A lifetime following Spurs may not sound like a recipe for happiness. But John Crace never feels safer, calmer and so free of worries than when standing in the middle of a football crowd. He explains why in this extract from his new book

I was nine in 1966, and football-obsessed. What I was missing was a team to be passionate about. Neither of my parents was that interested in football, so there were no tribal loyalties to inherit. The field was completely clear; I could support anyone. But who? In May 1966 the sport pages were almost as full of World Cup previews as they would be now. And one man and one face stood out: Jimmy Greaves. Brilliant striker, stylishly Brylcreemed hair: here was the epitome of cool and glamour. I wanted to be Jimmy. I was Jimmy. I became Spurs.

It should have been obvious from early on that this was going to be a love affair characterised largely by heartbreak. Greaves got injured in the group stages and was replaced by Geoff Hurst, who scored the winner in the quarter-final against Argentina. By the time Greaves was fit for the final, he had lost his place in the team. My dad and my sisters had gone out for the afternoon of the final, but I had made my mum stay behind to watch it on our poky black-and-white TV. I cried when Germany equalised with almost the last kick of normal time. I cried when England scored twice more in extra time. But I have a feeling I was one of the few nine-year-olds whose tears were also for Greaves. Hurst had scored his hat-trick.

I've often since wondered whether, in some cases, it's the club that chooses you rather than the other way round. It certainly seems we are the ideal psychological fit; unfortunately neither of us emerges with much credit from this. Spurs are a team with a sense of entitlement that generally exceeds their on-field successes; a team that lives off memories of past triumphs while too often falling short in the present; a team whose fans grandiosely talk of "The Spurs Way" as a metaphor for attacking, stylish football as we slide to yet another 4-3 defeat, illuminated by massive lapses of concentration and schoolboy defending every bit as much as a lightning quick break into the opposition's penalty area.

Decades of underachievement? Tick. An heroic sense of injustice? Tick. A pathological ability to rewrite failure as success? Tick. A seemingly infinite capacity for self-destruction? Tick. Selective memory? Tick. Yes, I'd say Spurs and I were made for each other. But there's more; much more. There's also an undeniable sense of the absurd – a rich strand of comedy – written into the club's DNA. Naturally, this is not something any side is terribly keen to admit, especially when it's trying to position itself as a top-four Premier League team, but it's there nonetheless.

It's there in the fallibility. Good as it sounds in theory to be a Manchester United fan, guaranteed to collect at least one piece of silverware each season, there doesn't seem to be much joy to be found there. One regulation win after another, with no one really needing to break sweat. Least of all the supporters. Where's the fun in that? Indeed, in a moment of weakness, my mate Kevin the Bright – he is very bright, despite being a Chelsea fan – recently confessed he rather missed the old days at Stamford Bridge, when his side was slipping to a home defeat to QPR on a crap pitch in front of a crowd of about 25,000, because then he was at least aware he was alive and watching a contest and not just a cog in a corporate machine bankrolled by a Russian oligarch.

Nor do I quite have the stomach for life as a Wolves fan, though I have more than a sneaking admiration for those who do. I'm just too much of a thrill-seeker; too much of an attention-seeker, come to think of it. I couldn't hack the endless backs-to-the-wall, try-to-sneak-a-goal-on-the-break afternoons, with avoiding relegation the only real aim, and the knowledge that your best players will be bought by someone else the only certainty. My fragile psyche needs at least the possibility of glory; though equally it needs the probability of disappointment. It needs to be tantalised with riches and rewarded with next to nothing. In short, I need an abusive relationship. And Spurs are the perfect partner.

Abject powerlessness

February 2011. Three wins in three games. Games I'd decided were crucial. Games that were all too losable. It was remarkable. All the more so, given my mental state. For a good 15 years now, I've had recurring bouts of depression. Not every year or even every two years, but regularly enough to know that another one is never too far away. And its time had come again. In some ways I've got better at dealing with it – there's no longer that feeling of "what is going on?" – but the sense of abject powerlessness never gets any easier. The symptoms are often quite subtle to start with. My sleep will become slightly worse than usual, my anxiety levels will rise, I'll catch myself wondering if that funny pain I sometimes get is cancer and I'll become less engaged than usual. All normal stuff for me. And every other Spurs fan, I should think.

