Fading echoes

At the end of the "Blanchflower century," the club must remember who Tottenham Hotspur were and what we must aspire to become again.

At dinner last night, my son and I raised our glasses…milk in his, water in mine…to the memory of Danny Blanchflower, born in Belfast 100 years ago yesterday. Moments before, I had read two famous quotes. The first was his most famous one:

“The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. It is about doing things in style and with a flourish…”

The second is one popularly attributed to his great manager Bill Nicholson, though more accurately, it seems to be a quote Blanchflower “ascribed” to his manager: “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.”

I couldn’t even get through reading that first quote without my voice breaking. And I’m getting choked up again just thinking about it.

On one level, this is all preposterous. I only began supporting Tottenham Hotspur in 2010, which was also the first time I’d even heard of Tottenham Hotspur. By then, of course, Danny had long been dead.

Yet I love the man.

He was born a year before my father, whose people were Scot-Irish and came to America from Northern Ireland. Like my son, Blanchflower was a right-sided defender. And perhaps a bit like me with my English Ph.D., he had a poetic heart, one that spoke of reaching for glory even in defeat—something I find particularly fascinating.

Watching Danny play must have been glorious. He won the FWA Footballer of the Year award twice and was nominated three times for the Ballon d’Or.

And he just happened to have been captain of our club in its most glorious time, when we became the first team to win England’s top-flight and the FA Cup in 1960-61—the first time anyone had done so that century…

and went on to won the 1963 UEFA Cup Winner’s Cup, the first European trophy an English side had won.

So imagine what it is to feel a connection to this long-dead man. To put this in terms of another sport: it’d be like a kid in Kansas City learning about Buck O’Neil for the first time…or a guy in Green Bay watching clips of Paul Hornung.

Or maybe it’s more than that. Perhaps it’s more akin to finding out you’re related to both Ernest Hemingway and Ernie Banks.

For if you are Spurs, Danny is in our lineage. For he is the player who defines the Camelot-like era of the ‘60s. And his words on glory speak to what I love about sport. It’s not the prize itself but the reaching for it. The journey not the destination. It’s the story more than the score.

The Dani Rojas character on Ted Lasso tells us again and again that “Futbol is life.” But as Mr. Blanchflower might say, that is a fallacy. Football is nothing of the kind. Football is merely football. But the stories we take from the sport are ones we can apply to life.

So when I read Danny’s words at the table last night, I thought not just about the beauty of these words or club’s glorious past or about our lack of flourish today—even though I was surely thinking about all this. I thought, too, about the privileged position I occupy as a parent who can share life lessons from a club legend: that life’s greatest successes come not on the scoreboard, but from the stories we take from the field, no matter what kind of field that may be.

And as I write this, I realize my greatest memory from last season’s Europa League championship campaign was not anything that happened on the pitch but, rather, the memory of collapsing into my son’s embrace at the final whistles, screaming of joy, and hearing him echo my cries back to me. For me, there will be everlasting glory in that story.

***

It was, of course, painfully poignant that what should have been a celebratory day of our Blanchflower century became mired in the final, turgid display of Spurs under Thomas Frank. I’d originally planned to write about the match and about the Dane’s brief tenure overall.

For now, I’ll let others do so. Instead, I write of our history: of glory and the echo of glory.

We find our club at a time when those echoes are fading. Club management gives lip service to the club’s attacking “DNA,” yet they never seem to learn anything from their clumsy attempts at reverse genetics.

And they seem to have forgotten all about aiming for glory. And though we find ourselves in the gutter at this moment in our club’s history, it is from the gutter that the quest for glory begins.

So as THFC begin this second century after the birth of its greatest captain, we must demand the club resume its quest. We must remind them glory is not found in the negative football that confounds supporters and players alike. Let the lot across town pursue that style of play and whatever it may bring them. We must regain the feeling we had in Ange’s first ten matches (before the injuries set in) and in Pochettino’s second and third seasons (before the sportswashers set in). The feeling we had after Bale at the San Siro and Dele at Selhurst Park and Lucas’s left foot at the Johan Cruijff Arena.

And if the bottom-liners and bottom feeders at the top don’t share this goal with us, it’s time for them to be sacked, too.

For as the short film We Are Tottenham Hotspur says: “We are about the glory of the game…the flick, the trick, the thirty-yard free kick.” And we must reach once again for our Camelot, so that even falling short of it will once again sound the echo of glory.