The Glory Game Read online

  Since 1972 we have seen the arrival of black footballers. Spurs had none, at any level, when I wrote the book. Behind the scenes there was clear antipathy and prejudice, though that again was conditioning, people brought up in a certain way at a certain time. That mentality has gone. Most teams now have three or four black players – but so far very few Asians.

  Another big change in recent years has been the arrival of players from abroad, attracted by big wages and the freedom of contract. Often these days there are only one or two English players in a leading English team. Hard to imagine this happening back in 1972, yet it wasn’t long after this that the first foreign imports arrived at White Hart Lane.

  I went to see Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa play their first game for Spurs, up at Nottingham on 19 August 1978, reporting the match for the Sunday Times. We’d had a dreary and very unglamorous few years, we Spurs supporters, watching the team drop to the Second Division, oh ignominy, and, even worse, having to suffer Arsenal’s success, but Keith Burkinshaw had pulled off a master stroke, spiriting away two Argentine World Cup players, though no one then knew much about them. On that occasion, Villa looked the likelier to succeed, as the Forest players found it almost impossible to knock him off the ball, but Ossie seemed a bit more frail and perhaps not up to our rough English style. (It ended 1–1.)

  At Cheshunt, the next day, almost 10,000 turned up just to watch the new Argentinians go through a training session. It heralded the age of the foreign imports. Even old-fashioned, traditional British managers decided it was time to start scouting abroad, instead of the lower reaches of the Scottish divisions.

  In the end, Ossie proved to be the better buy. Villa went home sooner, and was never an automatic first-team choice, yet he has left behind an image which will remain with all British football supporters, at least those who remember the Cup final of 1981, the centenary final, in which Villa dribbled, as if in slow motion, as if he was never going to get there, right through a crowded penalty area and scored his extraordinary goal.

  Perhaps the most amazing change of all has been the money in football. Everything goes up all the time – wages, income, the price of season tickets. As I write, it’s hardly worth jotting down the figures as they’ll be out of date by the time I finish the paragraph. But here are a few facts to show the scale and momentum. In 1972, the annual turnover at Spurs, from all sources, was £500,000. They didn’t, of course, in those days have such vulgar things as advertising in the ground or in the programme. Nor did Arsenal. Top clubs, proud of their image, did not do such things. As for having the name of some commercial sponsor on the front of one’s shirt, the very idea was repellent.

  In 1979, annual income had grown slowly to £1.4 million. By 1985 it had jumped to £5 million, thanks partly to the introduction of something else not thought about in 1972 – executive boxes. In 2000, Spurs’ turnover was over £40 million. It seemed a lot – but not as much as Manchester United’s £100 million.

  An established player in the Spurs side of 1972 was earning £10,000 a year. That is now the norm for one week’s wages for a fairly ordinary Premier player. Superstars, foreign players, glamorous players can easily earn £2 million a year from all sources – with the very top ones getting about £5 million a year. It means that one player today can earn in a year ten times as much as the whole of Spurs FC earned in 1972. I happened to interview Bobby Charlton in 2001 for a BBC Radio 4 programme, about reaching the age of 64, and I asked him afterwards what was the most he ever earned in football. He thought hard and said £15,000 in 1968, that was his best-ever year as a player. By then, he’d won the World Cup with England and the European Cup with Manchester United. You still can’t actually do better than that. Yet his £15,000 in one year is what a similar top player today earns in ONE DAY.

  When players retire now, they need never work again, as anyone who has played a few years in the Premiership should have several million in the bank, and probably several houses. At the end of this book, in the appendix on what that 1972 team is now doing, you’ll see that Terry Naylor is working as a postman. Hard to believe that any of our stars of today will end up as postmen.

  In the 1972 survey, I quizzed them about the possibility of staying in football. Out of eighteen in the first-team pool that year, eleven said things like, ‘Not bloody likely. I’ve seen Bill Nicholson after a game, and I couldn’t stand it. I’d end up in a loony bin.’ Six said they’d like to coach, either amateurs or professionals, but that was all. Only one actively contemplated being a manager. That was Martin Peters. ‘I love the game so much,’ he said.

