INTERNATIONAL WEEK
Djed Spence Got the England Cap and the Story Got Buried
Three of our academy boys wore the armband for their countries over the break, and somehow the only thing the national desks wanted to talk about was whether the new Nike template suits our keeper's calves. I am sick of watching our kids write the story in real time and then having to dig the story back out of the bin a day later. Spence did not just get a cap. He got a cap the system was not supposed to hand him, and the way it has been buried is the most Tottenham thing that has happened to me in years.
The cap nobody read past the first paragraph
On Friday night, in a friendly that nobody outside of the actual stadium was asked to care about, Djed Spence started at left wing back for England. Not the Under-21s. Not the B team. The senior side, in red and white, at Wembley, against the team ranked sixth in the world. I want to lay out what actually happened because the reporting on it has been a disgrace, and because the moment matters more than the people who decided to skip past it seem to realise.
Spence played 71 minutes. He completed 28 of his 31 pass attempts. He won four of his six duels. He put two crosses into the box and one of them was the kind of ball that makes a centre forward weep with gratitude, a left-footed, outside-of-the-boot, dipping delivery that the new number nine could only head wide. He did not give the ball away in his own half once. He did not get beaten by his man. He did not, at any point, look like a player who had been promoted three divisions beyond where the league table suggests he belongs.
He looked like a Spurs player. The trouble is that nobody in the press box wanted to write about a Spurs player being good, because the entire running order for the weekend had already been built around someone else's hair and someone else's interview about his new dog, and a clean, deserving, technically outstanding England debut by a lad who grew up two stops on the Overground from White Hart Lane was never going to be the headline. So the headline was the haircut, and the second headline was the dog, and Spence got a paragraph at the bottom of a long piece about the future of the left back position, and even in that paragraph the writer found space to remind us that "Spurs are bottom of the table" as if that sentence had anything to do with the way he played on Friday night.
I have been a Tottenham fan since 1996. I have watched us win cups, lose cups, lose leagues we were never in, get top four by accident, get top four by design, and get top four by goal difference on the last day of the season. I have watched the academy get praised, ignored, rebuilt, and quietly disrespected by a recruitment department that kept buying players the academy had already produced. None of that prepared me for the strange, specific hurt of watching our boy, on the biggest stage, do the job properly, and then having to read a column about someone else's dog.
What the cap actually means, and why it is being kept from you
Let me explain what an England senior cap represents in October 2026, because I do not think the people writing the paragraphs understand what they are looking at. England do not give out senior caps as a thank-you for a good Under-21 tournament. They do not hand them out because the manager likes the player. They do not hand them out as a softener for a bad loss in a qualifier. They hand them out when the scouting department, the coaching staff, the performance analysis team and the senior manager have all agreed, on the record, that this player is one of the four or five best in the country at his position right now.
Spence plays left wing back for Tottenham. In the same squad, available for selection on the night, England had two of the most capped left backs in the country's recent history, and one of the brightest young left backs in Europe, who plays in the Champions League every week and cost more than the new Tottenham training ground. All three of those players were fit. All three were in the squad. None of them started. Spence did. That is not a story about "rotation". That is a story about a player who has done something that, three months ago, the same press pack was telling us was impossible.
Three months ago the story was that he could not defend. Three months ago the story was that his crossing was inconsistent. Three months ago the story was that he was a one season wonder in a Forest shirt who had been exposed by anyone who watched more than ten minutes of him at Genoa. I read all of those stories. I read them at 2am on a Wednesday because I cannot sleep when we are bottom. I am not going to name the writers, because naming them is the kind of grudge the algorithm rewards, and I am above the algorithm this week. But I want them to know that I read them. And I want them to know that the player they wrote off has more senior caps than any of them have column inches about him, and the column inches are not coming back.
That is the story that should be on the front of every Tottenham section of every paper this morning. Instead the story is the haircut, the dog, and whether the new training kit makes the bench look "too busy". I have made peace with the fact that our club is a source of amusement to people who do not watch us play. What I have not made peace with is the idea that one of our own, on a night when he earned something that cannot be taken away from him, is being denied his moment by editors who do not know what a wing back is.
De Zerbi, the only person at the club who seems to understand what he has
Roberto De Zerbi named Spence in his first XI of the season. Not his second. Not his third. His first. The same Roberto De Zerbi who, two months before, had been asked in a press conference whether the academy was a distraction, and who had replied, in a way that made the room go very quiet, that "distraction is the word you use when you don't know what you are looking at". He then played Spence from minute one at the Amex, a stadium Spence had not won in his life, against a Brighton side built on positional fouling, and Spence played well enough that the away end started a new song about him by the hour mark.
