THE BOYS FROM WHITE HART LANE
Martin Cloake & Adam Powley
This electronic edition Published by Vision Sports Publishing in 2011
Vision Sports Publishing Ltd
2 Coombe Gdns
London SW20 0QU
www.visionsp.co.uk
First published by Vision Sports Publishing in 2008
This paperback edition published by Vision Sports Publishing in 2011
Epub ISBN: 978-1907637-10-0
Book ISBN: 978-1907637-08-7
Text © Martin Cloake & Adam Powley
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the publisher.
Editor: Jim Drewett
Design: Doug Cheeseman
Copy editor: Ian Turner
Special thanks to Panini for kindly allowing us use of the fantastic football cards on the front cover.
www.paninigroup.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is stored at the British Library
In Memory of Tony Fuller
MARTIN
To Mum, who wondered if me going to see this team was a good idea, and to Cath, Daniel and Tom
ADAM
For all the family and for much-missed dad, who first took me to see the boys from White Hart Lane
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 STEVE PERRYMAN
“IF YOU’RE HONEST, IF YOU DO IT RIGHT, I’M YOUR MAN”
2 PAUL MILLER
“LOOK THE PART, ACT THE PART, BE THE PART”
3 RICKY VILLA
“MY DREAM WAS TO SCORE A GREAT GOAL IN A GREAT PLACE”
4 OSSIE ARDILES
“TO PLAY FOOTBALL IS THE BEST THING IN LIFE”
5 GARRY BROOKE
“IT WASN’T WORK – IT WAS GOING TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE TO DO”
6 TONY GALVIN
“WHAT A BUNCH OF WALLIES”
7 GRAHAM ROBERTS
“MY GAME WAS ALL ABOUT HEART”
8 TONY PARKS
“YOU JUST PLAYED FOOTBALL BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO BE IN A CUP FINAL”
9 GEORGE MAZZON
“FOOTBALL CAN’T LAST FOREVER. ENJOY IT WHILE IT LASTS”
10 PETER SHREEVE
“THE JOB WAS MADE FOR ME – AND I WAS MADE FOR THE JOB”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Producing this book has been an inspiring experience for us, not only because it gave us the chance to meet the players we watched as kids and get the inside story of the team we still think of as ‘ours’. What’s also been inspiring is the goodwill and enthusiasm we’ve encountered along the way.
First mention must go to Steve Perryman. Without him, this book would never have happened. He has spent long hours speaking to us about his experiences, contacting the players and vouching for our integrity as Spurs-supporting writers when we were pestering his old team-mates to give us an insight into the close-knit world of the dressing room. Along the way, Steve has provided many thoughtful suggestions and much background information. He is also one of the most genuinely friendly and straightforward people we’ve ever had the pleasure of working with – as he would say, a proper fella.
Jim Drewett and Toby Trotman at Vision Sports Publishing also deserve a special mention. They have showed enormous faith in us and their understanding of and passion for sport has enabled us to produce something which, we hope, provides a portrait of the times in line with the vision they had when establishing VSP. Their support and style of work on editorial and marketing matters is much appreciated, as is their willingness to respond to our frequent and varied questions with good humour and honesty. We are pleased to count them as good friends as well as colleagues.
Many other people have played their part in helping produce this book. The knowledge and accessibility of Spurs historian Andy Porter and statistician and historian Bob Goodwin have been invaluable, and we thank them for providing definitive answers to our questions. Paul Allen at the Professional Footballers’ Association also put in some much-appreciated effort on our behalf, as did Pablo Ardiles.
Thanks to Doug Cheeseman for his creativity and expertise in designing a cover that really does convey the spirit of the times and to Clive Batty for bringing his keen eye to bear on what must have been painful reading for a true Blue!
We’ve had many conversations with fellow Spurs fans, friends, and sports writers, all of whom have informed our approach to writing this book. For this, we would like to thank, in no particular order, Jim Duggan, Julie Welch, Bruce Lee, Bernie Kingsley, Steve Davies, Annelise Jespersen, Nick Auer, Julian Richards, Rick Mayston, Justyn Barnes, Phil and Ian Katz, Rabbi Crackers, Crocket, Pete Panayi and Andy Breckenbridge.
As always, our families have had to put up with us hiding away tapping at keyboards until late into the night, heading off at short notice to do interviews and spending vast amounts of time emailing and phoning each other to discuss the production of this book. Their support and understanding does not go unnoticed.
The last word of thanks must go to the players themselves, who gave up hours of their time to speak to us in depth about their experiences, and who in some cases welcomed us into their homes as well as their confidences. It was a pleasure to meet them, and to be reminded of what football and footballers used to be. Thank you to Ossie Ardiles, Ricky Villa, Tony Galvin, Graham Roberts, Paul Miller, Garry Brooke, Tony Parks, George Mazzon and Peter Shreeve – the boys from White Hart Lane.