  After training, most players, then and now, talk about cars, girls, clothes, girls, holidays, money, music, girls. Martin would watch the apprentices and point out things I’d missed, predict who would make it, and he was always right. He did become a manager, but alas not for long. Too soft, too remote, too cerebral? There is a theory that only failed or flawed players make it in management. If you have known only success as a player, it is hard to cope with failure as a manager. Martin Peters went on to work in insurance. (He’s now also a director at Spurs.)

  But the strange thing is that eight from that year at Spurs went on to become managers, despite what they said at the time. Alan Mullery, captain that year, seemed obvious management material, though at the time he denied it. He was the one who feared he’d end up in a loony bin. For a while he did well as a manager, at Brighton and Fulham. Mike England, known as ‘Brains’ behind his back because they all thought he was slow, became a good manager of the Welsh national team. Steve Perryman went into management at Watford, though not quite as successfully as Joe Kinnear, who worked wonders at Wimbledon. Two players, both in the book, but reserves at the time, also went into management: Phil Holder became manager at Brentford, and Graeme Souness, well, he’s been manager almost everywhere. The eighth manager was the late and much lamented Cyril Knowles, who died in August 1991, aged forty-seven, the first fatality amongst the players who appeared in The Glory Game.

  As I write, we have at long last got an old boy at Spurs, the Blessed Glenn Hoddle, but who knows for how long, or how long Spurs will remain at White Hart Lane. That will be the end of an era. Arsenal have already done their deal leaving Highbury for ever. While working on the book I did come to feel a great sympathy for the players – and also the manager. He knows the worst long before we do. He realises the mistakes he has made, the dummies he has bought. He sees loss of form weeks before we do, knows about injuries being hidden, weaknesses being carried. He hears about domestic daftness, drink, drug and driving problems which players are striving to keep secret. He has to deal with the ones who can’t be told, the ones too thick to learn, the ones too clever for their own good. He knows the cowards and the cheats.

  I also realised how the players suffer. They feel the agony and experience the pain more than the supporters – and they have to live it, seven days a week. We can go home at five o’clock on a Saturday, kick the telly, switch on the wife, settle down with a Holsten Pils and feel sick. That gets it over with for another week. The players, poor petals, cannot escape.

  Despite being millionaires, the pressures are if anything greater today. There are bigger squads, more and often better people waiting on the bench, greater rewards for the few teams who succeed but greater perils and further to fall for the teams and payers who don’t make it.

  They should still be prepared to be shot at, shat on, by fans who don’t quite understand what is going wrong or why, by reporters who know only part of the story, and by managers who know too much and appear at times nasty, brutish and short-memoried.

  All the same, the players are human. They are not primarily in it for the money, whatever we might think when they roar around in their Ferraris. They do try hard, train hard and truly cannot understand loss of form, loss of confidence or loss of loyalty from people they thought would always love them. This book is an attempt to take you into their world, to give an understanding of the pains and pleasur
es of being a professional footballer.

  Hunter Davies

  2001

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  * * *

  First-team players Alan Mullery (captain), Martin Peters, Martin Chivers, Pat Jennings, Alan Gilzean, Mike England, Cyril Knowles, Philip Beal, Joe Kinnear, Steve Perryman, Roger Morgan, Jimmy Pearce and Ralph Coates. Leading reserves Tony Want, John Pratt, Terry Naylor, Peter Collins, Ray Evans, Jimmy Neighbour, Barry Daines and Phil Holder.

