The Glory Game Read online

  The apprentices got off the coach and Johnny told them to help with the balls and the gear. All apprentices have work to do as well as training. While the professionals go home after training is over for the day, the boys have to clean boots, wash out the dressing-rooms. Although this was the first day of the club’s pre-season training, the boys had had to report three days earlier, on the Monday. They’d been set to work right away, doing painting jobs, cleaning and whitening the lines on the practice pitches.

  The first team stood around on the lawns like nature’s stars, talking to each other in their own confident group. Even if you didn’t know any of their faces you could have told immediately they were the sixth form. They looked so adult and famous compared with the thin, half-developed apprentices. In another group stood the reserves, looking like reserves, lacking the first team’s Mediterranean tan or their natural superiority. They were equally stocky, but somehow rougher and tougher, with the right-length long hair but unkempt and all ends.

  The first team were saying hello and how are you and how’s it going to Ralph Coates. Everybody stood back to eye him. From the first team down to the apprentices, everybody wanted to have a look at Ralph Coates. It was his very first day at Spurs, the beginning of a new life, new friends, new rituals, new traditions. He had narrow trousers, compared with the first team’s obvious flares, and shoes which looked remarkably pointed. Surely even up in darkest Burnley they weren’t still wearing Italian shoes.

  Bill Nicholson had signed Ralph Coates during the summer for £190,000. It was the highest amount of cash ever paid for a British player. A record which no doubt would soon go, just like other records which Spurs have created in the transfer world over the years. But Coates wasn’t the most expensive player in the country that day – Martin Peters held that particular record, though his price of £200,000 had been made up of cash and a player in exchange. Martin Peters, of course, also plays for Spurs.

  Coates looked nervous as he shook hands all round, very politely. He’d been the star player in a team which had failed and been demoted. Would he be a star player in a team full of stars? How long would it take for him to settle in? Whose place would he take? Any new player, any new person, in any new group causes question marks.

  The new season would find Coates’s true worth, whatever that might be. The new season, like every other season, would also result in a new find. One of those young reserves would be bound to come through and join the sixth form and immediately start looking like a star. And if that happened, which star would fall? Apart from players maturing and finding form, or losing it, the season would also bring injuries. By the law of averages, there was bound to be at least one serious injury, putting a player’s whole career in jeopardy. It had happened last season, It would happen again.

  Martin Peters arrived, bringing the number of Jaguars to three. Pat Jennings had slipped in quietly, without saying much, and was standing at the back of the first group. Goalkeepers don’t say much.

  Peters went across and said hello to Coates, asking him curtly if he’d got a house, then he went in to the dressing-room to change. Martin Peters hates hanging around, doesn’t go in for chat and is never happier than when he’s sitting stripped and ready, all tense, with half an hour to go to kick-off.

  Peters, like Alan Mullery and Martin Chivers, already knew Coates. All three, being full England internationals, had played with him in the national team. The arrival of Coates now brought Spurs’ total of current England internationals to four, a greater number than any other London club would have for the start of that season.

  The first team went into the first team’s dressing-room and hung up their coloured long-collared shirts. Cyril Knowles, the left full-back, admired Coates’s old-fashioned shirt. Coates said thanks, very sincerely. ‘You’re only allowed the same clothes two days running,’ said Cyril, nodding to Philip Beal for confirmation. Philip said yes. ‘That’s the rule, Ralph.’ Coates looked suddenly very worried. They all laughed.

  Bill Nicholson, their manager, was changing with them, putting on his training shoes and shorts. For fifty-two, his body was hard and sturdy. He could almost have been mistaken for a player. Only his hair gave away his real age. It’s so closely cropped he looks as if he’s been sentenced.

  They went out and stood in front of the rose garden, waiting for Bill to say something. Each year, on the first day of the pre-season training, he usually gives a little pep talk, welcoming everybody briefly with a homily about the good name of the club and how it mustn’t be spoiled by things like long hair. Like most football managers, he has a phobia about long hair. But he said nothing. When he was ready, he simply led the way out of the room, across the lawns to the pitches.

