The Athletic

Hello, everyone.

Hello everyone, I'm Danny Kelly and this is The View from the Lane, as you know, the Athletics Top and Hotspur podcast. All thriller, no filler. Yeah, and I'm joined today by two of the great and good from The Athletic, Charlie Eccleshare and Jays Moore.

We're recording this episode before Totten's game against FC Murer in the Conference League on Thursday night,

so we won't dwell on that particular fixture.

But Charlie, seeing as you've been dispatched to Slovenia and are joining us from your hotel room, why don't you tell us how you've found the city of Maribor? Because I think we're not playing in Murrah's actual hometown. You're in, first of all, welcome. You're in Maribor, yes? Yes. Yeah, yeah. They play around 30 miles away normally in Murrah. But yeah, so they're down here. Their stadium's not big enough. It's still a very small stadium. I think it's like 11,000 it hosts and can only be half capacity and only about 200 spurs fans have travelled. It's very nice. Very cold and it is a bit quiet. There's a 10pm curfew, so it's a bit, there is a bit of that sort of COVID-y feel. but it's a very nice place. I've been to Ljubljana before. I hadn't been here, and Lviana's lovely. Can I ask you a weird question? Yesterday, I had the privilege of being on Adam Hury's podcast here, you know, the football cliches on the, on the athletic, and I think you couldn't do it. Yeah.

The bottom of the barrel was scraped and I pitched up.

And one of my pet loves in life is football under communism.

Now, of course, I am not a Stalinist.

The communism itself, I can definitely live without.

But football, is there any sign of the old communist world still in what used to be Yugoslavia? Any sign at all? It does have that sight feel to it. I think Libiana, from memory anyway, is a prettier place. This does have more of that kind of brutalist communist feel. But no statues of Felix Zersinsky or anything like that? No, no, no, no, there's nothing like that. Certainly not that I've seen. Disappointing, and you can't buy Hammer and Sickle T-shirts and things like that, no? No, I was trying to get you one. X, X, X, L, please. I don't want to look stupid in my Hammer and Sickle T-shirt, do I? No, no, no, I'll keep looking.

All right, so were they playing in it?

And the stadium, I think you're saying, it's not, even that's quite a small stadium, it won't be, it won't even be full. No, it can only be half. COVID, yeah, again, I think that's a COVID thing. How many spurs fans are you expecting? A couple of hundred. Wow. Amazing.

I mean, they were only allocated just over that

and whether people make the trip.

I mean, also Austria, which. They were only allocated just over that and whether people make the trip.

I mean, also Austria, which most of us had to come via, is in full lockdown. So I think that deterred a few people, even though there's no issue coming here and then going on. But yeah, so I don't think it's going to be a sort of carnival atmosphere, but we'll see. It should be fun. And in other news, nearer to home, James Moore is here with us as well.

It appears that, well, it doesn't appear. We saw the great Alessandro del Piero at the training ground this week. Hey, it was lovely, and you could see the Spurs players were just amazed to have such a brilliant footballer. It's a shame he hasn't got his boots for him because he's the exact creative number 10 Spurs need, isn't he? It's funny you should mention his boots because when I was at school, the kind of rumour, the story that went round at school was that Alessandro del Piero, and I'm assuming it's just because he had long hair, the rumor was that he wore women's football boots. That can't possibly have been, I genuinely thought about this yesterday for the first time in about 20 years, 25 years maybe. That can't possibly be true because, I mean, I don't think they really make specialist football boots for women now, really. And they're definitely within the... High-heeled football boots, yeah. I mean, I just can't see anything like that would have existed then. Football mules, yeah.

Also, I mean, Son is what, 29, Kane is 28.

Yeah.

Hoyberg, I think, had a picture of him as well, and he's 26, maybe 27.

I'm not convinced any of them will really remember Del Fierro as a player.

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