“Some players still call me Skip now,” he says. He talks to many of them on a regular basis, organises the reunions and get-togethers, and if something is OK by Steve, it’s reasonable to assume it’s OK by the rest of them. It is a rare skill to be able to earn and retain that respect but from the beginning, when he was first made captain at just 20, Perryman showed himself to be a born leader.
“Being captain came naturally to me. I think I’m a really good communicator, particularly about football, about strengths and weaknesses and how to improve them. It was my specialist subject. I don’t think when Bill Nicholson made me vice-captain there was a particular speech from him that said, ‘This is how you’ve got to be’, but if I hadn’t been captain I would still have spoken in the same way. Bill Nick noticed that and realised I’m a leader type. One of the players at Exeter said to me the other day, ‘I don’t want to be a captain because I don’t want to be a yes man.’ But that’s not right: you can be a leader without having to compromise what you think and feel.”
It was this willingness to lead from the front, coupled with his work rate and nuggety toughness that made Perryman such an instant terrace favourite. ‘He’s one of us’ was the feeling of the fans, who warmed to the industrious midfielder with the suede-head haircut he sported at the time. By the time Tottenham were relegated at the end of the 1976/77 season after several years of struggle, the hairstyle had lengthened but it was an older, wiser and more determined head on Perryman’s shoulders, one which saw relegation as the harsh remedy Spurs required.
“Going down was like a breath of fresh air for us,” says Steve. “All the seasons before when it didn’t quite happen and we got away with it, it didn’t change anything. The club had not been living in the real world. We could not compete for the best players, we were well down the wish list of where people wanted to go. We just lost our glamour. We weren’t the Tottenham that I’d joined.”
Relegation had been emphatically confirmed with a 5-0 defeat at Manchester City. “I think the recovery started then. We went into the last game [a 2–0 win over Leicester] playing with a freedom and with the crowd displaying a great attitude. How could you play for that club and listen to the support the fans gave you and not take that seriously as some sort of indication of their desire to get back to where we should be?”
The rebuilding of a fallen giant began with the board making the bold move not to sack Keith Burkinshaw. “The decision to keep Keith in charge was just unbelievable. How could that happen today? Credit to them, because it turned out to be a fantastic decision.” The willingness to make difficult choices continued with the shock transfer of goalkeeper Pat Jennings to deadly rivals Arsenal amid disagreement over a new contract. Burkinshaw was determined to assert his authority on the club but maintained continuity by retaining Perryman as his leader on the pitch. The pair shared, and still do share, a close and trusting relationship that was fundamental to Tottenham’s revival.
“I was captain under Terry Neill when Keith first arrived at the club, so when Keith was made manager he could have changed that. Thankfully he didn’t want to; it just carried on. I’ve always found Keith really, really easy to talk to. He’s not that approachable actually, but I just clicked with him. We spent hours talking on the phone, especially Sundays after games, and more so if we’d lost or were having a difficult time.
“Keith was young and new to management. But I noticed how much he improved, and we improved together, by talking to each other a lot. It was obvious Keith cared. He cared about the team, about it improving, about Tottenham Hotspur; he cared about living up to the tradition. And he was absolutely committed. He said to me once, ‘I am going to make this a team.’ It might have been at the point when we were looking all right but not quite there, before Steve Archibald and Garth Crooks arrived [in 1980]. He said, ‘Trust me, Steve, I am going to make this a team.’ And he did.”
Tottenham’s renaissance began with an end-of-season tour to Norway. “We played to a particular style that Keith felt was going to get us back up. It was a Tottenham way of playing; we passed the ball through midfield with the emphasis on skill and expression, but we needed to tighten up in defence a bit. After Norway, we went on to a pre-season tournament in Sweden where we carried on playing that way and in every situation we got more ‘football serious’ using that style. Not that we weren’t serious before, but we didn’t enjoy it; it was hard work being at Tottenham and struggling. Double hard work. Now, all of a sudden it was fresh, it was like the chains were off us. We were going to play this style of football and get out of the division. But we had to win promotion. We were being outmanoeuvred in the transfer market.”