  It was already seventy degrees and not quite ten thirty. The sun was blazing down as forty footballers in brilliant red, blue, yellow and green training sweaters appeared and started spanning out across the pitches. Behind them came Johnny Wallis and two other members of the coaching staff, dragging behind them forty brand new sparkling white footballs.

  The sweater colours had been decided by Bill Nicholson. Inside in the dressing-rooms he’d pinned up lists of four teams of ten, each a different colour. It was all very democratic. Each group had players from the first, reserves and youth teams, equally mixed. For the next four weeks, every new fifteen-year-old on £10 a week would be treated the same as an experienced £200-a-week man, twice his age.

  ‘We’ve got wonderful facilities here,’ says Nicholson. ‘Every player, from apprentice to first team, has the same opportunities to use them. That’s our promise when they join and we live up to it. They have to take turns, of course, but no one says bugger off, this is the first team’s ball court. It’s everyone’s.

  ‘We try to make it varied and interesting. I’ve never heard our players complain about the training. Obviously no player likes practising a skill in the rain so we go indoors to the ball court. Footballers don’t like endless running round the track. They prefer to run with a ball at their feet, but you’ve got to practise both.’

  He strode out across the pitches and stood in the middle of one pitch, surrounded by his players. He shouted to them that he wanted everyone to get a ball each and do some juggling, keeping it up six times, and then six times heading it, just to get the feel of it. After five minutes, he moved on to passing movements, telling them to split into pairs. Then they moved on to fives, with one in the middle, giving wall passes to the others in turn.

  For an hour he took them through a succession of ball exercises, each one getting more complicated. He blew a whistle when each was over, bellowing from the middle the directions for the next.

  Alan Mullery, captain of Spurs, was in the same group as Bobby Scarth. He bent down in front of him and went over any complicated instructions so that the boy could read his lips and understand his gestures.

  Ralph Coates looked more worried than Bobby. He was in a far group and finding it impossible to hear what Bill was saying. The old hands, like Mullery, had been through most of the exercises before. But to Coates, Nicholson’s was a strange voice with new tones, new phrases, new likes and dislikes to be mastered.

  During all the exercises, Nicholson kept up insistent criticism or encouragement. ‘Cyril Knowles, I was watching you there!’

  ‘You bloody would be,’ muttered Knowles, well out of earshot.

  ‘And I saw that, Gilly,’ barked Nicholson.

  Alan Gilzean had yawned, quickly turning his back to Nicholson when he’d felt it creeping out, but not quickly enough.

  After an hour, they moved to another pitch where Bill Watson, an ex-Olympic weight-lifting champion, took over. Twice a week throughout the season he takes Spurs for weight training and other exercises. He lined them up in rows and soon the sweat was pouring off them. The midday temperature was seventy-seven degrees. As he demonstrated each new exercise he breathed out heavily, giving a roar which echoed round the ground like a London bus putting on its air brakes.

  By this time there were about fifty spectators at the end of the pitch, kept at bay behind a rope, many of them girls, some families with kids, some working men just off night shift. They laughed at Bill Watson as he shouted and then oohed with sympathy as the forty players bent and desperately tried to keep up with him.

  Two press photographers were watching the training, the only two allowed on the ground that day. One was an agency man, to get the picture every London newspaper had asked for – Coates shaking hands with Mullery.

  The other was a local Cheshunt photographer, one used by the club for official pictures such as the club handbook and programmes. One of the jobs he’d had at the end of last season was to photograph the Spurs youth team because they’d won the Youth Cup. The club wanted a colour photograph of the team which would be sent as a present to each proud parent. ‘Terrible, terrible,’ Bill Nicholson had told the photographer when he brought in the print. The photographer was about to defend his work when Nicholson pointed at the haircuts. He wanted the photograph taken again – after they’d all had their hair cut.