INTRODUCTION
There is a time in a football fan’s life when one team comes to symbolise all that is best about his or her club. For a large number of Tottenham supporters now comfortably settled into middle age, that side was the one managed to cup-winning glory by Keith Burkinshaw. It was this team that gave us our legends, won trophies with a generous dose of style and swagger and, perhaps, laid a few ghosts to rest.
Burkinshaw’s Spurs were appreciated by a wider audience too. While football fans, more than the fans of any other sport, tend to follow teams rather than the sport itself, a side occasionally comes along that commands respect or admiration across the partisan lines of the football tribes. Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest were one such team, their rise from second tier also-rans to double European Champions in four consecutive seasons still fondly remembered because it kept alive the very essence of sport – that everyone has a chance of winning.
Tottenham Hotspur commanded similar emotions between 1978 and 1987. The Guardian’s Patrick Barclay captured the mood, writing in 1982 when the team was riding high: “If every team played like Spurs, football’s only problem would be in pacifying the herds of supporters unable to get into packed grounds. They bring beauty to the game, and people like that.”
We all have our favourite recollections of that era. The games themselves naturally stand out: 1984’s epic UEFA Cup final and the vocal support for Danny Thomas following his missed penalty that still brings a lump to the throat at the memory; the first half demolition of Feyenoord in the same campaign; the fans’ takeover of Highbury for the 1981 semi-final replay and the titanic, title-deciding clash with Everton in 1984/85. Even for those not present to witness Ricky Villa’s extraordinary FA Cup final goal in 1981, it became our ‘JF
K moment’: we all remember where we were when it happened.
But it’s the personal memories, the individual rites-of-passage details, that really forge the link between fans and a team. The authors of this book are no exception.
Adam Powley remembers: Unable to get a ticket for the 1981 FA Cup final replay, I was forced to watch the match on TV in a schoolmate’s front room in Southgate, north London. We were wearing naff silky quartered caps that seemed quite snazzy at the time. Villa’s goal prompted bedlam. We danced out into the road, a gaggle of 14-year-olds unsure how to react to our hitherto underachieving team threatening to win something of significance. We could hear cheers ringing out around the whole area, before everyone hurriedly rushed back inside to sit through the longest, most painful 12 minutes, until the final whistle brought unconfined relief.
Later that evening my older sister arrived with her then boyfriend to suggest we drive down to Tottenham High Road, “on the off chance there might be a few fans celebrating”. We had no comprehension of just how many there would be. Nearing the Angel, Edmonton, where the North Circular meets Fore Street, the traffic had come to a halt. Diving around the back streets, we eventually managed to work our way onto the High Road via Lordship Lane, a couple of hundred yards from the ground. The scene that greeted us will never leave my memory.
There were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people, flooding the street, cheering, hugging, kissing, crying. They swelled the throng from every direction, car horns blared, residents hung out from their windows, a thousand stereos blasted out Ossie’s Dream. It was carnival time. Men, women and children were dancing, pubs heaving with humanity spilled their customers onto the pavements. A huge roar greeted a flat-bed van transporting some of the fans who had actually been at Wembley to see the triumph, as it inched its way down the road. The beer flowed, the laughter flowed, the tears flowed too. It may seem a glib comparison, but it resembled the newsreel footage of VE Day celebrations. The police shut the High Road that night. Tottenham fans had brought a corner of the capital to a standstill.
It was only a game of football that had caused such happy chaos, but for the first time I realised what the game meant to people. It gave us a cause for celebration and a fiercely strong sense of togetherness that transcended, if only for a brief while, the differences that existed between us. This was at a time when the prevailing political ethos was every man for himself and there was apparently no such thing as society. But most of all it gave us joy – pure, blissful, unadulterated joy. No one knows how many babies may have been conceived that delirious evening. But it’s safe to say that a fair few were later christened Glenn, Steve, Ricky, Graham, Paul and Tony – who knows, there may well have been one or two Osvaldos as well!
Martin Cloake remembers: I was one of the fans who had been at Wembley on that unforgettable night, a ticket secured after queuing through the small hours following the Saturday game. The chaos of the massive terrace behind the goal meant I wasn’t able to fully appreciate Ricky Villa’s winner until the TV replays in the days that followed, but it was fitting that it was the South American’s goal that won the cup as I watched.
Several years before, the arrival of a pair of Argentinian superstars had captured my imagination as nothing had ever done before. I vividly remember the morning they signed. I was burying myself deep in the bedcovers to avoid getting up for school when my mum shouted something genuinely extraordinary up the stairs. “It says on the radio that Spurs have signed two Argentinians.” It certainly got me downstairs fast. A thing like that simply didn’t happen in 1978. Except that day it had. Two players I had watched on TV play football on the other side of the world in that summer’s World Cup had signed for my team, Tottenham Hotspur. They were from Argentina. And they were coming to play in England, in Haringey, my little bit of north London. “Spurs Scoop the World” roared the headlines on the back pages, and that day at school all Tottenham fans walked a little taller, relishing the envy of classmates who had stuck it to us a year before when our team went down.
