The Glory Game

  TREACHERY

  THE NEW EDITION OF THE BRITISH FOOTBALL CLASSIC

  Hunter Davies

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licenced or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781780570112

  Version 1.0

  www.mainstreampublishing.com

  Copyright © Hunter Davies, 1972

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY (EDINBURGH) LTD

  7 Albany Street

  Edinburgh EH1 3UG

  First published 1972

  Reprinted with amendments 1990, 1994, 1996 and 1999

  ISBN 1 84018 242 3

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Introduction

  Dramatis Personae

  1 The First Day

  2 Ralph Coates

  3 Pre-Season Training

  4 The First Game

  5 Bill Nicholson

  6 The Supporters

  7 Alan Mullery

  8 The Directors

  9 The Skinhead Special

  10 Martin Chivers

  11 Nantes

  12 Reserves and Nerves

  13 Scouting for Boys

  14 Mullery’s Injury

  15 The Battle of Bucharest

  16 Background Staff

  17 Cyril Gets Dropped

  18 The Hangers-On

  19 Bill Goes to Bristol

  20 Mullery Misses a Party

  21 Super Leeds

  22 Pat Jennings

  23 Milan

  24 The European Final

  Appendices 1972

  1–2 Football Tactics: Drawings

  3–5 First Team Pool: Basic Facts

  6–11 First Team Pool: Football and Social Attitudes

  12 Management

  13 Directors

  Appendices 1985

  14 Where are they now?

  15 Directors, 1985

  16 Management, 1985

  17 Players, 1984–85

  18 Comments

  Appendices 1999

  19 Where are they now?

  20 Comments, 1985 and 1997

  21 Basic facts

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  This is the story of an English football club during the season 1971–72, a long time ago, in another century, where they did things differently. The money, the merchandising, the television exposure, the players, the clothes, the conditions, the styles, the stadia, everything would appear to have totally changed since this book was first published.

  At the time, I worried that it might be seen as only of interest to that half of north London who supported Spurs. At Arsenal and elsewhere, they might refuse to read it. Yet it has been in print constantly since 1972.

  In 1972, I went round saying, no, really, it could be about your team, any team today, at the top of its powers – just give it a chance. As the years went on, I’ve also had to add a warning – please ignore the mention of flares, people long gone, dated references you might not understand, and try not to laugh at the piddling wages, modest homes and modest lifestyles.

  Why has the book continued to sell so well? I suppose the simple reason is that inside a club, inside a dressing-room, basic things are much the same, despite the externals having changed so drastically. The fears, the tensions, the dramas, the personality clashes, the tedium of training, the problems of motivation, injuries, loss of form, the highs and the lows, new people coming through, old stars beginning to fade, that sort of stuff goes on, and will go on, forever.

  The 1972 edition is now a collector’s item, if you can find a copy. I’ve been asked for it time and time again over the years, not just by Spurs fans, but by bookshops, new and second-hand, all over the world. I have only one copy of the original left, and that is very filthy because my son Jake, then aged eight, used to read and re-read it in bed every night. The whole book is full of very complicated red crosses and ticks. He gave each section and each player a star rating, then he’d change his mind, and his rating systems.

  I suppose the most correspondence I have had concerns the forty or so pages of appendices I put at the end of the book, all about the players’ football details, lifestyles and opinions. I’m a sucker for any sort of list, and at the end of a book I always bung in all the stuff in note form I haven’t been able to work into the body of the text. I realised anyway that as I had such intimate access to a group of eighteen or so sportsmen, at the height of their careers, I should take the opportunity to ask them all the cheeky questions I’d always wanted to ask. Getting each of them at home, on their own, away from the ridicule of their team-mates, made it fairly easy to put personal questions to them, the sort an outsider would never dare ask otherwise.

  I did ask an academic friend, Dr John Carrier of LSE, to help me phrase the questions, as he said I owed it to future research to get the thing done properly. At the time, I rather scoffed. But over the years, I should think not a month has gone by without some student somewhere writing to tell me that he or she is using my material in their own research thesis. What normally happens is that they put my findings against a present-day group of sportsmen, not necessarily footballers, not necessarily in Britain. You can, of course, get degrees in sport these days, at various colleges and universities. Nice to think I’ve helped a few PhDs along the way.

  In this new edition, I have included some further appendices for anoraks everywhere. As well as the original 1972 surveys of the players, their life and habits, there is a similar survey of the 1985 team and also of the 1997 team, so we now have three lots of surveys to be compared and contrasted. I have also included details of what happened to the 1972 team and what those players are doing today.

