A perfectly rational dislike of Spurs!

Growing up in southern Ireland I was the only WestHam fan at my school. In fact I was the only WestHam fan I knew apart from my dad. Being from Cork, there has long been a strong history of support for ManU, Liverpool, Arsenal and Everton. They regularly came to Cork to play pre season games at Flower Lodge against Cork Celtic and Cork Hibs. This meant that my mates when I was a kid tended to support "bigger and more successful teams" than West Ham.

Yeah I got a lot of good natured mickey taking from my mates about how good their teams were but it was just that, good natured. When I would call round my friends house to watch football, their dads would see my West Ham jersey and say things like "WestHam always play good football" or talk about the great players we had produced. They respected the club and what it stood for.

I have followed West Ham all my life, I have travelled big distances to watch them play and as these trips are often at short notice, I have on many occasion stood amongst the home fans at away games and with the away supporters at Upton Park.
Of all the fans I have ever met and shared a conversation or a joke with, none of them have felt the need to try and tell me that their club is bigger than WestHam, none except Spurs fans.

Now when you're a kid it's natural to take an interest in the clubs your friends support, I would often watch their teams play as football was a pretty rare thing on television and West Ham didn't tend to figure much in the games that were shown. Over the years I would keep an eye out for the results of these teams. I never really cared if they won or not, unless the result affected West Ham in some way. Now I never knew a Spurs fan growing up so I never cared how they did.

I still don't. I have never checked to see how they have done, I have never watched a Spurs game unless it was against us. My first trip to Upton Park was New Year's Eve 1983 to watch West Ham beat spurs 4-1, so if anything I should have a sort of a soft spot for them as it was the perfect first trip to Upton Park.

For a long time as a football fan I couldn't care less about Spurs or their fans. I have never been to White Hart Lane; to begin with, this was if I was going to make a trip to London I would prefer to wait till I could go to see a home game. Now though I don't go as I refuse to contribute even the price of a ticket to their club. I have never met a Spurs fan who didn't start a conversation by telling me how much bigger their club was than West Ham. Personally I don't care, I love my club, I love what it stands for, I love its history, its tradition and its fans.

I know every football fan feels the same way about their club and I respect that but when the only way you can support your club is by trying to put others down it annoys me. Every summer its the same thing, we have to listen to idiotic Spurs fans logging on to Hammers sites to inform us that the latest bunch of overpriced mercenaries they have bought are better than any players we have. They feel obliged to tell us that this is the season they will crack the top 4. They boast about how their latest recruit from the manager of the month club is the one to mastermind their title push. Then withing a few months they are calling for the manager's head and slagging off their players as being useless.

Again I wouldn't care but through all of this they still want to tell us how they are a big club. Constantly bleating on and on about being a big club doesn't make you one though!

This isn't just directed at us, its at all clubs, at all fans. Any response from other fans is immediately called anti semitic or jealousy. As you have seen from previous threads, they are very quick to sink to racist comments themselves. I am a tolerant guy, I don't care what race, colour or creed a person is. To me a person is a person, you can agree with me or not, you can like me or not, I don't care. I have a very good life, a great family and fantastic friends. I don't hate people, I really don't, but over the years my dislike of Spurs fans has grown and like a bucket that slowly fills, eventually it overflowed into hatred. I actually don't like feeling like this, I think its counter productive to hate anyone. You end up wasting your energy on hating them. I am annoyed at myself for allowing myself be dragged to a point where I feel this way.

I remember some particularly insulting posts on WestHam forums when they signed Dos Santos last summer. Even by their own high standards, the smugness they displayed was incredible, hailing him the greatest young player in the world, a player only they were big enough to tempt away from Barcelona, a player who would lead their assault on the top 4, a player who would spark their title tilt. Where is he now? On loan at Ipswich! Spurs is a cesspit of a club, it sucks players in and discards them. The fans build them up to anyone who will listen and tears them down quicker than anyone else. Yes its frustrating when a player doesn't meet the standards you want for your club, yes every club has a player who the fans don't take to, but none with the regularity and ferocity of Spurs fans.

I am fed up with them infesting this blog (Blog Admin Interjection here! I welcome the contributions of the Tottenham fans!). The last two articles I submitted had nothing to do with Spurs in anyway shape or form yet their fans were on here looking for someway to make it about them. Its small man's syndrome, empty vessels make the most noise, any nuumber of penis deficiency jokes and even now, as I am writing this, I can hear the responses slagging me off from Spurs fans.

As always they will respond with typical smugness and arrogance, they will say its jealousy on my part but its not, I really don't care what happens to Spurs, they will say that they beat us twice this year and they did, but we lost to other teams, some of them twice, and I don't hate them or their fans. They will say they are a big club and I will point out they are not. The thing that bothers me most is that I cannot find a reason to not feel this way, things like Hillsborough makes me realise that football is only a game at the end of the day and its not worth a single human life. I hope, I truly hope, that this article brings out some of the decent Spurs fans, that it separates them from the vocal minority who have turned every other football fan against their club. I hope they find a voice to speak out, not retaliate. That may be a bit much given the way this article is written but please don't give me reasons to reinforce the way I am feeling; make me re-examine it, make me think again, make me see you as decent football fans. You cannot for even a moment fail to accept a large part of the responsibility of why other fans feel the way they do about you.

A West Ham fan wrote a book once called "An Irrational Hatred of Luton"; maybe I should have titled this "A perfectly rational hatred of Spurs".

By Celtic Hammer