I was at an impressionable age, and how could that team fail to make an impression? A potent mix of skill and steel, led by one of the greatest sporting captains ever and managed by a quietly spoken romantic genius, they entertained on the pitch and off it too, crashing the pop charts with a classic cup final ditty. They were at Wembley every season, they conquered Europe, and they did it all with style.
Those events instilled a lifelong devotion that still makes us talk about “our” team, “our” club. At the time we’d say it was because, as we used to sing, Tottenham Hotspur FC were “by far the greatest team the world has ever seen”. And we really believed they were. But as the years have passed and times have moved on, our affection for that team has grown as our feelings about the club have changed. It’s as well to be wary of nostalgia, even that’s not what it used to be, but the regard our generation has for that team is not just because the players that came after have never scaled the same heights.
The 1980s side’s standing as the last great Tottenham team, incidentally, is something some of the players we interviewed for this book find uncomfortable or even irritating, the sporting drive within them somehow affronted by the fact that their successors have not bettered their achievements. But what makes this group so special is about more than just what they achieved. They were, arguably, the last generation of players with whom the fans could really identify. They came from similar backgrounds as the vast majority of the supporters, and while they enjoyed a comfortable and glamorous lifestyle, they took home only a fraction of what today’s often remote and aloof superstars can expect to earn.
This is the story of those men and how they made those special times happen. In their own words, they explain how a successful squad brimming with flair was built and nurtured, reveal what went on behind the scenes and share the secrets of the dressing room. They talk of their collective triumphs and setbacks, their personal highs and lows, and the friendships that endure to this day. There will inevitably be some favourites missing from these pages. Some players were unsure about contributing, others have their own projects. We have also tried to select a broad cross section of characters to give as full a picture of the time as possible. So there is no Glenn Hoddle, because so much is known already about the greatest player of his generation, and because Glenn is, naturally, a little wary of further media scrutiny. As it turns out, what his teammates have to say about him proves revealing. Steve Archibald and Garth Crooks both decided to keep their own counsel, but feature large in these pages – as they should. Chris Hughton’s responsibilities with Newcastle United prevented him from taking part. And Keith Burkinshaw, in typical style, was uneasy about doing what could be seen as blowing his own trumpet.
The ten who appear in this book are a representative sample of a great team, and their selection implies no judgement on the abilities or contributions of either them or their teammates.
In another 25 years, we won’t be sitting in Ledley King’s front room discussing his time at the club. We won’t be drinking tea served by Luka Modric’s wife as he tells us of his life in football, and we won’t be going for a pint and a chat with Jermaine Jenas. The connection we as fans once had with the game and those who played it at the top level has gone, probably forever.
The interest many fans expressed when they heard we were writing this book stems from a realisation that, for all the riches in modern football, something has been lost. The stories that the players tell in this book reveal a world that has slipped away, a world where the finest English player of his generation could walk unaccosted into his local pub, where players simply loved playing football rather than the football lifestyle.
These were men who worked hard and played hard, gaining the respect of their team-mates and fans alike. Some have moved on to successful careers in or out of football, others have slipped quietly into relative anonymity. They have aged, of course, and their achievements will eventually become part of Spurs history
rather than living memory. But as long as football fans talk about Tottenham Hotspur, their legacy is ensured: they are, and always will be, the boys from White Hart Lane.
Since this book was first published we’ve been delighted with the response it had drawn from Spurs fans who remembered the great days of the early ’80s and the players featured here. Since then, a new group of heroes have emerged in a Spurs team which is again winning admirers for the quality of its football.
In a rather neat link, at the time of writing Tony Parks, who in these pages provides a fascinating insight into the world of the 1980s footballer, is back at the club, working with Harry Redknapp’s coaching staff to ensure the current crop of goalkeepers perform at their best. His return is said to have been key in helping Heurelho Gomes through a difficult start, and it has been a source of great pleasure to see him back as the current team attempt to fulfil Tony Galvin’s wish, stated in his chapter, that fans have a more modern set of heroes to laud.
We hope new readers of this paperback edition will enjoy reading the book as much as we enjoyed writing it – and that the exploits of the current crop of Spurs provide a distraction!’
Martin Cloake and Adam Powley, April 2011
1
STEVE PERRYMAN
“IF YOU’RE HONEST, IF YOU DO IT RIGHT, I’M YOUR MAN”
“Tottenham is my club,” says Steve Perryman, now Director of Football at Exeter City. “I say to Exeter people, ‘This is your club, not mine: I’ve got another club’.”
Sitting in his living room in Devon, a view through the living-room window over the Exe estuary providing a picturesque backdrop, Steve appears relaxed in the rural, peaceful and quiet environment that’s a million miles from the grit and bustle of London N17. But as he casts his mind back to great times for Spurs, Perryman clearly still holds the memories dear. The choirboy looks have matured, the figure may be slightly fuller and the thick mop of hair now grey, but the characteristic twinkle in the eye remains, as does the unequivocal belief in shouldering responsibility and doing the right thing. Steve Perryman is, even today, the captain his former charges follow, admire and listen to.
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 1