  Over the years I’ve also had, of course, the ordinary fan letters. In the 1980s, I got a letter from Bryan Robson, captain of Manchester United and England, who was still a schoolboy when the book first came out. ‘A friend of mine has told me your book The Glory Game is the best of its kind yet written. If at all possible, could you please let me have a copy?’ But I wasn’t able to help him. I just couldn’t find a copy at the time. Morris Keston, that ardent Spurs supporter who was interviewed in the book (see Chapter 18), frequently wanted more copies to give as presents.

  Then, in 1985, out of the blue, this terribly good firm in Edinburgh – yes, Edinburgh in Scotland – said they would like to reprint it, just as it was, but with a new introduction. Why? Well, Cyril Connolly once said that any book which is reprinted more than ten years after publication has become a classic. So I suppose this book must, in its modest little way, be considered some sort of classic. Of its kind.

  The most surprising aspect of all, back in 1972, was that we sold foreign editions. This is very unusual with such a book. It was published in Norway, as Kong Football, and in Denmark, as Kong Fodbold. The Scandinavian interest can be explained as they took our Match of the Day live. It was even published in the United States, by St Martin’s Press, which was the bi
ggest surprise of all, considering that at the time soccer was not being played much in America, and the names of the Spurs players were completely unknown across the Atlantic.

  It was also serialised by two London newspapers, at the same time, which was a great help, the Sunday Times and The People. And that was where my problems began. It ended with me getting a threatening letter from a solicitor, the only one I’ve had in writing books, from Lord Goodman, our leading legal light of the day, or at least it was from his firm, Goodman Derrick. The Spurs board, so the letter said, wanted the book withdrawn while changes were made.

  During the first few months of doing the book, living with the team, both at the training ground and in the dressing-room, I had always expected something to go wrong. This was a bit more than I had bargained for.

  It all began when I approached the club, as a book writer, not as a sports journalist, saying I wanted to observe them over a season. I had been a Spurs fan since 1960 when I’d arrived in London, so naturally I wanted to devote my time to a team I had always enjoyed watching. But in terms of a book, any other First Division team would have done. The experts I spoke to, sports writers like Brian Glanville, warned me off Spurs. Their board was known as being very stuffy and unfriendly and Bill Nicholson, the manager, could also be stiff and cool. I wouldn’t be allowed in. No football reporter in Britain, then or now, is ever given entry to the dressing-room.

  Looking back, I’m not sure how I did it. I suppose not being a football correspondent was a help. They didn’t know my name and therefore had nothing against me. I wrote to the chairman, the manager, the captain, explaining in detail what I had in mind. I then had various chats with them, promising that each person in the book would read the bits about themselves, and the manager and the chairman could read the whole lot before publication and correct any factual mistakes. I also agreed to share the profits, 50–50, with the first-team pool. (This in the end drove my agent nearly demented. As small payments dribbled in, he had to divide them nineteen ways. I think he was quite pleased in the end when the original book went out of print.)

  Nobody at the club ever actually said no, I couldn’t do the book, but at no time did I have a contract with any official. That was why I feared, for so long, that if my face did not fit, I would be straight out and all my work would have been wasted. I was willing to accept that. I was doing the book for my personal interest, because I wanted to get inside a dressing-room to see what life was really like at a professional club.

  Very often I didn’t have the proper tickets, and all football clubs are obsessed by passes and tickets, but after a few weeks I managed to walk around as if I was part of the club. Travelling away, both in Britain and abroad, was the easiest, because I was presumed to be a reserve player. All the players were completely helpful and honest. I went to all of their homes, was invited to their parties, heard their worst fears, but I hope did not betray any real confidences. There was one senior player they all disliked behind his back, but he never knew this, so I felt it was unfair to point it up, though there are clues. Naturally, I kept references to girls in hotels to the minimum.

  The most exciting part of all was being in the dressing-room before and after a match. I always tried to hide, to get into a corner, because I felt sure that one day the manager, in some rage with the team, would suddenly catch sight of me out of the corner of his eye, and I would be out. The scene I remember most was in Nantes (Chapter 11) when Bill for once had a proper row with Martin Chivers, the one which finished, by chance, with the broken glass on the floor. I knew then he was looking for someone to vent his rage on, but I managed to escape.

  It was interesting to read Bill Nicholson’s own book, Glory Glory, published some years later (Macmillan, 1984), in which he says that he was upset that I had been allowed ‘to become virtually one of the players’. With hindsight, he would not have allowed it. After the Nantes match, so he wrote, he found himself keeping quiet when he wanted to say a lot of things, just because I was there. ‘Davies needed that sort of freedom to enable him to write such a revealing book. People in the game and our supporters enjoyed the book . . . but there were occasions when I deliberately held back because of his presence.’

