After Tottenham players came down with food poisoning the day before an important match to help decide who would make it into next season's Champions League, he wrote, ‘as sport escalates and becomes increasingly important in terms of people's livelihoods and people's lives, the things that made sport attractive in the first place begin to wane. If sport genuinely goes the way of conspiracies and secret warfare, then sport will become too serious and it will cease to amuse us.'
The secret nature of a conspiracy forms doubts in the mind of those who have been conspired against. Let's get matters straight – events which resulted in ten Tottenham players becoming ill in the early hours of Sunday morning on the day the club was about to play it's most important match in many years. It has far more likely been a conspiracy by a group with interests in money alone and should rule out any responsibility being placed on the heads of somebody connected to Arsenal let's say. The victim has been football and although Spurs have been the particular target in this instance, it was nothing to do with a crazed Gooner not able to bare watching the Champions League Final knowing defeat might prove to be disastrous three-fold. They have just come out of it, the slightly more fortunate, but no one can reliably predict what the outcome of the game at Upton Park would have been if this incident hadn't occurred. Although Spurs fans will of course feel that it would only have hindered their team's chances and since it turned out to be the narrowest of defeats, although Martin Jol admitted: "You can't say whether or not it cost us a Champions League place. It was a strange situation. One that I have not experienced anything like before." (The Times)
It's the uncertainty and doubt and the not knowing, that contributes to the foundations of any such theory that for example a betting syndicate might in some way be behind ten Tottenham players coming down with food poisoning on the morning of an extremely important game. Questions need answering. If Tottenham had a club chef at the hotel why according to reports was the food in the buffet prepared by Marriott chefs? How does food that has already been consumed the night before then become available for tests the following day? Was it a one hour, or a two hour delayed kick-off granted by the Premier League? And a question from those West Ham and Arsenal fans who doubt the incident was quite as serious as has been reported, why didn't Danny Murphy and Andy Reid start considering all the midfielders who did take to the field were later named as having been struck by the bug?
Not knowing the full facts only contributes to the belief that something untoward and criminal has occurred in an effort to fix the outcome of a football match. Even Tottenham's club doctor, Kalpesh Parmar said earlier today, "Early indications suggest it is going to be extremely difficult to pinpoint accurately the origin." And that's after the relevant test results come back in a couple of days.
This misfortunate outcome belongs to one club's season at the moment but it shouldn't be a matter for fans of other clubs to laugh at. Just because Spurs are in the spotlight now doesn't mean another club won't be next time. As a consequence of the events every football club has been affected by it and unless the situation does get fully resolved (which is highly unlikely) the last day of the 2005/06 season should be considered a terrible day for the whole of English football.