  At eleven thirty, Bill Nicholson called a break. The groundsman brought tea and they all rushed to grab a plastic cup each, then threw themselves on the ground for a ten-minute rest. ‘We didn’t get no tea at Burnley,’ so Coates told his group. Nor did they touch a ball for the first week of training. It was all road runs at Burnley. ‘That’s this afternoon,’ someone told him, groaning.

  After tea, they returned to ball games, doing intricate five-man passing movements, heading games, hand-ball matches, all with complicated-sounding rules, some so new that even the older players couldn’t follow them.

  ‘Get your hair cut, Chivers, then you’d hear me,’ shouted Nicholson.

  Eddie Baily, the as
sistant manager, arrived. He’d been with his wife to hospital. He joined in, shouting loudly for greater effort. Eddie, like Bill Nicholson, is an ex-Spurs and England player. But whereas Bill keeps his thoughts and his tensions to himself, very rarely losing his temper, Eddie is more on the surface, shouting aloud his thoughts, even his prejudices, managing to work himself into a rage on apparently very little. But today he was relatively subdued, because of his wife. A few of the more senior players asked how she was. He said not very good. They hadn’t operated after all.

  They finished with some practice games, firstly five-a-side, and then two full-scale matches, with all four teams playing on the same pitch. Forty players playing two games at once. They all looked in amazement. It was the first time Bill had told them to do such an exercise. It was surprisingly interesting. There was a constant series of attacks with the two goalkeepers in each goal constantly diving to save shots. Given TV exposure, it could catch on.

  Then they broke for lunch. While they showered, their sweaty clothes were put back in the skips and into the coaches and sent back to Spurs to be dried. A new set of training clothes, forty shirts, undershirts, shorts, socks and training shoes, all clean, were already laid out for the afternoon training. Every article of clothing is dried immediately after use by the two full-time laundry ladies, back in Spurs’ own laundry.

  In the dining-room, the first team sat together. Coates was again being asked about his house and was he liking it. It was the only thing they could think of to ask him. The conversation then left him behind as it ranged round Japan, parties, cars, investments and girls.

  It was chicken soup, roast beef, tinned fruit and custard. During the season, their daily training always finishes by one-thirty. But for the four weeks of the pre-season, Cheshunt becomes a camp, where they spend each entire day, training and eating together. Meals by Mecca, a nice concession they’ve had for some years. At two-thirty, Bill Nicholson, who’d had lunch in the dining-room at his own table with Eddie Baily and the rest of the coaching staff, said they were going on a run. He was already in shorts and a training shirt and red training shoes. When everyone else was ready, he set off out of the ground, his legs going like pistons, and turned left up a country lane. Everyone followed behind, most of them running to keep up.

  It’s known as Bill’s road run, although it’s really a very fast walk. The leaders, who kept carefully abreast of Bill and never ahead, were flaying themselves like professional walkers to match his incredible stride. Even at his age it was obvious that he could equal any of them at road walking and was better than most.

  We spread out in a long line. From about the middle onwards, they were doing a fast jog to keep up. Eddie Baily was bringing up the rear on a bicycle, screaming at everyone to keep at it. Pat Welton, the youth-team manager, was running in the line, dressed in a tracksuit.

  I was wearing the normal training outfit, number 22, the number vacated by one of the reserves who’d moved to Torquay during the summer. Every professional on joining the club is given a number which is printed on each item of clothing. The numbers go from I up to 40. You get it at random, depending on which are vacant when you arrive. Joe Kinnear, for example, is number 8, the number Danny Blanchflower had when he was at the club. Way back in the 1930s, before they were all born, Bill Nicholson had number 8 when he too played for Spurs.

  It was by now well over eighty degrees and the road was running in tar which splatted as we went along. I felt myself falling further back and ended up with the slackers at the end, led by Roger Morgan, Cyril Knowles and Jimmy Neighbour.

  We went up a hill and the sweat was dripping from everyone. Eddie Baily was labouring heavily on his bicycle. Roger and Cyril were gently holding the back of his seat, unbeknown to Eddie.

  ‘Come on, you lot. Keep running. I’m surprised at you, Jimmy Neighbour. You know that Roger Morgan is a bad influence on you.’

