I was in the pub yesterday and got chatting with this young lad about football. He was only 19 and there with his girlfriend but it was a nice day in the beer garden and, as I was sitting on my own (just the way I like it!), he struck up a conversation with me while she went for a pee.
He was wearing a Spurs shirt, and not one of the deluded types, as he said he would be happy with a top six finish under their new manager. When I told him that I expect us to be challenging City for the title next season as long as the refs don’t fuck us over, he said that it won’t happen because City are simply too good.
When I explained that we have had three league titles stripped from our hands, and handed to City, by poor refereeing decisions since Abu Dhabi took over, he admitted he was too young to remember 2013-14 and only just remembers 2018–19 but he remembers 2021-22 clearly and used the classic “decisions even themselves out over the course of a season” defence that the naive are prone to do.
And when we got to the reasoning behind City’s domination- the fact that they can hurl unlimited amounts of money at players and agents with no repercussions whatsoever- he made a perfectly valid point- one that I have often made- in that football reflects modern society in that the rich get richer and also are seemingly above the law.
He seemed like a nice bloke but couldn’t understand that referees often decide matches and, therefore, the destination of trophies, and that City’s financial cheating rendered their accomplishments meaningless.
It is refreshing that we have so many people born in the 21st century delving into their vast levels of life experience to tell us why we’re wrong, where we went wrong, and how we should fix it.