Greater love hath no man for his fellow man than the Chelsea supporter who is prepared to accept a Spurs win against the Blues for the sake of a friend, or something, says Ian Camlett.

Tony, a very good friend of mine, lays seriously ill in a London hospital. He is awaiting a bone marrow transplant and the prognosis is far from good. I have not actually seen him since I emigrated to Australia over twenty years ago, yet I think of him often. We grew up together in the same council flats in Manor Road, Stoke Newington, he a Spurs fanatic and me the only Chelsea supporter for miles. Though our rivalry never faltered, our friendship never wavered.

The Spurs team of 1961 was quite simply the best football side that I have ever seen. The Chelsea team of the same year was a music hall joke. We were about to lose Jimmy Greaves to Italy and without him our future was bleak. I watched his Spurs team play with the grim foreboding that must have been felt by the average Polish peasant watching the Panzers enter their country in 1939. You knew they were invincible yet you had no choice but to resist. It was futile yet magnificent at the same time. We were second best for years. The bastards even bought Jimmy Greaves the following year and destroyed all my notions of loyalty and trust. My hatred for them became pathological.

The Tommy Docherty team of the sixties gave me fresh hope, but the 1967 FA Cup Final put paid to that. I sat on the terraces of a near deserted Wembley Stadium, shattered and disillusioned. The team I hated had beaten the team I loved and deservedly so. I knew what to expect from Tony when I got back home, or at least I thought I did. He had daubed his first floor flat with streamers, flags and a banner draped over the first floor balcony. It read: “Spurs Supporters’ Club membership applications taken here – ex-Chelsea supporters welcome.”

I have not even had the pleasure of revenge following our record against Spurs in the nineties. How I wanted to laugh hysterically at him as yet another Spurs defeat followed with relentless predictability. But we lost touch for years until I heard from a mutual friend via e-mail about Tony’s plight. He gave me the telephone number of his ward and I called him. The nurse said he was sleeping but when I said I was an old friend calling from Australia, she put me through.

Time stood still. Two 52-year-olds resumed a rivalry that had been cut short decades before. His voice was weaker but his spirit was unbroken. We swam in memories and laughed like drains. The nurse cut the conversation short when his laughter triggered off a relentless coughing fit and he had to be medicated. We had been on the phone for about ninety minutes yet it seemed like seconds. I promised to call him again after we had kicked his mob out of the Worthington Cup.

When I got off the phone I had tears in my eyes. My family kept well away from me for the rest of the day as I wallowed in recollections of a time, many years ago, when we were both children playing in the same Sir Thomas Abney primary school team. He was Dave Mackay, strutting the field with his chest inflated like his hero, and I was Jimmy Greaves, with a silken touch and a deadly finish, while the rest were a motley collection of Gooners. The team played in orange, which was perfectly acceptable as there was not a Blackpool supporter within 200 miles. In fact, come to think of it, there were precious few in Blackpool. Tony was famous for commentating on himself as he played: “Mackay with the ball, Mackay evades one tackle, then two – GOALLLL!” We all found this hilarious but the opposition thought he was insane, and the referees, typically, saw no humour in it.

Some things transcend club rivalry and our friendship was one of them. I listened to the Chelsea Worthington Cup victory over Tottenham on Big Blue Radio over the internet and my joy was tempered with the realisation that Tony was probably the one most in need of cheering up. With absolute horror it dawned on me that, for the first time in my life, a Chelsea loss to Spurs might actually be acceptable. Thankfully this absurd notion was only fleeting, but the fact that it occurred at all was, in itself, testament to my love of the guy.

I hope and pray that Tony recovers. A rivalry like ours, now rekindled, must burn on at least until one of our sides wins the damn Premiership. It has been 47 years of waiting for me and 41 for him, so a few more decades will surely not matter. Those Gooners, Mickey Mousers and Scum really have no idea about genuine hunger. How can you feel starvation when your plate is regularly replenished? Tony and I licked ours clean long ago and, like Oliver Twist, our request for more has been fruitless.

