The 1994-95 season is the first that I have actual, tangible memories of football from. Oddly, neither are actually of the football action itself but instead both are recalling the emotions I felt sitting on the upper stairs (I lived in a townhouse with 2 separate sets of stairs) reacting to formative moments in my footballing life.


I shall deal with the latter first – it is the sadder of the two and not the focus of this blog post, but I feel I cannot cover my experience of being a football fan without touching on it.

Spurs have made the FA Cup semi-final (how they reached there shall be covered shortly), but being a naive, young Tottenham fan my expectations were that obviously this match would be another victory on course to a successful conclusion to the season.

Spurs ended up being on the wrong end of a semi-final demolition job, losing 4-1.

The only two things that I can actually remember about this match are:

  1. Anders Limpar played a key role in Everton’s victory, and I recall that my early indoctrination as a Spurs fan had already drilled into me the dislike of anything Arsenal-related, and so upon discovering that Spurs’ conqueror-in-chief was an ex-Arsenal player, it twisted the knife of defeat with the utmost cruelty.
  2. Being utterly inconsolable on the stairs, crying uncontrollably after the full-time whistle had gone.

This was my strongest early memory as a Spurs fan. What an introduction…

It is possibly as much an inherited memory as an experiential one that my Dad has implanted (I think because it is one of his favourite moments as a Tottenham fan), but the earlier memory of this same season involves a certain “Rocket” Ronny Rosenthal.

The scene of this event is a 5th round replay in the same FA-Cup run, and Tottenham are 2-0 down. Enter the aforementioned “Rocket” – a man most famous not for any footballing prowess but an open-goal miss that has gone down in history and has become synonymous with his name.

Entering the fray as part of a tactical reshuffle by the excellently coiffed Tottenham manager Gerry Francis, Rosenthal scored 2 goals in 2 minutes to level the tie. He then proceeds to hit the go-ahead goal in extra time.

For Ronny’s own sake, I would like to be able to propagate a virus throughout the world that automatically plays these goals whenever someone attempts to watch a replay of his most infamous miss.

The first was an instinctive striker’s finish where Ronny sneaks in at the near post ahead of a close marker and flicks the ball with aplomb into the opposite corner.

The second is probably even better, with Ronny receiving the ball on the right touchline before cutting inside, dribbling past two defenders and hitting and “Rocket” (I had to do it) into the right-side of the goal.


The third he picks up the ball on the opposite touchline. This time he takes a more direct route towards goal, and with the space opening up he cuts across the ball – sending it arcing away from football’s most famous wobbly-legged Zimbabwean (Bruce Grobbelaar) and into the top-left corner.

Please just watch these highlights, take a look at the pure unbridled joy on Ronny’s face, and please remember this whenever you are confronted with anyone wanting to mock this legend of a footballer for his previous transgressions.

So, back to my own personal memory of this momentous occasion. The reason why I suggested that this is as much an inherited memory as one of my own is that I don’t believe I actually saw any of these goals going in at the time.

What I can remember is being frustrated at having to go to bed while I could still vaguely hear my dad watching the match in the living room one floor below. I can vividly remember creeping out of my room to sit in my pyjamas as the top of the stairs, where I could just make out the excited tones of the commentator, and most definitely hear the cries of joy from my dad as 2-0 became 2-1, became 2-2 and the rest is history. My dad’s excited recollection of events, and the many times we rewatched the recorded highlights has surely fleshed out the memories that I have of this occasion. The illicit listening of the game feels like an affirmation that I caught the footballing bug hard from an early age, while the eventual shared experience with my Dad in the excitement of it presaged the many joyous moments that we would spend together in this footballing life.