Follow Jermaine on Twitter: @jjenas8

To say Tottenham have a big week coming up is an understatement. The match against Arsenal next weekend could be decisive for the league title hopes of both sides, but there's another derby coming up against West Ham on Wednesday night that is just as important.



As a member of the Spurs team beaten at Upton Park in the infamous "Lasagnegate" match on the last day of the 2005/2006 season, when the bulk of our squad went down with food poisoning, you could say this derby will always have a special resonance with me - as it will for anyone who experienced that day.

The feeling I had in the dressing room after that match, sitting in agony with people throwing up all around me while the West Ham players across the hallway were screaming and shouting like they had won the FA Cup, is something that will stick in my mind forever. I struggled to let it go for a while, to be honest.

In fact the Hammers had an FA Cup final the following weekend against Liverpool and not much to play for in the league, whereas we had to beat them to secure our place in the Champions League ahead of Arsenal.



The silly thing is that for a game against West Ham we would have normally just stayed at home because it was a local derby, but because it was such a crucial game the club put us in a hotel because they wanted us to be together.

Lasagne and spaghetti Bolognese were on the menu, we ate, and then in the middle of the night we started dropping like flies. It was mayhem. The club tried to get the match called off, but in vain, so we just had to play through it feeling like death. A lot of the lads were running on empty - literally. Even while the gaffer Martin Jol was giving his team talk before the game, players were being sick in the toilets. Once the game started players were literally running off the pitch. It was carnage.

View photos Bobby Zamora is brought down inside the penalty area during the Barclays Premiership match between West Ham and Tottenham Hotspur at Upton Park. (Photo by Phil Cole/Getty Images) More

By the end of it we felt so horrific that the fact we had just lost out on the Champions League, on the last day of the season, to Arsenal, with West Ham in the next room having the biggest party ever, was almost of secondary importance.

As players all we could really do was use that feeling as fuel for when we played West Ham in the future. And we had some nice moments against them, to be fair. The following season, Paul Stalteri scored the winner at Upton Park in the last minute of a 4-3 win.

Playing Tottenham seems to rile up West Ham like nothing else - something that when I first went to Spurs I didn't really understand.

I still don't in some ways. Tottenham's number one derby will always be Arsenal. If any derby intensified in the years that I was at Spurs, it was the one against Chelsea. But the players never viewed West Ham as one of the big derbies, and that's probably one of the things that infuriates West Ham fans.

I even remember having conversations trying to work out what the West Ham thing was all about. Granted, they were close geographically, but so were Charlton, for example. I didn't get the hatred they were trying to create, which I didn't feel ever materialised from Tottenham's end. The biggest derbies remained Arsenal, followed by Chelsea, and I don't think it's any different now.

The progress West Ham have made over the past few seasons has been exceptional and it will be a vociferous atmosphere at Upton Park, but it's nice to feel that fierce environment as a player because it tunes you in. Not all the Spurs squad would have played in this fixture before, but there are enough homegrown players to let them know what to expect.

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