  I apologise, Bill, if I did inhibit you. But of course the real basis of his problems at that time, which he honestly admits in his very interesting book, was Chivers. I could see it in Bill’s eyes all the time, yet he never let his real emotions come out, even when I wasn’t there. (And though I got into the dressing-room, he did bar me from team talks, in which players told me he was equally tight-lipped.) He could never find a way to motivate Chivers, a task beyond most managers, and would be driven into silent rages when the player, for all his gifts, would disappear completely in vital games.

  At the training ground, however, Bill was always very helpful, making me a welcome visitor, allowing me to take part in the pre-season training, joining in all the exercises, wearing the training strip, getting in the bath with them afterwards. That was a marvellous beginning to my season and gave me excellent material for the first chapter of the book.

  When The Glory Game came out, several football reporters on the popular papers tried to stir things up by implying I had been cruel to the players, making them out to be morons. This is untrue, as I hope you will see, though I did finish the season feeling rather sorry for professional footballers, their lives so regulated by those background coaches, missing out on so much of the normal growing-up years, continually under pressure, both physical and mental, and, most of all, getting such little pleasure out of actually playing football.

  The popular press also got Eddie Baily, the assistant manager, to say that he was upset. If I did upset him, then I do regret it. There was this conspiracy in football that all books about the game, especially official books, about individual clubs, must be utterly anodyne, with no flesh-and-blood people, no real conversations or feelings, no emotions, just the usual ghosted banalities or dry statistics, and certainly no bad language. In the book, Eddie does shout and swear quite a bit, but then he’s a coach. That’s what coaches do. And in far stronger terms than anything I reported.

  I like to think that it did give a glimpse of the real world of football. Not the whole truth, of course, but there were no lies, no public-relations gloss or supporters’ club genullections. The strangest thing of all is that no one has done a similar book since. Perhaps I ruined the pitch for everyone else. The word got round in football that I had done a hatchet job, been nasty about them, revealed things which they would have preferred to keep secret, so perhaps other clubs have been determined to keep nosey writers out of their dressing-rooms. Whatever the reason, a similar book, with similar access, has not appeared.

  I can’t see it happening either. Every player and his dog has an agent today, plus a lawyer and accountant. A host of sponsors follow them around, merchandising and marketing men pull their strings and newspapers have them under contract for every pearl. Getting into the Premiership dressing-room is probably impossible, but even if you did, you’d need dozens of legal agreements before you could publish a word.

  My 1972 legal row, of course, gave people in football the idea that I had indeed been horrid. What caused the Spurs directors to instruct a solicitor was the way The People did their serialisation of the book. I’m not blaming them. They, naturally, gutted it very cleverly, stringing all the juiciest bits together. I honestly didn’t think there were any, and still don’t, but I suppose a superficial reader could see lots of references to, say, Gilzean having lots of empty bottles in front of him, and be led into thinking that the book must be full of footballers boozing. Tut tut. Footballers drinking? What an allegation.

  As I had agreed with the players, they read the bits about themselves. Bill was given the whole manuscript, though I doubt if he ever read it properly. But I had proof that the chairman indeed read every word because he sent it back with his handwritten comments on a lot of pages. I told the lawyers all this, and sent them ev
idence, and that was the end of the matter. I didn’t hear another word.

  In the chairman’s defence, I’m sure he read the bits not about himself rather quickly, and probably did not recognise them when he saw them reproduced in The People. It is now all rather trivial, a very small storm in a half-time teacup. But I suppose it did help to give the impression that the book might be hot stuff. Reading it now, such allegations are laughable. When you think what modern pop stars reveal about themselves in the press, and even many footballers, then this book reads like Enid Blyton.

  The sort of Second World War language and metaphors with which Eddie Baily used to exhort his troops, urging them over the top, were still typical of the times. Both he and Bill had been in the army, had seen men act like men, not like these long-haired fairies. As with so many managers and coaches of the day, they were from another world, another generation. Their hatred of long hair was real. It did drive them mad, hence Bill making the whole youth team have a new photograph taken, with a different hair style. Imagine that happening today.

  The gulf between such managers and their players was enormous. They had grown up in the age of a maximum £20 wage, which meant that in their playing days footballers had earned little, with no nightclub life, no commercialisation, no TV, no groupies chasing them. People like Nicholson and Bill Shankly in many ways despised their players for being soft and cosseted. I once met a famous Liverpool player who said that when he had a broken leg, Shankly accused him of doing it deliberately. Oh, they were hard men, those old 1960s managers.

  There are still a few hard men who believe footballers have to be treated like children, disciplined and kept in their place, but they are dying out. The modern manager has much more in common with the modern footballer. He too earns a big wage as a manager. That is one of the many changes in recent years, the rise of the Manager as Star. Successful ones are courted by the media, have their own columns in the press, and rival clubs, at home and abroad, offer them fortunes, enough to set them up for life, if it is thought they can save their team. I don’t know what Bill Nicholson earned at Spurs, but I bet it was ridiculously little.