Nightmare at The London Stadium?

I’m no fan of horror films – whether jump scares or psychological they generally scare the crap out of me so I just avoid the genre. Perhaps the last horror I did watch was Saw – probably just the first one but I’ve seen bits of subsequent films and the concept of these moral dilemma’s that the victims have to endure has intrigued me. 

This coming weekend us Spurs fans have our very own dystopian dilemma when Arsenal travel to West Ham on Sunday. A win for West Ham significantly changes the dynamic at the bottom of the table and suddenly makes our position perilous. I’d go as far as to say that should West Ham win against Arsenal – thus knocking us back into the bottom three before we play an in-form, confident Leeds side on Monday night – I’d then back them to take four points from their last two games, which might just be too much for us despite the hugely promising win at Villa. 

Should Arsenal win it goes a long way to securing our Premier League status and avoiding the greatest humiliation in our history in 49 years (recency bias aside – relegation in 2026 would be the biggest failure in the club’s entire history coupled with the social media ‘bantersphere’ meaning a football Armageddon for all of us). An away win also virtually secures them the League Title – their first in 22 years. 

As a grown man in my mid-40s with a family, children and a responsible job, another team winning the league title really shouldn’t be a factor. It should be Tottenham or no-one but I know I’m not alone in waking in a cold sweat considering how unbearable it will be to have to walk past so many smug Goons - often of similar age and standing to me – walking around in replica kit with ‘Champions 26’ on the back. As a side note this does seem to be a peculiar trend to see middle-aged men of a Goon persuasion, more so than any other club, peacocking around in public in modern replica shirts?  

In the style of SAW perhaps this is now our ultimate moral dilemma, born from the Man City episode almost exactly two years ago. On that evening the stakes weren’t quite so high for us. We’d stumbled into the last two games of the season with a chance of qualifying for the Champions League via the fourth place spot but there was very little momentum and it felt like most of us, as fans, had checked out for the season anyway. In my mind, qualifying for the Champions League had long ceased to be the utopian achievement it had felt when we first got there in 2010. 

In the build up to that game I felt desperately sorry for Ange; he was absolutely right to question why any supporter (including me) would actively want to see their team lose to spite their rivals. If I’m honest, I didn’t know what to feel that night. In the end instinct took over; when Sonny raced through, I fully expected him to slot past Ortega and give us a late equaliser but I wanted him to miss and felt relief when his unusually tame effort was saved. I’m 100% certain Sonny did everything he could to score. Every member of the team and coaching staff wanted us to win that evening, even if a seeming majority of fans didn’t. 

I was never demonstrative either beforehand, during or after that game. Being content for us to lose (that’s a better framing than ‘wanted us to lose’), it irked me that I wasn’t mature enough to ignore petty local rivalry for the greater good of my team. 

This collective anathema has seemingly been picked up on by the football gods – or the version of the antagonist from SAW - and now is the basis for the conclusion to this season.  Is it karma? Is this a repeat of 1999 (there – I got in a 90s reference!) where we all cheered Man Utd on against us on the final day of the season to deny Arsenal the title, only to suffer the era-defining indignity of seeing Campbell cross north London two years later?

Only you will know how you will deal with this moral dilemma – there really is no perfect outcome come full-time at the London Stadium…unless West Ham win but we then go on to win our remaining three games and stay up anyway? 

Footnote: had Sonny scored and we’d qualified for the 24/25 Champions League we wouldn’t have won the Europa League and experienced Bilbao, the huge relief of the trophy drought ending and the euphoric parade.

Gareth Dace is the author of "Hot Shot Tottenham" and "Is Gascoigne Going To Have a Crack?"