Sometimes it stops at that; but not often. Usually, what happens next is like falling off a cliff. After a couple of weeks of hanging in, of trying to hold it together, of trying to cope, of trying not to let my wife Jill see that everything is on the verge of going tits up because I know how scary she finds it, all hell breaks loose. Crippling panic attacks, complete insomnia and an overwhelming sense of futility; even getting out of bed feels too hard. At this point I call in the artillery.

I have an ambivalent relationship with my psychiatrist, not helped by the fact that he only usually sees me when I'm in crisis. He thinks his job is trying to keep me well enough not to need to go into a mental hospital, but part of me – obviously not the well part – can't think of anything better than going into a mental hospital, because I was sent to one when I was first diagnosed with depression and I quite enjoyed it. Not the being ill bit, but the being in the hospital bit, because it's one of the few places I've ever been where I felt totally safe.

No one had any expectations of me – if I said I wasn't up to doing very much, no one so much as raised an eyebrow – and the other patients were some of the loveliest people I had ever met. They were bonkers, of course, but then who was I to judge? It was also the only place I've ever been since primary school where I was congratulated for knowing the capital of France. Every afternoon, the nursing staff would try to collect as many patients as they could and make us interact in some kind of communal activity. Usually a quiz. Most patients were sensible enough to duck out of this, but I couldn't resist as I've always been a competitive bastard.

"What's the capital of France?" a nurse would ask.

I'd say nothing, not wanting to look too pushy. No one else would say anything either, though for rather different reasons. They were either too catatonic to speak, or felt no need to bother with such a ludicrously trivial question. So it would inevitably always be me who broke the silence.

"Paris."

"Well done, John."

And so it would continue until the nurse decided enough was enough. At which point I would ask for the final score.

"John, 23. Everyone else, 0."

I never got bored of that bit. There were downsides to being in hospital. Apart from being mentally ill. It was inconvenient, it was worrying for the family, it interrupted my work. And my football. It's surprising how vocal people who have done nothing but stare at the wall all day can become when someone suggests watching something on TV they don't like. It was also an eye-opener to discover that not everyone wanted to watch football. I had thought it was only Jill.

Not necessarily for all the right reasons, then, I'd steered clear of being an inpatient since the first time I'd been seriously depressed and, on balance, I wasn't that keen to try it again in early 2011. Spurs were playing AC Milan in the last 16 knockout stage of the Champions League. AC Milan share a stadium with Inter. So, after telling Jill the previous November how I couldn't possibly not go to Milan to see Inter as there might never be another chance to see Spurs play in the San Siro in my lifetime, I had tickets to return less than three months later.

I just wasn't sure if I was up to it. I liked the idea of being there; I just couldn't imagine me getting there. It felt too far, too difficult. I could barely make it to the end of the road to get a paper in the morning. How was I going to make it to Milan? So when I saw my shrink a few days before the game, I was half hoping he was going to let me off the hook and tell me to stay at home.

"I've got this other problem," I said towards the end of the session. "I've got a ticket for the Milan game, and I was wondering if it would be a mistake to go."

"Are you mad?" he replied.

"I wouldn't be here otherwise."

"You're right. Sorry." Never underestimate the value of a shrink with a sense of humour. "I meant: 'How could you not go?' If I could get off work, I'd go myself. I've been a Spurs fan for decades and it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Who would have thought it? A shrink who understood that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity could come round twice in three months. Perhaps we were both certifiable.

Less than a week later my friend Matthew and I arrived at our apartment in Milan. We had planned just to dump our bags and explore the city for a few hours, but it was pissing with rain, Matthew needed a snooze and I wasn't feeling that wonderful. Having expended all that nervous energy fighting off the anxiety of getting to Milan, I was going to have to do it all again the next day to get home. I closed my eyes and concentrated on just breathing for the next few hours. What a state. Reaching the last 16 of the Champions League was supposed to be fun, not a mental test of endurance. One that I was worried I was losing.

