…under a bushel

I’ve been at work today and for the first time in yonks I’ve been unable to pin my colours to the mast by wearing my Spurs shirt on a match day. (Tonight we play Sheriff Tiraspol in the Europa League.) To be fair, although I have several of said items, acquired over quite a number of years, they are not particularly flattering or even tidy. The one I’m sitting wearing now is stained down the front with years and years of stuff being spilled down it. I can’t remember when I bought this particular one but I do know that I wore it to the 1999 Worthless Cup final (League Cup), when we won 1-0 from a last gasp goal by Allan Nielsen. The game was responsible for my life-long hatred of Robbie Savage who cheated by diving to get one of our players sent off but we still managed to beat Leicester City despite being down to 10 men. That team contained the man who is now our assistant manager, Steffen Freund. We all love a player and member of the coaching staff who clearly LOVES the club at a level that’s more than just a pay packet. In the words of 1999 and to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory # “I love Steffen Freund, I know he loves me…” I know, I know, neither particularly imaginative nor tuneful!

Anyway, tonight’s shirt is old and knackered as are all of my other Spurs shirts – since I became a student, the price of a new one is prohibitively high. Here is a link to a photo of me wearing it in January 2005, when it was in considerably better condition than it is now even though that day was a bizarre ad for why goal-line technology should be introduced! Anyway, I couldn’t wear it to work because I’d not have been properly professionally dressed so I hit on a cunning plan. A plan so cunning that if you put a Spurs shirt on it it’d be Steffen Freund! I got a small and unobtrusive Spurs enamel badge and tucked it into one of the soft folds of my scarf. I could wear my colours, even though I hid my light behind a bushel, it was still lit – woo hoo.

COYS