Beef Bagel

I don’t know how rare it is out here but parking two minutes walk from the stadium last night was a real novelty - exciting it may not have been but then neither was the game.

The half dozen Tottenham fans in the away section were dwarfed by the rest of us who’d bought our tickets separately and were sitting in a self made section of our own along with a scattering of Hapoel fans, who spent most of the 90 minutes with their faces in their hands.

“Our team this year is bullshit,” was how a Hapoel friend of The Bagel’s put it when he arrived just in time to have missed the second goal. If you thought teams in England had problems holding on to their players when the giants of the game come calling, then imagine how it feels to support a minnow of a club in a gold fish bowl of a league. Six of Hapoel’s starting XI from last season were poached by European clubs paying more money and offering better football. For the majority of footballers, the Ligat ha’Al (quite literally ‘the Premier League’) is simply a shop window for the continent and if you ever thought our board made some rash decisions, last year’s Hapoel manager was sacked after a respectable fourth place finish for absolutely no reason whatsoever. There’s less belief amongst the red half of Tel Aviv than there is around the Lane right now.

Now, if there was any ever doubt that we have a strong Jewish supporter base than it was blasted out of my head last night. There’s something hilarious about a Holsten shirt topped off with a kippah and a voice shouting “Yid Army!” but there were 100% Yiddos as far as the eye can see. It took a while for the team to notice that the majority of the song wasn’t coming from the fans behind the goal but after several rounds of “England’s No.1, England’s England’s No.1″ Robbo and the boys got the idea.

Golders Green must have been like a ghost town as the English Jews mixed with both Israeli supporters and good handful of British ex-pats who were thrilled that their beloved Tottenham had come to the Holy Land at last. We even started singing Jewish folk songs much to the amusement of the Hapoel faithful but most of all it made my night to see the Pita Bread at his first Spurs encounter singing his heart out to Tottenham tunes as he picked them up. It made The Bagel proud.

On the pitch of course it was boring as rather turgid affair from two clubs that just aren’t playing footy right now. The minute Hapoel went down to 10 men the home team gave up and we just spent the rest of the game trying to walk the ball into the net. The frustration was clear when Jermaine Defoe skyed one into the crowd with five minutes to go from a bad position because he simply hadn’t had a shot for the 30 minutes or so he’d been on the field.

The saving grace of the show as far as I was concerned was finally watching Prince Kevin play a little ball and bugger me, he’s good. He doesn’t work quite as hard as JJ but he’s confident on the ball and he threads a decent pass - a short range Michael Carrick but it’s early days to be damning him with such titles as “the next Pele etc”.

When we finally got back from the game I found this in my inbox from my cousin working over at the Hilton…

…(that isn’t her by the way) but great, tell me now when they’ve already gone!

Pure.

The Bagel.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Bagel News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.