THIRD TIME
THE THIRD KIT FINALLY MADE IT ONTO THE PITCH
We have waited since August to see the navy strip and, the one time the club gave it to us, the referee took the game with it. Of course. I am writing this in the same tone I have written in since the season started, which is: proud, furious, accurate.
Strip of the Season, Result of Last Decade
There is a particular kind of pain reserved for football fans who are good at aesthetics and bad at results, and we have refined it. Tottenham Hotspur, 2026. We are in the top six for shirt sales, top three for away allocations, top one for away allocations that travel to Sunderland on a Tuesday, and we are seventeenth in the table. I checked. I checked again. The number did not move.
The club launched the third strip in early August, a deep navy with the faintest mint trim, and I will admit here, openly, that I bought it. Not the away. The third. I do not know what that says about me and I have stopped trying to find out. I have worn it twice to the supermarket and once to a wedding rehearsal, where my brother-in-law asked if I was going through something. I was. I am.
The strip was not worn in a competitive game until 19 October. I am aware of how absurd that sentence is. I am aware the kit was released in August. I am aware we played eleven matches in that window. I am aware that a kit is a kit and a result is a result and the two are not supposed to bleed into each other. I am aware of all of these things, and I am going to write the column anyway, because this is a blog and the blog is mine.
De Zerbi has not picked the third strip for a league game. The club has, instead, paired it with cup fixtures, where the colour clash rules work in our favour, and with European nights when the floodlights make the navy look like a photo negative. I understood the logic. I do not have to like it. We are Tottenham. Liking things is not what we do.
On Sunday, against Bournemouth, in the kind of October rain that makes the new £1.2bn stadium feel like a shipping container, the kit finally came out. The team sheet had it. The pre-match graphic had it. The lads in the away end filmed it on arrival. We were, briefly, a team with an aesthetic again.
Then the game started.
De Zerbi's Choices Were Right Until They Were Not
For 77 minutes, the manager got the game right. I want to lead with that, because we get accused of complaining without credit, and the manager has been getting more right than wrong for a month now. The shape was a 4-2-3-1 with Xavi Simons as the ten and a midfield of Bissouma and Bergvall behind him. Spence continued at right back, his ninth start in a row, his international form clearly travelling with him. The full backs were high. The wingers were inside. The full backs being high is the part that hurt later, but I will get to that.
The opener came through a route I have been begging for in this space for two months: a thrown-in to the edge of the box, a flick-on, and a Simons volley that was, briefly, the loudest thing in N17. I do not know what the away allocation was on Sunday, but every one of them was louder than the home crowd for the rest of the half. We have noticed. The club has noticed. The new ticketing tier, the one that pushed some season ticket holders into a different category for 2026-27, has been noticed.
Bournemouth equalised through a set piece that should not have stood. The foul on Vicario in the build-up was, by any reading of the laws, a foul. The VAR check lasted ninety seconds. The decision stood. I am not going to relitigate the laws of the game in this paragraph, but I will note, for the record, that the same process for a foul on Richarlison in the first half took four minutes and produced nothing. The technology is not the problem. The threshold is. The threshold is set by people who do not, on present form, like us very much.
I have made this point before. I will make it again. I am comfortable making it again.
The Red Card, The Referee, and the Strip
The sending off came in the 78th minute, and I have spent two days deciding how to write about it. Joao Palhinha, on for Bissouma, took a yellow for a tactical foul in the 61st. A second yellow came seventeen minutes later for a challenge on the halfway line that, by my count, did not include any contact with the man. I have watched it back seven times. I have slowed it to quarter speed. I have a small child and I have lost hours of my life to this and I would like them back.
De Zerbi said afterwards, with admirable restraint, that the referee had "managed the game differently in the second half." The manager is too polite to say what we are all saying, which is: the second yellow was a booking for being Spurs. Spence, earlier in the half, was booked for time-wasting after a throw-in he took quickly. Time-wasting. The throw-in he took quickly. I have asked around. None of the other managers I speak to have this in their week.
The kit, throughout this, looked magnificent. I want to put that on the record too. The navy, under floodlights, is the best kit we have worn since the 2019-20 third. The mint trim, on the cuffs, catches the eye every time a player lifts an arm to appeal. We lifted a lot of arms. The kit was not the problem. The kit has never been the problem.
The Table, The Pattern, The Kit Drawer
We are sixteenth. We are sixteenth on goal difference, ahead of Nottingham Forest and behind Brentford, and ahead of nobody we expected to be ahead of and behind nobody we expected to be behind of, which is the worst sentence I have ever written about this club and I have written a lot of sentences about this club.
The pattern is now eight matches without a win in the league. The pattern is a clean sheet drought that has stretched past 700 minutes. The pattern is Xavi Simons looking like the best player on the pitch for 60 minutes and then fading. The pattern is a transfer window that was supposed to fix the defence and instead fixed the front line. The pattern is De Zerbi, in his first Premier League job since Brighton, learning what we have always known, which is that the job is not the job. The job is the job plus the refereeing plus the fixture computer plus the injuries plus the people in the suits who pick kickoff times that suit the broadcast and not the squad.
I have written those words in different orders for two years. I will write them again.
But: the third kit is good. The third kit, finally, on the pitch, on a Sunday, in the rain, looked the part. I wore mine to the supermarket this morning. The cashier asked if I was going to a game. I said no. She said I looked like I was going to a game. I told her I was, sort of. She nodded. She is from Edmonton. She gets it.
What the Strip Was Doing While We Were Noticing
I have been thinking about why a kit matters to a club like ours, and I have come to a conclusion I did not expect, which is that it matters because the kit is the one part of the operation the club controls. The manager is the club's choice but also the league's, in a sense, because the league has a media cycle that picks favourites. The referee is not the club's. The fixture list is not the club's. The table is the table. The kit, though, is ours.
When we lose, the kit is the thing we can still pick up. When the third kit finally comes out, after eleven matches of being kept in a drawer, it is a small act of choice in a season that has not offered many. I am not going to pretend the kit scored the goal. Simons scored the goal. I am not going to pretend the kit won a free kick. The kit did not do anything except be worn, and that is, in October 2026, enough.
The club will, presumably, bring the third kit back for the cup tie against Birmingham in midweek. I will be there. I will be wearing the third kit. The cashier at the supermarket said I looked the part. The Birmingham fans, if they are reading, will have something to say about it. They always do. I will take that. I will take anything at this point that is not the table.