No better time to get it right, prove them wrong & A couple of personal memories of Spurs fans I’ve met

Hello Gooners. Hope you are all well this friday. Don’t know about you but I am super pumped up for this north london Derby. Not that I wasn’t pumped for it all these years….

..Living in a place about 200 miles from North london, it used to be pretty hard to develop that aversion for Spurs. I consider myself lucky to only have met and I’m not joking here, about 10 Spurs fans in my whole life. The aversion picked up momentum 3 years ago.

I met up with a few friends from school during the Easter holidays after we played Spurs for the last time at Highbury. One of my friends’ friend happened to be a Spurs fan. I didn’t know about this until the conversation drifted onto football. And then it kicked off (verbally). He began talking arrogantly about how Spurs were finally going to make the top 4 and how our domination was coming to an end. Well mate, its been three years and counting…

Another Spurs fan I met was on Christmas day. He was a distant relative of the family. I was wearing the 2000-2002 home shirt, the first Arsenal shirt I ever owned. So I’m feeling honoured to don the shirt of my heroes, having a lovely time with family and friends. Then suddenly someone points out (as if it needed to) that I was an Arsenal fan and that this would be interesting as he was a Spurs fan. Pretty sure that these guys don’t work for the UN by the way. For a brief moment or two the room went a bit quiet before the dude just shaked his head as if the idea of supporting Arsenal was so morally flawed and never bothered to speak to me (even though we’d never met before).

I do have a bit of sympathy for them. I mean to sing “We are the best” before every home game when they were languishing in mid-table all the time. And now they think they are Top4 material and even better than us just because they are a point behind us with the season not even half way…

Last year’s home result against them was one of the lowest points in my Arsenal supporting years so far. To talk about in any more detail is to sap any existing energy left with me. But what I can say is that result and the comments coming from the Spurs sections should be enough as a motivation tool for our lads.

As atmospheres for derby goes, it has blown hot and cold compared to other derbies in the world. Tomorrow our fans should ensure that we blow hot and the Spurs fans get the shivers.

Regarding team selections, Fabianksi is desperately unlucky as he probably would’ve played tomorrow. To throw in Almunia tomorrow with so little match practice is a bit risky. But it is the ideal opportunity for him to show his class. Rosicky’s injury is a massive blow to the balance of our side. Since he has been injured we’ve looked shaky in our last two games. Co-incidence?

Can’t speculate on what the team make up will be but I suspect it will be the same as last week. Tomorrow is too soon for Nasri to start and unlike Almunia he would have to do a lot of running at a ridiculously high tempo. Better for him to be on the bench and then be that match winner.

Spurs are missing Defoe (admittedly I player I respect for his goalscoring record), Modric and Lennon, both of who had a pretty decent outing last year at the Emirates. Bentley gets his only start this season tomorrow. £17 million, of that 7 million straight to us right? And this guy only plays against us. How sad.

I really don’t want to predict the score tomorrow, so would appreciate your thoughts on that, team selections, your experiences with Spurs fans all over the world and anything else related to this derby.

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