  Manager Bill Nicholson

  Assistant manager Eddie Baily

  Trainers Johnny Wallis and Cecil Poynton

  Youth-team manager Pat Welton

  Club doctor Brian Curtin

  Directors Sidney Wale (chairman), Charles Cox (vice-chairman), Arthur Richardson, Godfrey Groves, Geoffrey Richardson

  Club secretary Geoffrey Jones

  Assistant secretary Bill Stevens

  1. THE FIRST DAY

  * * *

  Summer had been very late acomin’ in and June had been all rain but now we’d had over a week of sweltering sun with temperatures over eighty and everyone was convinced that summer had at last arrived. It was Thursday, 15 July, and Wimbledon had just finished. Miss Goolagong was still in everyone’s minds but cricket was now dominating the sports pages. The school holidays had yet to begin. Most of the population were thinking about their summer holidays. Very few were thinking about football. It wasn’t the weather, it wasn’t the season, it wasn’t the time for football.

  Tottenham High Road, up in the anonymous terraced wilds of north London, looked almost pleasant. It was nearing ten o’clock and the morning rush hour was over for another day. The first of the early shoppers were appearing, rolling up their summer-dress sleeves.

  The home of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is at 748 High Road, N17. You could easily miss it, if you were rushing along the High Road with your head down. It’s set slightly back from the road with the main entrance down a little lane beside a pub, the White Hart. But once you’ve stepped back and taken it all in, it’s hard to believe that anyone could miss it. The stadium lurks behind the High Road like a vast battleship with its floodlights towering over the rooftops for miles around.

  The stands were empty. There was just one car in the large carpark, stranded in a far corner like a leftover from one of last season’s forgotten dramas. As far as Spurs were concerned, 15 July was the start of a new season. For any professional club, the four weeks of full-time pre-season training are four of the most vital of the year.

  An empty coach swung into the carpark and reversed, backing up towards a door in the corner of the stadium. Inside the boot room were ten boys, in sparkling clean shirts and well-pressed hipster trousers. Three of them were sixteen and the others were only fifteen. One was reading out bits from the Melody Maker while the others jeered. When they heard the coach, they stopped and opened the door of the boot room and allowed the sun to stream in.

  For seven of the boys, all newly signed apprentice professionals, it was the first day of their lives as full-time footballers. The other three were apprentices who’d been at it for up to a whole season already. They told the others to put the boots in the skips and then push the skips out and put them in the boot of the coach.

  Johnny Wallis, the trainer, was sorting out the strips. Above him were rows and rows of boxes, all labelled with their contents. ‘White tops for black feet’ said a box behind his head. He supervised the boys as they loaded the skips, the balls and finally a large weighing machine onto the coach. Then the boys got on the coach themselves and sat on their own at the back, waiting. Johnny sat at the front with the driver.

  Two of the older boys had their arms round each other’s shoulders, almost abstractedly, as if for comfort, looking out of the windows towards the offices, waiting for Pat Welton, the youth-team manager. The fifteen-year-olds seemed nervous. They looked too young for the battles ahead, too innocent for the world they were entering. They appeared unaware that in almost every way they’d voluntarily given up leading a normal life.

  In many ways, they’d taken the major step years ago. At least one of the ten had been first approached by Spurs when he was only twelve and a half years old. From that moment, he’d lost interest in school work or any desire for a trade apprenticeship. All of them had known for at least a year they were going to Spurs. All of them had been passionately desired, coaxed and coached, encouraged in almost every way, except financially, to sign on the dotted line and become a Spurs apprentice.

  Of the ten hopefuls in the back of the bus, sitting so eagerly and so patiently, probably only one would reach the top and finally make the Spurs first eleven. Three or four more might make it to full professional status and play for the reserves, then leave to play in other teams, lower down the leagues. The rest, well, they could end up at eighteen without a job in football and unqualified for anything else.

  Two of the sixteen-year-olds said yes, they knew the problems. They knew the odds were against them. But having once got to Spurs, you could always go somewhere else. If you started at a lower club and failed, that was it.

  A dark-haired boy from Belfast, ex-captain of the Northern Ireland schoolboys team, said he had chosen Spurs from a total of twelve professional clubs who had approached him. If he failed at Spurs, he’d be too disappointed to carry on. He’d go straight back to Belfast and get an ordinary job. The boy beside him, who came from Oxford, said he’d play for anyone, in any league, if Spurs chucked him out. He’d manage somehow.

