Hoddle may still pull up short

13 April 2012

Where were you when you heard The News? I was in Kentish Town Baths, doing my twice-weekly thrashing up and down. Just starting my 20th length, boaster, when this bloke in the next lane banged me on the arm. Pool rage, I thought. Better ignore it. He does look younger and fitter than me.

It happened again on my next length. I had my goggles on, cheapo pair, which was why I hadn't recognised him.

"HODDLE'S COMING!" he shouted at me. It was Fred, a friend of my son's, bringing me the good news.

I sang to myself in the showers. I beamed all the way home. What excellent timing. Just what we wanted. With the Blessed Hoddle in charge, we're bound to stuff Arsenal in the semis.

In the Eighties, I used to arrive at White Hart Lane early, just to see Glenn tie his bootlaces. He never did anything clumsily. His long passing was as good as Beckham's, hitting the ball 40 yards from apparently impossible positions, yet still managing to find his man. Unlike Beckham, he scored lots of goals.

He had a habit of playing with his shorts pulled up high, to reveal several acres of lily-white thigh. As poet laureate Andrew Motion might have written, if he'd been any good at rhyming.

There is a present-day player who has started to display this engaging habit - Fabien Barthez of Man Utd. Glenn's shorts were worn high throughout a match. Barthez only tends to pull up the right leg at moments of stress, such as waiting for a corner, or after a goalmouth scramble.

I can't remember him doing it when he played for France. Perhaps he's taken it up as a replacement activity, now that he no longer gets kissed pre-match on his baldy bonce. Is it a masonic signal, a coquettish gesture aimed at his girlfriend, part of a code to warn off some Asian betting syndicate or simply because he's easing his balls which have got caught up in his jockstrap?

With Glenn, giving us the benefit of his lovely thighs was a bit girlish, hence the fact that opposing fans referred to him as Glenda. He could be a bit of a blouse, disappearing when things got tough, or pirouetting on the ball once too many times and falling over. He played 53 times for England, but I have a faint memory of him never being truly established, never demonstrating on a world stage all the talents we knew he had. Or is my memory failing? I've found a quote from someone writing in 1982 about England's World Cup chances.

"Hoddle is the player named most frequently by the other players as the player they admire. So why at the age of 24 has he got only eight caps? Why is it still uncertain if he will make the final 11?"

Now who wrote those words? It should say at the end of the cutting. Goodness, it was me. Have I really been chuntering on that long?

All Spurs supporters love Glenn, even those who never saw him in the flesh. It's part of the romance, the self-delusion, about our glorious past, teams filled with heroes, who will return, quite soon. We've only been waiting 40 years. It must be soon.

And what a game to return for, Sunday's FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal at Old Trafford.

At the Arsenal-Spurs league game last week at Highbury, the toughest game for me every season as I sit there, among the Arsenal season ticket holders, trying to be invisible, the man next to me started rubbishing Glenn's management career. "Glenda's done f*** all as a manager."

Awful the language one has to put up with at Arsenal. I said Glenn had taken Swindon into the Premiership, got Southampton to a healthy position. "In other words, f*** all," said my friend.

Yes, but this is what he's been waiting for, I replied. This is Glenn's destiny. Home is the Hoddle, home from the seas. "Don't give me that Robert Louis Stevenson shit," said my educated friend. "It's players Spurs need, not poetry."

How true. Hoddle's arrival has been a triumph for the supporters. It proves we do have power, even in this money mad, TV age. At Spurs for 20 years, they've been shouting "Out, out, out", from Irving 'Where's the Money?' Scholar to Alan Sugar and George Graham.

Now we have got our wish. The person we all loved, Our Hero, has returned to lead us to the promised land. And I'm scared stiff. Not just about Sunday but the next five years of Glenn's contract.

If it doesn't work this time, that's it. End of romance. No more delusions. Who else will we have to blame? All we'll be able to shout is something you've never heard anywhere before: "Supporters - OUT, OUT, OUT".

Hoddle may still pull up short

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