It was Nick Hancock, of all people, who pricked the pompous reaction that followed Eric Cantona’s attempt to kick xenophobia out of football. On Fantasy Football League, 48 hours after the event, Hancock was asked for his opinion. “I thought it was appalling,” he began, wearing a newsreader’s grave face. “I thought it was terrible, I thought it was tragic. But most of all, I thought it was very, very funny… comfortably the best thing that’s happened this season. Absolutely brilliant!”

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Hancock’s comments came to mind earlier this week, when Spurs’ hilarious rampage at Stamford Bridge prompted a tedious crescendo of sanctimony. There are some people who are genuinely appalled with Spurs’ behaviour. Nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pretending the alternative view – one that is held by millions of football fans – does not exist. “We don’t like to see that kind of thing.” Oh yes we do Des! Mousa Dembele’s impromptu ophthalmology on Diego Costa was out of order, not to mention a little weird, but the rest was good, unclean fun.

Jock Wallace, the former Rangers and Leicester manager, called it the “battle fever”. Games with an edge are generally far more interesting and rousing. When Manchester United beat Arsenal 4-2 at Highbury in 2005 – after Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira almost came to blows in the tunnel – there was a similarly outraged response from many. In the Sunday Times, Hugh McIlvanney, Britain’s greatest sportswriter, offered an alternative appraisal. “… United grew stronger amid the intensity of a contest that was, understandably, too bitter for many tastes but which I must admit to finding an irresistible spectacle,” he said. “It did have deplorable elements … Yet, in spite of its intermittent echoes of the ugliness that had erupted in the tunnel before kick-off, the match was memorable mainly as epic entertainment.”

Spurs and Manchester City both missed out on major prizes this week; one went down like Tony Montana, the other closed the door quietly behind them. As a neutral or a fan, what would you rather watch? In their post-match interviews, Eric Dier, Harry Kane and Mauricio Pochettino seemed to be having a competition to see who could use the word ‘proud’ the most. Quite right too: Spurs stood up to Chelsea in a way that would never have happened in the past, and that burst of aggression is intrinsically linked to other qualities that make this the best Spurs side in decades. It is almost impossible for a team to excel in the Premier League without those qualities. In their darkest hour, Spurs looked like winners.

If that happened every week it would be an issue, but these were unique circumstances. Spurs gave a human response to crushing disappointment; as such, they deserved a bit more sympathy and a lot more empathy. They had been battling for the title all season, and saw it disappear, at a time when they were being goaded by 40,000 fans, not to mention a number of Chelsea players. What were they supposed to do, smile sweetly and take a selfie?

Chelsea's Diego Costa clashes with Tottenham's Michel Vorm at the end of the match Image credit: Reuters

Such needle invariably elevates games – in terms of skill as well as aggression, as Eden Hazard proved with his sparkling performance and beautiful goal. Diego Maradona spent an entire career using anger as a creative energy. It is not just about winning or losing; it is about winning or losing against them. That heightened experience is a rare visceral thrill for neutrals, never mind supporters, never mind players. Football at its best should a fusion of skill and steel – or, in the words of Ruud Gullit and Louis van Gaal, when “sexy football” meets “sex masochism”.

It’s easy to blame gentrification, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Many ex-players suffer from an interesting amnesia when it comes to their own on-field excesses. There are exceptions, like Gary Neville, who says he always tries to put himself in the dressing-room before he rushes to criticise. Neville was Roosevelt’s man in the arena; most of those passing judgement from on high have never entered the arena and wouldn’t last two minutes if they did.

All football fans who enjoy games with an edge instinctively know when it goes too far. There is a simple test: watch a bad tackle, and see whether your instinctive reaction is nearer to a laugh or a wince. This should prompt a laugh; this probably shouldn’t.

There is an element of guilty pleasure in this, certainly. Nobody wants to see over-the-ball tackles, or anything that significantly endangers an opponent, but none of the Spurs tackles did that. If you take the sanctimony to its logical conclusion, everybody will end up living in a padded cell.

Tottenham Hotspur's English defender Eric Dier (C) fouls Chelsea's Belgian midfielder Eden Hazard (R) Image credit: AFP

Football, like society, has become obsessed with image. Not only has it lost touch with reality, it wouldn’t recognise reality if it walked past it in the street. There are umpteen reasons for that, beyond the scope and intelligence of this blog, but the most influential bear the acronym PC: political correctness and personal computers, the latter facilitating a digital identity that sometimes bears little resemblance to the person constructing it.

So many people are keeping up appearances, attempting to present a perfect world that can never exist, and taking cheap shots at those who are caught deviating from the fantasy. Burn the witch, we know your Twitter handle. If you’re going to throw those crowd-pleasing shapes, you’d better live like Mother Teresa. The reality is that most people would bundle their gran under a bus for a retweet.

Values aren’t necessarily correct, they are just contemporary. Many are cyclical. Football’s attitude to physical contact differs enormously from rugby and other sports; they can’t both be right, yet there is a smug certainty in the way even the vaguest physical contact is dismissed. There were references to “two mass brawls” in the Spurs/Chelsea game and, while Susie Dent would not argue with that phrase, this was hardly the wild west, or even Chelsea v Leeds in the 1970 FA Cup final replay.

Increasingly things are painted as either good or bad, black or white, when really life is one long shade of grey. There is nuance in most things that football does not recognise. The Sopranos was also a comedy; The Office was also a drama. There aren’t good and bad human beings, just human beings capable of both good and bad – often, like Spurs, at the same time. It often feels like celebrity status disqualifies someone from being allowed to have a human reaction, when the opposite should be the case because the pressures are far greater.

All of this is not to say that matches with aggro are intrinsically enjoyable. The 2010 World Cup final, for example, was profoundly depressing. The difference between those games and the enjoyably nasty ones, like Monday and the 2006 World Cup game between Portugal and Holland, is honesty. There is something dispiriting about watching teams who try to win matches by foul means or fouler, with calculated cynicism. Spurs’ heads had gone by the end, and Dier in particular left part of his brain somewhere in a field in west London. There are few things in life to compare with the dark humour of watching an adult who has completely lost it. Maybe it shouldn’t be funny, but it is.

A culture has developed, in football and life, where snide, passive-aggressive behaviour is becoming an acceptable norm. Dishonesty is the best policy; nobody makes eye contact or has difficult conversations. That has serious long-term implications. Masculinity is changing - we know that, we’ve all seen the Sopranos – but that change has been dramatically accelerated by an attempt to impose a set of values that are alien to so many. Man up? Man down more like. “We are men, they are men,” said Pochettino. “It's football.” Well, it was.

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