Grumpy Oldie Man

So why on earth did I sacrifice my honeymoon to it?

My wife, with whom I have been closer than ever since she summoned the common sense to put several counties between her and the erstwhile marital home, steered us down memory lane not long ago.

‘Do you remember what you said when we’d been married a matter of weeks,’ Becca tenderly mused, ‘and I asked what you’d do if my funeral coincided with Spurs playing in the FA Cup Final?’

Unusually (see below), I did recall. I said that, while a funeral is a movable feast, I wouldn’t fancy my chances of persuading the Football Association to shift the match. But if for some strange reason I couldn’t reschedule the interment, I would – and here I cannot overstate my reluctance – be unable to attend.

Even before that exchange, she knew what she’d done. The honeymoon took us to a Shaker inn in rural Massachusetts that was charming in every way other than its lack of cable TV.

On the last day of the 1991 Ryder Cup, I checked us out and into a grubby motel room that did offer the service, and inveigled her to cross an eight-line highway on foot to fetch Bourbon and Big Macs.

We needn’t linger on the honeymoon finale at the then newly opened but now sadly closed Trump Taj Mahal (it takes a very stable genius to go bust with a casino) in Atlantic City. But after a typically triumphant spell at the blackjack table, I had to beg 50 cents off a bellboy to get us through the New Jersey Turnpike en route to Newark Airport.

The above is intended not solely to express my wonderment that, as a co-habitee at least, this saintly woman endured 21 years before she shrugged off the bonds of holy matrimony. Establishing the derangement of my passion for sport in general, and

Tottenham in particular, may contextualise the ague of shock caused by recent news.

That it broke during the first televised live debate between the two prospective prime ministers in no way helped. One soul-crushing experience in an hour is a nuisance. A pair of them feels like a biblical plague. Where, I caught myself wondering, are the locusts?

Anyway, the news concerned the sacking by Spurs chairman Daniel Levy of beloved manager Mauricio Pocchetino (Poch to us fans; Pocahontas to my mother), and the appointment in his stead of José Mourinho.

There may be a dash of hypocrisy in railing against this union as arguably the least engaging alliance known to humanity since Jacob Rees-mogg palled up with Boris Johnson, because I once united them together myself.

Messrs Levy (no 56) and Mourinho (no 11) are yoked in You Cannot Be

Serious, my 2010 ranking of the people and things in sport that have vexed me most.

I mention that book not in the hope that readers might identify it as an ideal Christmas present – though, if you want to show contempt for an in-law, you could do worse.

I mention it, again, to give the flavour of the horror occasioned by this development.

Mr Levy has form. He once hired George Graham, formerly of Arsenal, the north-london neighbours known to the God-fearing as ‘the scum of the earth’.

I can’t recall whether it was a reference in an Evening Standard column to that, or to another of his other recruitment outrages, that caused the thin-skinned little darling such offence. Many more times than not, I can’t recall why I opened the fridge door.

Whatever the reason, relations reached such a nadir that, eventually, if briefly, he banned me and the entire Standard from the club. In a life defined by indignities, being defended in my own paper by David Mellor stands out as a doozy.

As for Mr Mourinho, if the Portugueser’s amalgam of conceit, insolence, paranoia and stultifyingly defensive football has escaped you, my congratulations.

The most gruesome element here? Actually, it’s 5-6 the pair and take your pick.

Is it being a wretch of such essential banality and emotional inadequacy that, deep in middle age, I am rendered senseless with distress by a managerial appointment?

Or is it the certainty that, should Mourinho succeed, the loathing will morph into adoration?

This – more, even, than the two gentlemen themselves – is what I viciously resent about the game. It isn’t a game. It is a tribal religion that destroys the moral sensibilities. It makes you the sporting equivalent of a Trumpsupporting evangelical.

In this limited sense, skipping one religious rite, a funeral, for another, a final, might be less offensive than it appears – if only to the clinically insane.

In another, it makes me want to rend my internal organs in self-disgust. But the terrifying truth remains that if the Führer reincarnate found the top corner from 30 yards in added time to give us our first meaningful trophy since the year I was wed, 30,000 Wembley voices would join in a rapturous chorus of ‘One Adolf Hitler, there’s only one Adolf Hitler’.

‘Should Mourinho succeed, the loathing will morph into adoration’