  At the front of the bus, the driver was peeping his horn. Johnny Wallis, sitting beside him, said that Pat must be in Bill Nicholson’s office. They’d have to wait.

  ‘Oh Gawd,’ said the driver, ‘I hope it’s not like this every day.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I’ve done some miles since last season,’ said the driver, making conversation.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Johnny, not listening. ‘I was in Japan. You should have seen the turf. It was like coconut matting.’

  The boys at the back strained to hear any of the Japan gossip. It had been the first-team’s close-season tour, not of course for the youth or reserve players. Two and a half weeks at luxury hotels, all expenses paid, plus pocket money. They’d only got back on 11 June, tanned and affluent-looking, loaded down with cheap dolls, transistors and cassettes.

  At one time, just a few years ago, all footballers got three months off in the summer, taking other jobs to supplement their wages. These days, with wages up to £200 a week, they don’t need other jobs, but they do need time off. Apart from those ten boys on the coach, every full professional making his way to Cheshunt that day felt that the new season had arrived too quickly. They thought of the four weeks of training ahead as a long hard drag.

  At last a message came that the coach could go. Pat was going by car. As they drove out of the ground, past the White Hart pub and right up the Tottenham High Road, a very fit-looking middle-aged lady in a short summer dress was going past on a bicycle. She waved at the coach and Johnny Wallis waved back. The boys took no notice. It was Darky, wife of Bill Nicholson, the Spurs manager. Their house is only a few minutes from the ground. She always says he would like to be even nearer, perhaps have a flat in the stand, so that he need never leave.

  It was almost a rural sight, the trainer waving to the manager’s wife as she cycled past to do her shopping, as if Spurs were a village football team. It all comes down to scale, when the carpark is empty and fifty thousand people aren’t thronging the High Road.

  The coach was heading for the club’s training ground at Cheshunt, nine miles up the Cambridge Road. Football clubs never practise on their own pitch – the turf is too valuable. The sixteen-year-olds were talking about the training sessions they’d done at Cheshunt last season, being men of the world, having seen it all before. The younger ones took it all in, apprehensively. The Oxford boy said he’d hurt his back right at the beginning, with all the exercises, and had felt rotten for h
alf of the season.

  ‘I didn’t know whether I was coming or going,’ he said.

  ‘It was being told not to hold the ball,’ said another. ‘That’s what I didn’t like. I thought they’d let me show a bit of individual skill, but that was the last thing they wanted. No one can show off. You must get rid of the ball at once.’

  On the back row was Bobby Scarth, the son of a former Spurs professional, looking out of the window. He’d shown such natural ability in evening trials while still at school the previous year that the club had decided to sign him on as an apprentice for one year, even though he had hearing difficulties. The other boys had already got used to him, and he to them. He was to be treated like everyone else and no fuss made of him. It was hoped by the club that the press would be unaware of him for as long as possible.

  There are three pitches at Cheshunt, one with a miniature stadium, plus extensive dressing-rooms, showers and a large dining-room. In all, about nine acres of lush lawns in the best part of suburban Hertfordshire. They bought it twenty years ago for about £35,000. Today it must be worth around a quarter of a million. They own it freehold, just as they own their ground in Tottenham. Many clubs lease their stadium and their training ground, if they have one.

  A few of the first-team players were just arriving. Alan Gilzean was getting out of his Jaguar. Joe Kinnear was signing autographs by his new MGB GT. Mike England arrived in his new Capri, a surprise present from his wife (even footballers’ wives have money these days). A group of about half a dozen teenage girls screamed and ran towards him, then stopped, hesitant. Girls who run after pop stars keep running, desperate to grab hold of everything, half-convinced he’s their property anyway. They buy his records and feel they own him. But girls, and boys, who hang around football stars are much more respectful. They keep their distance, cowed when they reach the presence. The girls held each other, nudging and whispering, and then, giggling, they shyly asked for his autograph.