Gone Baby Gone

When I began to write this on Tuesday morning, just hours after Dimitar Berbatov was unshackled and unveiled as the newest slave on Colonel Ferguson's Old Trafford Plantation, the plan was to slice up the sulky Bulgarian and feed his limbs to the woodchipper. I was insane, combing the Yellow Pages for a Zoroastrian (preferably named "Vilma") to ritualistically shave my testicles.

But with time and the first few chapters of "The Joke" now having stewed around my head a bit, the gauntlet has been retrieved. The daggers, sheathed. I'm still going to have to buy a new Spurs shirt. Please, Dimi, $70 payable to The Likely Lad. The rage though, has passed. Berbatov was never staying at White Hart Lane. To have sold him at such an inflated rate-- and to bring in Young Campbell too-- is victory, however Pyhrric, for the club and its fans.

As first noted by PavlyuBent (nee BerbaKeane, nee BerbaBent), the credit in the outcome of this miserable, prolonged drama, goes largely to Those Batshit Arabs (TBA) who purchased Manchester City. Daniel Levy had no choice but to sell Berbatov by the transfer deadline and everyone knew it. By Monday morning, as Colonel Ferguson rose from his alcoholic stupor, there was no chance a club bidding against itself was going to pay Spurs' asking price. But in came TBA, always there to bail us silly Jews out of our silly Jewish messes, and their Citeh caper. Fourty-eight hours later Berbatov is, for no less than 30.75m, property of the second largest club in Manchester.

I'm a Spurs supporter. My heart is full and my life is one piece. There is joy (little "j") and pain and they can co-exist. But there are no tears. Not for this guy. Losing players is a part of this sport more so than any other. Football, as much as I love it, is still new to me. That, along with so many years of rooting for shitty-but-rich New York teams (Mets, Jets, Rangers), has made the process-- and the process is as bad if not worse than the fact-- of losing such a talented player that much more galling.

Berbatov signed from Leverkusen in the summer of 2006 with average expectations. But he was magic from the start. For six brilliant months it was flick-ons, dummies, step-overs and goals. Loads of goals, even if the highlight reel shows a lot of Middlesbrough and Slavia Prague.

The crack-up, the kind "you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about," came in the Spring of '07. Just one season at the Lane (and as noted, just six months before the chatter began) and it was clear that this was not a long term arrangement. In that regard, Monday's move was an anti-climax. This deal was done more than a year ago.

Football is fleeting, and especially so for the footballers. Berbatov is 27 years old. Health-permitting he has three or four more years to pad his fag fund. Staying at Tottenham, he would never have entered the Nou Camp as anything better than a paying customer. Ambition is not Dimitar Berbatov's sin.

It was his behavior, on-field and off, in concert with the agent Dantchev-- whom I imagine to look like Borat's producer-- that makes Berbatov such a disdainful character. Barry Bonds never played for the Mets, so I don't know how a Giants fan rationalized rooting for him. But it couldn't have come from a much different place than allowed me to pull on a Berbatov shirt every weekend. His sulky gait, the rolling of the eyes, the pleading arms-- it wore on for so long that now, a couple days after his departure, the only emotion is relief.

The team may hurt for goals this season, but come success or failure, there'll be nothing owed, no moral promissory note on my fandom. The Spurs players now at Tottenham are there because they believe in the manager, their system, and better-than-average Premier League wages. No illusions here about how fragile that peace may be, but for today at least, I can like my football team again.