That is the man in charge. That is the man who has watched Spence train every day, in the same way he watched Yves Bissouma come back from a loan at Brighton and become a central midfielder, in the way he watched Marc Cucurella go from a player nobody trusted to a player no manager in the country would sell. De Zerbi does not work in hype. He does not work in narrative. He works in what the player does on a Tuesday morning against the B team, and the rest of us are welcome to keep up. He made the call on Spence, and the England staff agreed with him within six weeks. If you want a single, clean explanation for why we are still in this league and still in this fight despite the worst run of results we have had in my time watching the club, you are looking at it.
And here is the part that the press has decided not to write. The same week Spence was captaining England Under-21s into the next round of their own competition, three other Spurs academy players were named in the senior squads of their national teams. Three. In one international window. While we are bottom of the Premier League. While we are being treated by the press as a cautionary tale. Three boys, all under 22, all on a first team wage or below, all now senior internationals in the same fortnight. The academy has done this. Not the owners. Not the recruitment department. Not the commercial team. The academy, the staff who run it, and the manager who has been brave enough to keep picking them when the league table screamed at him to pick someone else.
Why the press will never give it to you straight
I have a theory about why the story has been buried, and it is not a flattering one. The story of a Tottenham academy player earning an England cap on merit does not fit the running narrative about us, which for the last 18 months has been one long op ed about how the club is in free fall, how the model is broken, how the project is dead, how the new stadium has eaten the soul of the place, and how the only fix is a firesale and a reset. That narrative is a business. People sell columns on the back of it. People sell advertising on the back of it. People get promoted into the Sunday Times on the back of it. You do not interrupt a cash flow narrative with a paragraph that says, actually, one of the players you have been writing off for the last year might be quite good.
So the paragraph does not appear. The paragraph gets edited down to one sentence. The one sentence gets pushed below a story about the haircut. The story about the haircut gets pushed below a story about the dog. The story about the dog gets pushed below a story about whether the manager should be sacked. By the time the Spurs fan reaches the bottom of the page, the news that one of their own has played 71 minutes for England and looked like he had been doing it for ten years has been compressed into a single, dead, three word line. "Spence featured." That is what the file will say. That is what will end up on the database. That is what the next writer will pull when they want to write the lazy piece about the squad in November. "Spence featured." The system is not lying to you. It is just not bothering to tell the truth.
I have been writing this blog long enough to know the difference between a story that has been killed and a story that was never born. This one was born. I watched it. I watched the cross, I watched the defensive header in his own box, I watched the throw-in routine with the coach that he had clearly been told to do in the dressing room, I watched the team huddle at half time where he was the one doing the talking, in a 71 minute appearance where he was not the captain and not the most senior player and was still the one doing the talking. Then I went online, and the story was the dog.
What we do with it, before the next round takes it away
I am not going to pretend that one cap changes the table. We are bottom. We are bottom and we have been bottom for longer than the table is designed to show, and on Saturday we have to play a team in form, at home, in a fixture that we have lost more than we have won since the new stadium opened. The cap does not help us on Saturday. The cap does not save anyone from being two nil down at half time. The cap does not turn a defensive mistake into a save, or a missed chance into a goal, or a refereeing decision into a fair one. I am a long enough in the tooth Spurs fan to know that the news cycle and the pitch are two completely different things, and the press will use the cap to feel good about us for a week and then go back to writing the firesale column on Monday morning.
What the cap does is give us something the table cannot take. It gives the next boy in the academy a name to point at, on the wall, in a frame. It gives the next boy a name to point at when the loan offers come in, when the agent calls, when the parent gets nervous, when the boy himself wonders if he is wasting his time. It gives the club a name to put in front of the new recruits in the summer, when the new recruits ask, with that polite little smile, whether the academy is actually a route into the first team or whether it is just a press department. It gives De Zerbi a data point in his next meeting with the board, when the board suggests that the policy of playing academy players during a relegation run is "a little romantic".
It also gives me, and I do not say this lightly, a story I am proud to put on this site. I started this blog because I was tired of reading the same piece about us every Monday, in the same voice, by the same kind of person, for the same kind of reader. I started it because I thought the people who actually go to the games, who actually watch the Under-21s on a Tuesday night in Stevenage, who actually know what a Spence cross looks like when it lands right, deserved a writer who would put the story back in the right place. The story of an academy left wing back earning an England cap on merit, in a week when his club is bottom of the league, is a Tottenham story. It is the Tottenham story. It is the only Tottenham story this week that should exist, and I have written it, and the haircut piece is not on this site.