Priorities. Got yours in order? Is each day for you a slick march through the to do list, striking tasks one by one, progress to your goals assured? Each week and month slotting cleanly into the broader scheme, one that means the five-year plan can’t fail.
No? If you’re idly reading this on Wednesday morning, I can’t imagine your life is so rigid. But then again if you are on the way to the Europa League final, perhaps the reading of every scrap concerned with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is your priority, in which case congratulations, keep at it, you’re doing a fantastic job.
Personally, I find it near impossible to figure out how to prioritise anything in life. Except that if something must happen soon, then I seem to prioritise anything else that might possibly be around to do.
Even the dishwasher, or fixing the broken toilet roll thingy. In the end the decision is generally made for me by the cruel march of time. The deadline arrives, it must be done.
It’s irritating. But it is also true that for most of us it is hard to easily tell what should – or should not – be prioritised to make our lives complete.
Not so if you’re a football club. Their priority is to win. And like many with the resources, but more painfully, perhaps, than all, if you are Tottenham Hotspur, your aim, long established, long derided, is to win silverware.
Tonight Tottenham return to a major European final for the first time since 2019. Their aim is a first European trophy in 41 years (well, 40 years 363 days actually). It is hard to express what this trophy would mean to this club. But, everything.
Mauricio Pochettino is held in such high regard by Spurs supporters not just for that mad, beautiful Champions League run – in a season without signings – but for his decency and his commitment to treating the ambitions of Tottenham fans with respect.
I will always love Poch, and whenever I see him making flirty little comments about the fanbase and the club, my Spurs group chats light up. We miss him still.
But one area where he perhaps underestimated the fans’ desire was in the yearning for a cup. He prioritised the league over going deep in domestic cup competitions, and we were rewarded – but never got to kick out the trophy cabinet mothballs or earn a rebuttal to the jokes.
Ange Postecoglou understands this. Iron-clad self-belief can seem frightening up close, but his claim ‘I always win something in my second year’ is not just a (correct) boast, it is also a statement of intent and a source of pride and comfort to his squad: we will get there, it is ordained.
He cannot know what will come to pass in Bilbao tonight. But that established refrain means we ride on confidence rather than desperation. Yes, despite it all.
Clickbait chumps have demanded that the established bonus for winning the Europa League – a place in the Champions League – be stripped from either Tottenham or Manchester United because of their laughable positions in the Premier League table.
And for both sets of fans this year much domestic football has been a humiliating grind.
But Postecoglou has prioritised. I’m not trying to claim the league form is a deliberate trade, but he looked at what was available to him, identified the tasks ahead and had to choose. He chose right.
And because the Europa League winner does earn Champions League football, sorry Keysy, tonight makes an irrelevance of the league finish. The Premier League form is not even really a compromise, except to the suffering of my eyes.
Win tonight and no one can deny Spurs’ season is better than that of repeat league runners-up Arsenal.
And this is the difference between football as a job and football as a hobby. No one is rationing fans’ word count or energy resources. It’s perfectly fine to spend the whole season bemoaning Ange’s lack of nous and then gloat ad nauseam if the cup is ours. Because practical realities mean nothing. It’s like promising 0% immigration to the UK from Trump’s golden elevator, rather than running the country.
There is a plan, which this team and this manager have my utmost respect for making, whether or not it plays out tonight in Spurs’ favour.
See you in the Champions League next season, suckers.
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