Only the most churlish football fan – and there is a lot of them around these days – would deny West Ham supporters their moment in the sun after last night’s impressive triumph in the bizarrely named Europa Conference League, their first trophy for 43 years.
As a Spurs fan growing up in in the West Ham stronghold of Ilford, and having attended the same secondary school as Trevor Brooking, former Hammers manager John Lyall and the infant school that later produced Paul Ince, it was hard to avoid the Claret and Blue hordes.
For a while in the 60s, when both clubs were at their peak, Bobby Moore lived nearby, in the same road as Terry Venables as it happens. As kids, we would bump into him in Gants Hill.
This was a period when West Ham won the FA Cup, the European Cup Winners Cup and, yawn, the World Cup. It even persuaded my younger brother to support them despite coming from a diehard Spurs family.
Last night was West Ham’s cup final and they won it, an achievement Spurs have not been able to boast about for nigh on two decades
At school, a majority of the boys were West Ham supporters.
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