even the players didn’t quite know how to behave in that climate. Dele Alli, possibly the only person in the entire stadium completely at ease, danced down the touchline early and, later, Lucas Moura and Erik Lamela each enjoyed brief flourishes. Down the other end, Marc Navarro thundered a long-ranger just over Paulo Gazzaniga’s crossbar and Isaac Success showed signs of rediscovering his La Liga form. When half-time arrived, Lee Mason’s whistle was met with near silence, just the sound of thousands of people scuttling towards the concourse.

Almost immediately from the restart, Success broke away and scored. It was what the game needed for the sake of its rhythm, but it also reminded everyone that there was a match to win. Even if the games were played on the surface of the moon, losing to Watford twice in a month was an annotation this season could definitely do without.

The goal, at least, seemed to needle the Tottenham end into a more orthodox irritation. Mauricio Pochettino wasted little time in introducing Mousa Dembele and Son Heung-min, reminding everyone of just how shallow this squad is. Fernando Llorente followed shortly after and, again, everyone was left wondering how long it will be until Harry Kane breaks for good.

Plenty of fans made this trip, there were over 20,000 in the ground, but whatever open-mindedness brought them here quickly began to fade away. Spurs were stodgy and blunt, without Christian Eriksen and his miracle angles they spent most of the night playing up to the Watford box and then into the cul-de-sacs around it.

But then a spike and the one moment this night was potentially always good for: Alli burst into the box and was hauled down. Penalty. He stepped up, he scored, and his name boomed around his home town. On an evening which felt wrong from the start, that was very right – and curiously affecting. There was even some movement up in the gallery, as the home fans looked down on their favourite son and finest export.

Tottenham even took the lead shortly after and, briefly, all was forgotten. They countered quickly through Winks and Dembele, before Lamela artfully scooped the ball past Heurelho Gomes. It was a catharsis of sorts, but one which Watford quickly snatched away: Capoue levelling after a heavy deflection to send the game to penalties.

Spurs persevere. Three nerveless penalties crash into Gomes’ net, Gazzaniga saves twice down to his right, and Alli is left alone on the spot, in front of the Watford fans but underneath his own. He scores. Of course.

Tottenham offended the Gods on Wednesday night, cheaply surrendering a lead to ten men while trespassing on football’s cursed burial ground. Really, it was the most egregious affront to karma. There’s tempting fate and then there’s inviting the darkest spirits to do their absolute worst. Somehow, Spurs survived.

Pochettino was gracious afterwards. He began his press-conference by thanking the town of Milton Keynes and the club for hosting his side. Rightly, because the staff at Stadium MK were helpful and welcoming and, whatever the origin story here, they were just here doing their jobs and doing them well. He also spoke about Alli, the decision to award him the captaincy for the evening, and what that meant to him. He was pleased, happy, relieved to be another step removed from that losing run and into the next round.

Stripped of its context, this was a fun night. A midweek knockout game with four goals, three of them late, and a penalty shootout which sent most of the travelling fans home happy. That journey is the problem though: supporters will happily slog from one end of the country to the next, but some trips they shouldn’t be asked to make. Tottenham may have been left with no choice in this decision, but they invited that conundrum on themselves.

Really, this was only a successful mess. An Apollo 13 of a sporting mission. A night we should never talk of again.

Seb Stafford-Bloor – follow him on Twitter