White Hart Lane: into the mystic

For a child growing up in Suffolk in the 1970s, White Hart Lane felt like a mystical place. Just the name made it sound special. My local teams played at prosaic roads, but “White Hart Lane”? The images that name conjured up. It was a place I  knew I was going to reach one day, and I spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like when I did.

Supporting Spurs from a distance, when football didn’t have today’s saturation coverage, I relied on occasional TV highlights and radio commentaries, newspaper reports, and the programmes that I regularly ordered from the Spurs Shop.

I pored over pictures, especially older ones, studying the ground and the crowd as much as the players. Those packed terraces; the uniqueness of the Shelf; the cockerel; the curved fencing at the front of the stands; the stairs coming up from the tunnel to the pitch. I looked at the faces in the crowd, their reactions to what was happening on the pitch. I read about White Hart Lane under the lights, the European glory, glory nights. I was going to be there one day.

You took more care of us, Archibald
I found out about the architect Archibald Leitch, and the other grounds he’d designed, seeing the similarities with stands at Goodison Park and Ibrox. How many other teenagers in Suffolk were reading about Archibald Leitch?

When I was about 14, my mum took me to London on a day trip to see the usual tourist sights. But there was only one sight I wanted to see, so we found ourselves getting on a bus at Seven Sisters one sunny midweek morning. “Do you go to White Hart Lane?” I asked the conductor. “Every day of the week, love – and especially when we’re at home.”

It was a different era to club megashops and organised stadium tours. The man behind the counter in the small Spurs Shop recognised my name from my regular programme orders. Mum asked if there was any way we could see inside the ground, as we’d come all the way from Suffolk. He called out to someone, “They’ve come all this way…”

An older gent took us in through the West Stand entrance and left us on the terrace with a strict warning not to go on the pitch. I looked for all the things I’d seen in photos and on TV: the cockerel, the Shelf, the players’ entrance to the pitch. I couldn’t have been much happier if Spurs had actually been playing.

It was another couple of years before I saw a game there – Derby in 1979, Ossie’s first Spurs goals, one a volley at the Paxton end, where I was standing at the back of the terrace. I celebrated by madly waving my scarf around, felt it hit something and turned to see a policeman picking up his helmet off the ground.

Found myself in a strange town
When I later moved to London, White Hart Lane was a familiar haven in a strange city – at a time when I didn’t know anyone, the Lane was a place where that didn’t matter, and a place where I also got to know people (who I’m still going to games with).

The Shelf became my home for the most part. It’s where I stood for the 1984 UEFA Cup run – now I was part of the crowd at White Hart Lane under the lights, part of the crowd for the European glory, glory nights.

From the Shelf, I saw Maradona in a Spurs shirt; Hoddle eclipsing Cruyff; the marvellous 1987 team; Hoddle’s ludicrous dummying of the Oxford keeper for his farewell goal.

It’s also where I stayed, along with many others, for a post-match sit-in protest against plans to replace the famous terrace with executive boxes. I thought the ground would never recover from that – and it took me a few seasons to get over it – but the atmosphere at the stand-out games of the last 10 years beats a lot of my earlier memories.

As my friend and Park Lane companion Bruce says, all the changes the ground has been through – in my time, three of the stands have been completely replaced – make White Hart Lane a bit like Trigger’s broom. Right up until the last few weeks, I’ve kidded myself that this is just another ‘change’ – we’ll be coming home in a year to the same place, the same pubs, the same journey – but we know that nothing about it will be the same, really.

So Sunday’s going to be emotional and, regardless of the result, it’s going to be one more time with feeling: “We are Tottenham, super Tottenham, from the Lane.”