Everything Is Tottenham: injury crisis solutions, post-trophy disaster, Lamela on ice and more | OneFootball

Regular readers will know that our entire worldview can be summed up thusly: Everything Is Football.

But more specifically: Everything Is Tottenham. The entire world, this ridiculous timeline on which we’ve been cursed to exist, everything that happens in the universe is far more easily understood once you accept this one simple truth into your hearts: Lads, it’s Tottenham.

It is the history of the Tottenham. It is Spursy. It is and always has been and always will be the force that guides the universe.

Yet in recent days we’ve found ourselves more convinced than ever about the fundamental truth of this phenomenon. If anything, for me, Clive, the wider world of sport has become too Spurs in recent weeks.

Don’t believe us? Consider just how extraordinarily Spurs all these things are. And these examples are all drawn from just from the last few days and weeks.

England egg-chasers’ Six Nations campaign

This is incredibly Spurs-coded. They even wear white kits for goodness’ sake. They’re not even trying to hide it. They’re mocking us.

But consider every detail of England’s disastrous campaign. The arrogance following an early win. The musing about whether it was really fair or dignified that they should have to play all these sh*tty little teams that are clearly beneath them.

Then getting absolutely pumped for several games in a row while committing stupid acts of self-sabotage under a floundering coach whose grasp of the plot has grown wafer-thin.

And then follow all that with a brave but futile final stand right at the very end which still ends in defeat and only serves as an irritating reminder that there really was no need to be quite so sh*t for quite so long before that.

Oh, and every other team in the competition spent the whole time laughing at them and they entirely deserved it.

It couldn’t be more Spurs if it was conceding a long-range effort that the goalkeeper should probably have done better with.

Kent County Cricket Club’s attempts to solve an injury crisis

We all grudgingly accept that for all Spurs’ self-owns and self-inflicted catastrophe this season that they have also been struck low by a second successive season of staggering injury problems.

They were without 13 senior players for the trip to Anfield last weekend, and that was no outlier. Something happens to players when they get to Spurs. Dominic Solanke had barely missed a game in his professional career but is now injured at least as often as not.

Conor Gallagher had famously never missed a game at all through injury or illness before joining Spurs. He now, according to Igor Tudor, has asthma and is struggling to breathe. There is a compelling case that Spurs should be shut down on public health grounds, never mind just on the long-established ‘being sh*t’ grounds.

But wait, there might be a solution from the cerebral and thoughtful world of cricket. As the weather improves and thoughts turn to pleasant summer evenings accompanied by the sound of leather on stump, Kent have taken drastic measures in an attempt to alleviate their own long and nightmarish run of bad luck on the ol’ injury front.

They’ve got a faith healer in to ward off evil spirits. There’s no way Spurs haven’t already tried that, but there would surely be no harm in trying again.

Also, we put it to you, dear reader, that getting a faith healer in to sort out your injury crisis and then when for some reason everyone takes the p*ss putting out a statement saying ‘Actually, it was a non-denominational geopathic surveyor’ and thinking that would make everyone stop taking the p*ss, is the single most Spurs thing ever attempted by any organisation that is not in fact Spurs.

Lamela on ice

We’re sure we really don’t need to explain how and why this is powerfully Spurs-coded.

We don’t know which of the universe’s scriptwriters went ‘What if we put Erik Lamela in ice skates?’ but we would like to buy them a drink.

Now what we know about ice hockey can be written in large type on the back of a small stamp, but we have also had reports that this particular Lamela enthusiast is a divisive sort of player, largely considered to be annoying and a bit crap but beloved by his loyal fans for his propensity to perform this kind of daftness.

Perfect.

This chap is now our favourite ice-hockeyist just as Lamela is our favourite footballer of all time. It’s not even close, by the way. People like to pretend there’s still a GOAT debate to be had in football, but until anyone else can say the sentence ‘I won a Puskas Award for the second-best rabona goal of my career’ we consider the matter closed.

McLaren’s F1 travails

We’re willing for now to put aside our concerns about whether brum-brums are actually a sport, just because here the parallels are so spooky.

Having last year won meaningful silverware for the first time since 2008 (the F1 constructors’ championship rightly considered about as significant as an Audi Cup or International Champions Cup), it has all gone dramatically and catastrophically wrong in double-quick time this time around.

This season, they’ve spent most of the time losing before they’ve even begun, beset by so many problems and struggles that most of the time they can’t even get a functioning unit to the start line.

Annoyingly, they have retained the services of their Australian for another season which slightly spoils things, but he has at least not been involved in any actual action yet so it kind of works. Shut up, it kind of works.

Ludvig Aberg’s Players Championship collapse

The Swede spent three-and-a-half rounds positioning himself at the head of the leaderboard at Sawgrass, and then slapped one straight in the water to end up with a bogey. That’s just a bit of misfortune. Can happen to anyone, that.

Where the Spursiness kicks in here is by then doing exactly the same on the very next hole, thus turning a minor setback into an existential crisis.

Two disastrous dampness-based errors in quick succession to ruin all the undeniably impressive work that had been done in the tournament up to that point? Where have we heard that before? Aberg did at least manage to finish things off. Because you can’t really substitute golfers, can you?