Though with 15 minutes of the game to go I was experiencing the familiar agony that comes with daring to allow yourself to believe: the dread that hope would be rewarded with disappointment. With 10 minutes to go, we took the lead. Lennon ran from the halfway line, beat a couple of defenders and squared the ball to Crouchie, who slid it into an open net. I couldn't help myself from standing up and started yelling, "Ye-e-e-e-e-s." Immediately, I felt Matthew tugging on my arm.

"Sit down, you idiot."

I looked round to find I was the only person standing in the whole of our section of the ground. I smiled sheepishly and tried to pretend I'd only stood up to stretch my legs. Amazingly, I got away with just a few disapproving glares. Either the AC fans were a lot more forgiving than most or they were all numb with cognitive dissonance, incapable of accepting that what had just happened, had happened. It hadn't been in my script, so it was unlikely to have been in theirs.

"You do know that Crouchie scuffed it," I said.

"Of course he did," Matthew replied. "You didn't imagine he hit it cleanly, did you?"

"Amazing."

"Amazing."

It would be a while before it properly sank in for me. I was still anxious and depressed, and it felt as if there was a disconnect between me and reality. It was like I had been there, yet not really been there. Maybe if we'd have lost it would have seemed more real.

Back home, Jill had been trying to arrange our own spring holiday. She had just handed in her notice at work, was taking a month off before starting her new job and wanted us all to go away for a week.

"I can't afford to take the time off," I pleaded.

"It's amazing you've managed to go to Milan this month, then."

"It is, rather."

There wasn't much point trying to explain the difference between sneaking abroad for the night to see The Most Important Game of the Season™ and trying to find a convenient seven-day stretch in the second half of April when Spurs weren't playing – a near-impossible task, given the danger of postponed games being rescheduled. Or of me just cocking things up, as I had four years previously, finding myself with no internet or mobile-phone access in the middle of a South African game reserve, rather than at White Hart Lane for a Uefa Cup quarter-final tie against Seville.

This year, thankfully, I had a rather better reason for being obstructive. My depression. You might have thought a holiday would be just what you need to cheer yourself up; Jill had once thought that when she booked a holiday to La Gomera, one of the least-inhabited of the Canary Islands, while I was depressed. I sat by the pool for a week, either reading a book about the fire-bombing of Dresden or staring catatonically into space, while she tried to entertain the kids with the island's two star attractions: a piece of uneven concrete doubling as a crazy golf course and the German nudist beach. We didn't try that again.

That didn't stop Jill finding me annoying, though. Living with someone who is depressed must be almost as bad as being depressed. There is no standard rhythm or logic to depression; you know you're losing touch with reality, you can't be talked out of it and you just have to hold on as best you can through the white-knuckle ride until it lifts. And you have no idea when that will be, so there's no point making any major plans for when you might be well again. Even more infuriating for her was that, beyond just about holding my job together – I had a lot of holiday held over, so I went on a two-day week – and trying to deaden the panic attacks in the gym, the only thing I could really manage was going to the football. She thought it typically perverse of me.

It may well have been, but it wasn't deliberately so. She saw me as someone putting himself into her twin visions of hell: Ryanair and a huge crowd of football fans. I saw myself just doing something that had to be done, something that required nothing of me beyond showing up. I could shout or stay quiet as I pleased, and no one would judge. Or notice. At the best of times, the idea of milling with crowds of shoppers on the high street makes me anxious and homicidal. Yet even when I'm nuts, I feel safe in a football crowd: over and beyond a common sense of purpose with everyone else, I feel as if I'm in a bubble where there's nothing getting in between me and the moment. All the other worries that are invading my psyche 24/7 – "You're going to die, John, it's only a matter of when" – dissolve for a few hours. There is no me; only football. It's the most perfect time off, time out from myself. Knowing there are football matches – and therefore moments like these – ahead is one of the things that helps me survive those days when every minute feels like an hour.

