“Why are we watching this again?” was the perfectly valid question my wife posed to me half way through Four Days in October, ESPN’s documentary about the Red Sox improbable come back in the 2004 ALCS.  Why, indeed, would two big Yankees fans be watching this again? It was my fault. “It’s the Tottenham fan in me that has to watch it” was my only defence.  To me, it made sense.

The fact that I’m a Yankees fan, who’s not from New York, is something that always had bothered me to some degree.  I felt akin to the legions of Manchester United fans there are across the globe, glory hunters attracted to the name and the success, but once you have your team, it’s your team.  I started following baseball with the 1996 World Series, so I didn’t have a choice of 30 teams, I had 2: Atlanta Braves or the New York Yankees.   New York, the city, had always been of interest to me, so I was drawn to them. Futhermore they were the underdogs – the Braves were the reigning World Series Champions, the Yankees hadn’t won since 1978.  A team with great history that hadn’t won anything of significance in my lifetime? Sounds like my kind of team – so I sided with the Yankees.  Of course, they won – which was great. And then again 2 years later, and in 1999, and in 2000.  It started to feel a little easy: baseball – a game where they play 162 regular season games and then the Yankees win the World Series.

I paid my dues as a fan over those first years – watching games that started at 1am in the UK and finished as dawn was breaking. Trips I made to New York incorporated when possible a trip to the Stadium for a game and I considered myself to be a “proper” fan.  Once I moved to New York, I was able to watch most the games at a reasonable hour and go to them much more regularly.  Less than 2 months after I started dating my wife, we went to our first game together and have continued to share our Yankees fandom together ever since.  However, the rivalry with the Red Sox was a sore point to me, as Boston was the team most similar to Tottenham.  Both teams were constantly beaten by their hated rivals.  Year after year, no matter how good their chances seemed, something would happen to perpetuate the underachievement.  Maybe the lack of success had lasted longer for Red Sox fans, but when you’re born in 1981 it doesn’t really make too much difference if your last title was in 1961 or 1918, it was history. Even sportswriter and Red Sox fanatic Bill Simmons saw the alliance and picked Tottenham as his Premiership team back in 2006