  They were puffing and panting, too tired to comment till they got up the hill. Roger and Jimmy are two of Spurs’ wingers. Their future in the first team looked pretty gloomy, now that Ralph Coates had arrived.

  Roger Morgan, bought for £100,000 two seasons ago, had been out through injury much of last season. Jimmy Neighbour, a former Spurs apprentice and now still only twenty, had managed to make his first-team debut while Roger was injured. He’d been hailed as a new boy wonder by many papers. Jimmy, being younger and more innocent, tends to take a lead from the cocky, more experienced, rather flash Roger Morgan.

  ‘You’ve got nowhere, Jimmy Neighbour,’ shouted Eddie. ‘And you’ll get nowhere, not with him.’

  ‘Thanks, Ed,’ said Roger, laughing directly at him.

  ‘I mean it,’ said Eddie. ‘The object of a football team is to win trophies . . .’

  ‘Jimmy’s got a few,’ said Roger. ‘You should see the notches on his cock.’

  ‘That’s the sort of remark I mean,’ said Eddie. He shook his head in heavy disapproval.

  Eddie cycled on to shout at another group who were wandering off the pavement and into the road and looked in danger of being run over. When he went ahead, a bottle of orange juice appeared from someone’s shirt and was passed round, then thrown in a hedge. We passed a school and all the kids in the playground stopped to cheer and wave. One or two shouted ‘Arsenal, Arsenal’.

  Eddie screamed at everyone to take care and go into single file as we came to some workmen mending the road. A black labourer looked out of a hole and gave us a cheer. ‘Man, you’ve got it easy,’ he said to Eddie, jeering at him because he was on a bicycle.

  ‘Don’t force me,’ said Eddie, very quietly, cycling on, saving his reply till he was out of earshot. ‘Why don’t you go back to the jungle and eat bananas.’

  ‘Ignorant twat, that’s what you are,’ said Cyril Knowles, running beside Eddie.

  ‘I call you a white bastard, so what’s wrong with that?’ said Eddie. ‘I tell you to get back to your igloo, don’t I? You’re the one who’s ignorant.’

  Cyril comes from the far north, Yorkshire. He’s usually first when it comes to the cheeky remarks, baiting Eddie. His accent sounded funny. Almost everyone else at Spurs speaks broad London. About eighty per cent of the professionals come from the London area, which is unusual for a London club. At Arsenal and Chelsea a much larger proportion come from the north or from Scotland. Ralph Coates had been amazed that morning to be told he was the only Geordie in the Spurs camp. At Bumley there had been so many Geordies they’d often played Geordies against the rest in practice matches. Geordieland, of course, produces professional footballers out of all proportion to its size.

  ‘Christ, I could go a cold lager,’ said Alan Gilzean, the only Scotsman in the Spurs first team. He was jogging with difficulty, the sweat covering his ample forehead. He hates road walking. He thinks footballers aren’t meant to walk.

  Eddie moved along the long line again and Roger and the others got back to more serious topics. For several miles they discussed investments, houses and furnishings. They were trying to get Jimmy Neighbour, who is unmarried, to move out of his mum’s house and buy a little flat, which they would of course help him to use. They shouted to Joe Kinnear, who’d become a director of a furnishing company during the summer, asking what discount he could get for them.

  At the front, Bill was silently pounding on, with Martin Chivers and Peter Collins at his elbows and a trio of eager apprentices just behind. There was no talking at the front. At the back, it was all talking and jokes and oaths.

  We ran through a council estate and Roger gave a run-down on the trade-in price of every car outside every door.

  ‘Hey, there’s some new council houses going up,’ shouted Cyril. ‘You wanna get your name down, Ralph.’

  The road run finished about four. We covered about six miles. Not much, for a group of athletes, but arduous enough on the first day back in training, especially after a whole morning of other more gruelling physical exercises. Most of them made a great show of groaning and complaining, making out it was worse than it was, like a lot of schoolboys, all for Eddie’s benefit. No one moaned in Bill Nicholson’s presence.