We don't differ much from the cavemen

12:56pm Friday 5th October 2007

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I WAS delighted to talk to Martin O'Neill again last month when the charismatic football manager returned to Adams Park.

I had only briefly met him once about 15 years ago when he was at Wycombe Wanderers, and so it was a bit of a thrill when he chatted to me before doing a video interview for our website.

He had come back to Bucks as star guest at a special evening event entitled An Audience with Martin O'Neill'.

Martin is a huge star now, but was still gracious enough to make small talk with a local newspaper hack like me. Not all famous people are as friendly, so I officially count the Aston Villa boss among my celebrity favourites.

And that's why I believe I need intense psycho-analysis to work out the reasons for my obsessive behaviour as a football fan.

You see I support Tottenham Hotspur, a club I have not visited in more than 20 years.

I do not live near Tottenham any longer and barely know the faces of all the players.

Yet, it ruins my weekend whenever they lose, which is pretty frequently these days, and it brightens my life whenever they get a good result.

Consequently, I am miserable most of the time, and I constantly ask myself why I put myself through these agonies for a team I no longer have any connection with.

It all boils down, I suppose, to ancient tribal instincts. If you cut me in half, you'd find Tottenham Hotspur runs through my body like Brighton Rock.

It all began almost 40 years ago at infants school in north London. We were faced with a straight choice of which local team to support: Tottenham or Arsenal. It defined your group of friends and made the days go quicker as you taunted the rival supporters.

I obviously made the wrong selection, but it was sacrilege at that age to change loyalties, and I had to endure the indignity of watching Spurs spiral into demise, culminating with them being relegated in 1976.

But there was something magic about going to the games. I remember being a small boy holding my dad's hand as we walked with hordes of fans, surrounded on all sides by the stench of hot dog vans.

I stopped going in my late teens when I found there was more to life than football.

These days, I don't even particularly like Tottenham because I can't stand the way they have treated their present manager, Martin Jol. There's no bragging rights to be had by supporting them when I live in High Wycombe, and it shouldn't matter to me whether they win or they lose.

But it does, it really does. On Monday, they were playing Martin O'Neill's Aston Villa.

I came home from work, switched on the computer and discovered Villa were winning 4-1.

I should have been delighted for Martin O'Neill but instead I was devastated. My loyalty still lay with a group of young millionaires I had never met, rather than a decent hard-working former Wycombe man who had chatted with me a week or so earlier.

I was still depressed half an hour later when I returned to the computer to see the final score. Incredibly, Spurs had pulled it back to 3-4 and there were still a couple of minutes left.

Manically, I stood by my PC continually refreshing the BBC live text feed. And when Tottenham equalised in the third minute of injury time, I went berserk with joy.

I rushed downstairs to communicate the happy news to Mrs Editor's Chair who remained bewildered by it all.

And she's right to be. There is no rhyme or reason to this tribalism, but millions of men are like me.

We're all cavemen really and the only way we differ from the Neanderthals is that our clubs are premiership ones.

Perhaps one day they'll find a cure for this illness. But until then, expect me to be permanently miserable.