A still more surprising side-effect of my depression is that it took a period of mental illness to inject a temporary note of sanity into my football-watching. Like every fan, I want to believe that my being at a game somehow has an impact; that if I wasn't there, something different would have happened. Any correlation between me wearing a lucky shirt, shouting at a referee to give a penalty or booing John Terry to make him lose his rag and get sent off is, of course, accidental. And yet part of the collective delusion of being a fan is the notion that your participation and involvement can make an incremental difference. By willing something enough, you can get what you want. It's like being an American for 90 minutes.

I hadn't noticed the mismatch between cause and effect so much in previous depressive episodes – principally because it wasn't particularly evident, as my negative mood was generally reflected in a negative series of results. But this time, despite my repeated pre-match predictions of disaster, we had won four tricky games on the bounce. Even I couldn't escape noticing I had no control over events; it was almost a relief, in a dull sort of way.

Normal service was resumed with the away game at Blackpool. Despite Blackpool having had a dreadful run since the beginning of the year, despite this being, on paper, the easiest game of the year, despite us creating more than 10 clear-cut chances, we were 3-0 down by half-time. A consolation deflection by Pav in the second half wasn't really much consolation. The defeat also began to make me wonder again if maybe I didn't have some influence over Spurs's performances after all. It was a worrying time. Or maybe I was starting to come out of my depression.

'So why bother?'

Media pundits often talk of the unpredictability of the Premier League as one of its great attractions. But it is really the predictability that is the fans' lifeblood. Understanding your place is what creates a team's identity. And for Spurs, that is to be the nearly team. In summer 2010, no one could say we'd had a bad season, but it hadn't been that good, either. There had been some standout performances, but we had lost too many games we ought to have drawn and drawn too many games we ought to have won. It had been typical Spurs.

"So why bother?" Jill asked when my son Robbie and I got home. It was hard to explain what it was like to be hypnotised by men kicking a ball – however badly – or be left breathless by moments of transcendent brilliance. It was harder still to explain how empty I would feel without the friendships, and the constant endurance test of proving to myself that I can stick with something through both good and bad.

Football helps me navigate my life. Robbie had started the season more boy than man and had ended it more man than boy; his life was increasingly his own and he now came to games with me because he wanted to, not because he thought he had no choice or needed to keep me sweet. There was a loss in that, but a gain also. Robbie was surviving growing up rather better than I ever had, and I felt flattered he liked me enough to spend that amount of time with me. Spurs had become part of the glue that held us close.

As indeed it would be for me and Anna, my daughter. By the start of the next season she would have left home to go to university in Manchester, and it would have been the first time in 19 years she hadn't been living at home. I was going to miss her a lot. But Manchester had its advantages; it was a gateway to United, City, Blackburn, Wigan, Liverpool, Everton and Stoke.

"I have a feeling you're going to be seeing a fair bit of me next year," I told her.

"Not too much, I hope, Dad."

Football has also helped me deal with the smaller stuff. Mostly my life is a succession of unheroic failures, of things that I haven't done quite as well as I should have done, of being a bit late for something or turning up in the wrong place. Which is just like watching Spurs. Imagine how inadequate you must feel to support Barcelona; inch-perfect passes relentlessly pinging around the pitch from first to last. It would get to me in the end. I need a team that goes from the sublime to the ordinary in a blink. It helps to keep me sane. Or insane, depending on your viewpoint. Spurs fail so that I don't have to.

The one inarguable gain as that season came to an end was that I was still alive, something you may take for granted but I never have. I had made it through another year. It's good to have a few constants in my life. After my mum and sisters, Spurs is the longest relationship I have ever had, and it's an infinite source of enrichment: Spurs show me how to win and lose, how to say hello and goodbye. From 90 minutes to a lifetime.

Extracted from Vertigo: One Football Fan's Fear of Success by John Crace, published by Constable & Robinson