During our last conversation I told Tony that it is my wish for him to live long enough to see Spurs win a Premiership. “You have to be kidding,” he said indignantly. “Someone once made the same wish for Methuselah and he lived to be 969 before he finally gave up the ghost.”

Even as a child I tended to speak more slowly when talking to Arsenal supporters. It wasn’t contrived; it just happened. A little like the way adults tend to speak gibberish when attempting to converse with toddlers. It just seems to be the natural thing to do.

Born and bred in Stoke Newington, just a fifteen minute walk to Highbury, I was the only Chelsea supporter for miles around. Physically and mentally abused by them I should have felt fear and shame but I felt more like Gulliver being attacked by thousands of Lilliputians. I was a mental giant amongst midgets and revelled in the attention I received.

In those days, the early 1960s, neither they, nor we, were particularly good. Tottenham were the team who lauded it over all others and a truly superb Spurs side won the double in 1961. We were in transition having recently lost Jimmy Greaves to the lure of the Lire and a young Chelsea side was rebuilding under Docherty. Arsenal were average at best. The only thing that has remained unchanged in the almost 40 years that have passed since then is the absolute, unadulterated thickness of the average Gooner. The fact is, no matter how many matches they attend, and no matter how long they follow football, they are totally ignorant of the finer points of the game. I used to think it was genetic but it is in fact an acquired trait. Put simply, supporting Arsenal necessitates a total abdication of meaningful analysis. In its place is a boorish smugness, a total lack of humility, and a complete absence of class. Arguing with an Arsenal supporter is a little like attempting to swim up the Niagara Falls; very tiring and ultimately futile.

I went to school at William Ellis in Highgate. I was one of just three Chelsea supporters at the school. There were many Arsenal supporters but the three most vociferous were Dave Burden, Ken Witham and Geoff ‘Jumbo’ Hale. They were North Bank boys and probably still are. The last time I saw the three of them they were all unemployed, single and living in council flats with fairly lengthy police records. The other two Chelsea supporters are both in the legal profession one a Judge and the other a QC. I think that tells us something about the relative intellectual capacities of the individuals. The interesting thing was all six of us were in the same Hampstead and District League football team, Fleet United. The rest of the team were a mixture of supporters including one guy who supported Dunfermline. We never asked him why. Anyway Ken Witham was actually a superb footballer and, on that basis, he was made captain. His father, another Gooner, became coach. He spent the first three coaching sessions attempting to teach us the offside trap; need I say more? We never won a single game as I recall until we sacked his dad and replaced him with a guy called Peter Drabwell who played as an amateur with Hendon. For the remainder of the season we were unbeaten.

I now live in Sydney, Australia but remain a Chelsea fanatic. Several years ago I took my Toyota in for a service and it turned out the mechanic was an Arsenal supporter. I spoke briefly (and slowly) to him about football and that was that. I picked up my car and left. He was erased from my memory banks the moment I drove out his workshop. When Kanu scored the third of his goals against us many years later – the match was live on cable TV – I threw my coffee cup through my lounge room window. My son and I were distraught. The phone rang. I picked it up to hear what sounded like the braying of an ass at the other end. Laughter and ridicule poured down the phone. “Who the hell are you?” I asked. “I’m your mechanic, don’t you remember?” was the reply. This cretin had kept my number and waited almost three years to call me and laugh down the phone at my distress; a guy he had spoken to for just s few brief minutes many years before. Who else but a Gooner could stoop that low?

That is why I have a special loathing for Arsenal supporters that far exceeds any negative feelings I have towards Manure or Spurs fans. That is why beating them is so important to me and why the last few years have been hell. Surely it is about time justice was seen to be done and we walk away with the three points. You see I have that mechanic’s home number now and my fingers are itching to get dialing at 4am on a Sydney Sunday morning. It won’t only be the kookaburras that he will hear laughing, that I can assure you!