By Dave P
October 18 2004

We have never played Portsmouth on October 18th so its a trawl through the record books for anything interesting and as far as away fixtures go it does not make pretty reading so I will have to be a bit selective here. Lets start in 1930. We were a second division side and we played Bury at Home. We won that one 3-1 and just missed out on Promotion finishing third. It was another two years before we re-joined the top flight.

We'll now move on eleven years to 1941 and the dark days of the War. Normal league competition had been suspended two years earlier and a Spurs side competed in the 'London League". It was not unusual in these times for players on leave from their war duties to play for whoever would give them a game so not a lot of credence can be given to some of the games. Some were interrupted by air raids and a lot of the football was aimed at morale boosting for the public, and propaganda aimed at the enemy. 'You may be dropping bombs on us but life goes on' type of stuff. Anyway on October 18 we travelled to Brentford and recorded a 4-1 win in front of a 6000 crowd with goals from G.A. Ludford, A. Duncan (2) and someone with the surname of Noble who I have no record of. If anyone knows who this was I would be interested to know. Was he a guest player (common in the war years) or a youngster.

Trawling through old fixtures throws up some surprising or unexpected games from time to time and one such game took place on 18th October 1954. Quite why this game took place I am not sure but we played a friendly at home to SK Vienna. We lost the game 1-2 but an interesting fixture non the Less.

Not an easy day to find history for so I will cheat a bit and highlight a game in 1974 the day later on the 19th. Why would I do that?. Well Goals from Steve Perryman and Martin Chivers ensured we beat Arsenal 2-0 at home and that for me is a good enough reason to include it