St James’ Park. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

IT’S come to something when you can’t sit down and enjoy Spurs do the typical Spursy thing of imploding on a Sunday afternoon. By the way, it’s also come to something when some Spurs fans think they are in crisis because they are only third in the table and have lost a match against the now financially-doped Newcastle United.

The identity of their opponents was what made it so difficult to enjoy, sponsored as they are by a country where, let’s remind ourselves because Alan Shearer won’t tell you, homosexuality is criminalised, torture is still used, people are locked up for opposing the absolute monarchy and there is no freedom to write opinion articles like this.

Oh yes, and Saudi Arabia’s rulers – according to US intelligence and general suspicion –ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Yes, too right there’s no laughs in this column this week.

Perhaps it is because Eddie Howe seems like such a nice guy that pundits are happy to purr on about the rise of a new Saudi-owned football force with money to burn, but he had the cheek to say this over the weekend: “Credit the players for the performance – don’t look at how the team was put together.” Don’t look! DON’T LOOK!

The absence of any real kickback in the media of how the club is transforming itself is ugly in itself, but to hear the usual football-before-anything studio guests celebrate Newcastle’s shortcut to the top.

As in our chaotic national politics, with the Magpies, we are in the “stand for nothing, fall for everything” territory.

Howe has played a dutiful representative. You’ll hear him talk about how the progress hasn’t all been about money and, as we saw with his time at Bournemouth, there is no doubt that he is a clever coach. But nobody is foolish enough to believe that the £200million already spent on new players is the end of it. It’s only the very beginning, with a Saudi magic money tree now firmly planted in the North East.

We’ve seen with Manchester City how, in the end, nobody is bothered, though. How many times did anybody mention who was pumping money into the Etihad? Instead, all we got was the usual media bores waxing lyrical about how lucky we were to be watching the world’s best players.

Chelsea’s successes also come with an asterisk next to them, having been polluted by a man whose assets were ultimately chased by the UK government.

Of course, all big teams have put money first to compete – Arsenal’s sponsorship with the Rwandan tourist board is problematic.

But, ugh, on Sundays like the one just gone, it’s almost a case of rather Spurs than Saudi Arabia.