A titanic sinking

How good’s your history? Remember anything about the year 1912?

Yeah, that boat sank, but there were lots of other interesting things happening too. Amundsen announced that he was the first person to reach the South Pole. Scott didn’t. Captain Oates announced that he was going out and that he may be some time, and indeed he has been some time, because 106 years later he has yet to come back.

March 1912 saw the first ever parachute jump from a “moving” plane. Now, my aeronautical engineering is a little rusty, but that suggests to me that previous parachutists had been daring enough to jump from about a metre up.

Elsewhere, some bloke flew somewhere non-stop, some woman flew somewhere else non-stop, and in August sodomy was legalised in France.

However, I bet that on this particular footballing weekend, most fans will associate the date with the misfortunes of one of English football’s biggest clubs, Tottenham Hotspur.

Apparently, this season is their worst start to any season since 1912. They have collected only two points from their first seven games, a tally so poor that people are even talking about Derby County in the same breath.

Admittedly, they have already had to play Chelsea, but they have also come up against such supposed relegation fodder as Wigan Athletic, Hull City and the always unpredictable Sunderland. And ironically they actually got a point from the Chelsea game.

HISTORY’S A FUNNY OLD GAME

In that 1912-1913 season that Spurs started so badly, the first division title was won by my team Sunderlandnil (this was a good seventy years before the name change, when they still played under the old name Sunderland), who had been playing glorious football for thirty-odd years.

Sunderland (as was) were so good that they also reached the FA Cup final, where they lost to Aston Villa, thus putting off the first ever league and cup double another half century until the 1960-1961 season when it was finally achieved by … Spurs.

That league title was the fifth in twenty years for Sunderland, and without any shadow of a doubt they would have been in with a shout in any European competition, had such things existed at that time. As it stands though, English football had to wait until 1963 for its first major European trophy, when the European Cup-winners’ Cup was won by … Spurs.

And the FA cup has been a happy hunting ground for Sunderland, with arguably the greatest cupset coming in the 1973 final when Stokoe’s second-division team beat the great Leeds United 1-0. Of course, the second division is a heady height indeed compared to the situation of the 1901 winners, the Southern League outfit Spurs.

It must also be said that when I was a kid growing up, before the (re-)emergence of modern greats like Manchester United and Arsenal, Spurs was THE great cup-winning side. In 1991 they won their eighth FA Cup, a record which stood for a few more years, at least.

WALKING ALONE

1912 also saw a feat achieved which was not to be repeated for another seventy-three years. Towards the end of the previous season (1911-1912) Spurs went to Anfield and won 0-1 with a fifth-minute goal from Tom Mason. They would not win there again until 1985.

The Liverpool-Spurs match had been played on the 16th March 1912, just a month before that incident with the boat, and I clearly remember the emphasis that the television and newspaper journalists placed on the coincidence of the date, talking about how the last time Spurs had beaten Liverpool at Anfield had been before the sinking of the Titanic.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

At the end of that 1912-1913 season, Spurs finished in 17th place (only the bottom two went down in those days), surviving the drop with a total of 42 of our Earth points. Since 1995, the only team to be relegated from the top flight having reached 42 points was West Ham in 2003.

Spurs travel back to Anfield on Saturday 24th May next year – the last day of the season. Will they already have crawled their way up to those 42 points, or will their fate be decided on a pitch that they still rarely win on?

For the sake of Tottenham’s fans, you would hope it was the first option, because if a club as steeped in history as Spurs goes down, it will be a titanic sinking indeed.