Last stand Spurs fired up for final White Hart Lane derby
Pull of old stadium’s last games drives title push Club finalise move to Wembley next season
Mauricio Pochettino referred to it as an “amazing energy” and a “union” and Tottenham Hotspur will go into the final north-London derby against Arsenal at White Hart Lane cresting an extraordinary run of home form and momentum.
Spurs play their penultimate match at the old stadium tomorrow – the club finally announced after a board meeting yesterday that they will take up the option of going to Wembley for a season – with Arsenal struggling to make the top four and close to finishing below their north-London rivals for the first time in 22 years.
That one-sided period led to the coining of the phrase “St Totteringham’s Day”, the annual Arsenal celebration when it is mathematically impossible for Spurs to end the season above them. It has been taken place in every campaign that Arsène Wenger has been at the club. Until now. With Arsenal 14 points behind, the run is almost over.
Pochettino professed ignorance of Arsenal’s perennnial slight – “I really don’t care about that celebration. My English is so bad I don’t read or listen too much” – but that is part of a wider argument that he has hammered home: the club need to think big. Thinking big means globally not locally and fretting not about besting your neighbours but winning the league. “You cannot say the weight of one year has the weight of 20,” Wenger said pointedly, and understandably, but there is a growing sense of a power shift.
Thinking big is also about moving into the new 61,000-seat stadium – 1,000 more than Arsenal’s ground – which is emerging alongside the old White Hart Lane, Tottenham’s home for 118 years. And while Wenger claimed it takes two years for a club to “recreate a kind of history to feel comfortable and to feel like you play at home”, Pochettino dismissed the notion that he might prefer to stay at the Lane as it is, such is his side’s formidable form there.
“No, no, no, no,” he said. “It is important to sort everything and try to move as soon as possible to Wembley and then to move again to the new stadium. The evolution you cannot stop. It is so exciting to go to play at Wembley next season and then to move to the new stadium but we cannot now regret about White Hart Lane.”
Until they do leave – and with Manchester United the final visitors on May 14, there could hardly be two better opponents to see off the old ground – there is an astonishing record to maintain, one that has established Spurs as Chelsea’s only challengers for the title and helped reduce that lead at the top to just four points with five matches to play. Never mind consigning St Totteringham’s Day to the past, if Spurs could leave White Hart Lane with their first league title since 1960-61, that would be an unprecedented farewell.
When clubs approach the end of their time at a stadium, their team appear to draw special strength from the imminent farewell, as West Ham United found at Upton Park last season and Pochettino himself experienced as a player at Espanyol. They left their ground of 74 years, the Sarria, in 1996-97 and beat Barcelona in the final Catalan derby there in one of the greatest days in the club’s modern history.
Spurs go into tomorrow’s game on a run of 15 wins in a row at the Lane – 12 in the league, three in the FA Cup – having scored 49 goals, conceding just nine, and having ended Chelsea’s winning streak in January.
The club can feel a sense of history in their campaign, a sense that every game is a landmark. “We are playing from the beginning of the season as if it’s the last game at White Hart Lane – the atmosphere, the players, the fans, everyone behaved with amazing energy. You can feel that,” Pochettino enthused. “Our fans are so excited, and our players, too. I think that feeling, that energy that our fans translate to the team, is amazing. And it is key, to push you and help you to give your best.”
It had, he said, united supporters with players. “I think the team plays exciting football,” Pochettino added. “The fans are completely involved with the team, they feel very close to the team. And I think we can build that relationship; that is great for the club. I think it’s fantastic. That collaboration . . . I think that is a fantastic union, that can only benefit the club.”
Pochettino added: “It’s true that emotion will be involved [tomorrow], more than maybe in other games. But it’s a good thing that the team learns a lot, they know that football is emotion; you play with emotion.
“You cannot ignore that it is a derby, and all that means, for us, for the fans. We are not only playing a derby, we are playing for another big thing, that is to be alive and be in the race until the end of the season, trying to win the Premier League.”
Although Danny Rose has returned to training from a knee injury he is not expected to be fit for the derby, while Spurs will assess Mousa Dembélé’s ankle. Arsenal rate Laurent Koscielny as “60-40” to play because of his knee problem. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is fit, however.
There will be a farewell ceremony at the Manchester United game on May 14, while White Hart Lane season ticket-holders will be given the chance to purchase their plastic seat before the stadium is demolished.