Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Yid

"They're beginning to get on my nerves. Who are those guys?"

So says Butch to Sundance in the classic 1969 buddy Western as they are chased by a relentless six-strong posse during the central sequence.

Didn't end well for them, did it?

And so Spurs look over their shoulder. And there are our dogged pursuers. Tracking us at an almost perfectly constant distance. Getting on our nerves. Except we know who those guys are.

It's a horrible feeling. And it makes you do stupid things. Like look at the remaining fixtures and work out how many points we'll end up on. People treat this like an exact science. Newspapers run features showing who's going to pick up and drop points when and where – and print 'final' tables based on those 'results'. (I've just done it, and I reckon 67)

What you're actually doing there is trying to predict the outcome of 12 football matches. If you could do that, you would, within a week or two, win enough money to buy Tottenham Hotspur and ensure we finish above Arsenal and everyone else every single season.

Back to Butch and Sundance. What can we learn from them? Well, in the end, the pressure of pursuit caused them to throw themselves off a cliff and into a ravine. I think it was a ravine.

Anyway, that kind of worked, and then they moved to Bolivia, and then they died in a hail of bullets. The film ends, famously, on a freeze frame of them in their last moments of life. With a happy ending still possible.

Spurs' equivalent will be a close-up of of Danny Graham's face, a study in cold concentration, the electronic scoreboard in the back ground showing three numbers: a 90, a 2 and a 1. He is clean through on goal, Lloris has come out to narrow the angle, but Graham looks like he knows what he's about to do, he looks certain.

And the sound? In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid it's gunfire, in Spurs' season it will be the sound of 30,000+ plastic seats clacking back into the vertical position for another restless summer.