The Jerilderie Letter

★★★★★ An irreverent look at Spurs' dramatic year
★★★★★ Stats, Features, Quizzes and Twitter followers!

“It is better to fail aiming high than to succeed aiming low. And we of Spurs have set our sights very high, so high in fact that even failure will have in it an echo of glory.” – Bill Nicholson

Welcome to the 100% Unofficial Tottenham Hotspur annual 2013. An irreverent look at our favourite team, celebrating the good and the great about one of the most dramatic periods in Spurs' long and proud history, and having some fun along the way.

“Bill never let us forget that we were out there to entertain the public.”

This mentality has remained even with the modern side of today. After the 4-3 defeat to Inter Milan at the San Siro, there were no glum faces. It felt like a victory. Knowing that each player had given their all in that second half despite being down to ten men, despite being 4-0 down away to the European Champions, was enough to give real pride to the fans. Remember OLAY OLAY OLAY!

Includes:

• FEATURE: Kyle Walker

• Season Review: Premier League

• Season Review: Cup competitions

• Player Profiles (1)

• FEATURE: Gareth Bale

• Player Profiles (2)

• Impossibly Difficult Spurs Quiz

• Spurs on Twitter

• Andre Villas-Boas

• New Armour

• Prospects

• Goals of the season

• And lots more!

So long as the public are entertained, long will Bill’s philosophy continue. We hope you enjoy this 100% Unofficial! Tottenham Hotspur Annual 2013.

Come on you Spurs!

In 1882 three schoolboys from the Hotspur Cricket Club decided that playing football in the winter might be a good way to keep fit. So, after a meeting under a lamp post about 100 yards from where White Hart Lane stands today, they formed Hotspur Football Club. Players paid sixpence to join up, and the club played its first match in a dark blue strip with a red 'H' badge.

Now Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is one of the greatest names in the greatest games of all, with an illustrious history of footballing firsts including having become the first non-league team to win the FA Cup, the first team of the modern era to win the league and cup Double and the first British team to win a European trophy.

Beyond that, the club has a proud tradition of ambition, excellence and of playing football the right way, 'the Spurs Way'. It is an unspoken but implicit prerequisite that the teams who pull on the famous lilywhite shirts will always endeavour to entertain and exhilarate the club's fans with fast, quick-passing, attacking football. "The game," as the great Spurs captain Danny Blanchflower so succinctly put it, "is about glory".

In The Biography of Tottenham Hotspur, renowned author Julie Welch – who has lilywhite and blue blood coursing through her veins – brilliantly deconstructs the history of the club to get to the very heart and soul of Tottenham Hotspur. How did Spurs develop their unique and precious character? Who were the key individuals and what were the key events that shaped the modern Spurs?

Packed with wonderful stories from the formation of the club to the present day, and the memories of numerous legendary players, managers, supporters and other key figures, The Biography of Tottenham Hotspur brings the rich and glorious history of Spurs to life from a new and fascinating perspective.

With Steve Perryman, Ossie Ardiles, Ricky Villa, Tony Galvin, Paul Miller, Graham Roberts, Garry Brooke, Tony Parkes, George Mazzon and Peter Shreeve.They were the last great Spurs team. A tight-knit group of London lads laced with Latin creativity, Yorkshire grit and Scottish genius, playing for a few hundred quid a week and the glory of putting on the Tottenham shirt. They won two FA Cups and a UEFA Cup together, they went drinking together and they appeared on Top of the Pops together. They were The Boys From White Hart Lane.Renowned Tottenham authors Martin Cloake and Adam Powley have tracked down their childhood heroes to produce a book of wonderfully vivid and candid interviews with ten members of the team including Steve Perryman, Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa.It is a book that not only opens the doors of the White Hart Lane dressing room during this iconic period for the club, but takes the reader back in time to a football world before Premier League, multi-billionaire foreign owners and millionaire reserve players sitting on the bench in yellow boots and headbands.Packed with insight, revelations and wonderful stories – including the training ground prank which saw a player break his toe on a breeze block, the all-night drinking session in Swaziland and the story of how Ossie dented the FA Cup –The Boys From White Hart Lane is an intimate and eye-opening portrait of the men who put the glory back into Spurs."A cracking read. This is the real story of the greatest team I played in - and had the honour of captaining - and it's full of stories even I didn't know."Steve Perryman

In this vivid account, the author punctures some generally held assumptions: despite slaughter and famine, the province on the eve of the Plantation was not completely depopulated as was often asserted at the time; the native Irish were not deliberately given the most infertile land; some of the most energetic planters were Catholic; and the Catholic Church there emerged stronger than before. Above all, natives and newcomers fused to a greater degree than is widely believed: apart from recent immigrants, nearly all Ulster people today have the blood of both Planter and Gael flowing in their veins. Nevertheless, memories of dispossession and massacre, etched into the folk memory, were to ignite explosive outbreaks of intercommunal conflict down to our own time. The Plantation was also the beginning of a far greater exodus to North America. Subsequently, descendants of Ulster planters crossed the Atlantic in their tens of thousands to play a central role in shaping the United States of America.