COYS

Tottenham Hotspur are playing South China in Hong Kong on Sunday. My wife and I will be joining an assortment of the many HK Spurs fans in the north stand, along with my capoeira teacher and her 5 year old daughter. I think it's good to have kids along - it helps cut the swearing down and the sprogs' energeticicity can be infectious.

As I will mention at the drop of a hat, I've been Spurs since the day I was born. I wasn't born in Tottenham - I pranced onto this mortal coil at University College Hospital a little way down the road - but my family lived there at the time, on Philip Lane. And on that day, Tottenham won the FA Cup. So I didn't really have much of a choice in the matter.

Despite that, this will be the first time I've ever seen Tottenham play in real life. When I was a little over the age of one, we moved to Bedfordshire. We were never terribly well off, and we could likely have afforded either tickets to White Hart Lane or the train tickets to London, but not both. As a student in London, I honestly never even thought of going to a match. Now that I think of it, I probably would have had the cash, but it honestly never crossed my mind - I'd got used to football, or at least Spurs, being something I saw on TV. At uni in Beijing, I did go to a match between Beijing Guo'an and Qingdao at the Workers' Stadium. I think that was the only sporting event I went to in those four years.

After university, I moved to China, which pretty well nixed any chances of Spurs-watching. We nearly had the chance on our honeymoon earlier this year to go, but the home matches were on the day we arrived and the day we left (and in the middle was an away game at Villa that seemed unappealing). Despite this we did spend some time trying to work out if we could get from White Hart Lane to Heathrow in time for our flight back to Hong Kong. As it was, we barely made it from my cousin's house near Loftus Road to the airport in time, so it was probably for the best we didn't start from N17.

So what I'm saying is, it's been a bit of a wait for this Sunday afternoon, and I fully intend to enjoy it.