Tottenham’s squad was little altered for the season in Division Two, but results and performances improved, with Steve one of those who prospered the most. “It was possibly the best season I ever had, I enjoyed it as much as anything. I played one of my best ever games at Bolton in that league,” he says. “I played at the back and just controlled the game from start to finish – though we got beat so I couldn’t have been that happy with it. People were sending me cuttings from the local paper two weeks on with readers writing in – northern people writing to a northern paper saying, ‘How can this fella not be playing for England?’ I was that good on that day.
“I just had such a fresh approach. I think the previous years of playing as a midfield workhorse amid all that hurry and scurry gave me the experience to cope with being pressurised on the ball. Playing at the back I didn’t have that same degree of pressure and had more time on the ball. I could now run 20 metres, cut it to Glenn Hoddle, we’d surge forward – wonderful. It really was me drawing a line under a career low.
“My start at Tottenham was lovely, with cup wins at Wembley and all that. The middle part was a bit of a depression. Being a person who felt responsibility I took it hard, all the disappointment of relegation, the demise and criticism, it was tough. So it was like going into a new world as a player in the Second Division. I shouldn’t say it was my best season but it was for all sorts of reasons, it gave me fresh impetus to carry on and have a long career with the club, because if it hadn’t gone well in that division maybe it would have been time to go. You never know how it quite works out.”
Steve and Tottenham’s futures were uncertain up until the end of the campaign, but a goalless draw at Southampton gave each side the point they needed to go up. “The last step is always the hardest one to take,” says Steve. “You want something so bad, but we lost at home [3-1 to Brighton] and we had to play our way out of it. I just think about those big games towards the end and our crowd – our crowd had been brilliant when we were relegated, but how were they going to act when we needed that final push for promotion? We needn’t have worried – they were fantastic. You feel it now sometimes, some very mundane games away and there are 6,000 Tottenham people shouting their hearts out. That’s not just happened today – that’s been built up over a number of years. In a way that’s what fed us: we gained power off the crowd.”
‘Tottenham people’ – it’s a Perryman refrain when he talks about Spurs fans, an acknowledgment that it is the supporters in large part who are the club. In contrast to the modern era when top players can seem remote from supporters, existing in their own closed-off, well-heeled world, Perryman and his teammates had the common touch. Steve’s bond, honed over the years by his role as captain and man-of-the-people outlook, was stronger than most.
“When I was on the pitch I heard every ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ that 50,000 people could make. At any stage of my career, I knew how the crowd were thinking – I knew. And I think they knew that I knew as well. Therefore I accepted the responsibility of all that. White Hart Lane can be a tough old place to go back to when you’ve lost the away game to Arsenal and the home game before that and you’re playing at home to, say, Birmingham; it wasn’t an easy stage to be on at times. But if they saw that you were ‘right’, that you were committed, honest and doing your best, they backed
you: that’s how I saw it. Of course if you weren’t ‘right’ they let you know as well, which is everyone’s prerogative. It was warranted.”
Unsurprisingly, Steve does not hold much truck with the notion of footballers being particularly special or courageous in having to perform in a physical and pressurised environment. By way of example he cites the case of his young daughters. Aged 10 and 12, both are budding gymnasts. There is a photo in Perryman’s house of the younger girl poised on the beam. Asked if, as a father, he isn’t terrified by the kind of gravity-defying back flips and risky exercises she has to do, he answers, “It’s unbelievable. Don’t ever tell me that footballers are brave.”
An interview with Steve is peppered with such observations about character, and consistent themes emerge: responsibility, leadership, honesty. These are the traits he admires in others and qualities he prides in his own personality. And they were required in abundance for the return to Division One, where Burkinshaw’s fundamental faith in attack was to be severely tested.
The initial boost came with the spectacular signing of the World Cup-winning Argentinian duo, Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa. Inevitably this led to the partial breakup of the promotion-winning side, and more change for Tottenham’s longest serving player to digest. “Prattie [John Pratt] and Terry Naylor were going. I loved those people. I don’t remember any suddenness to it; it just sort of evolved. You play with people and then they move on, that’s just how it goes.
“In some ways I suppose it needed to happen. The club had to start competing in the transfer market. Of course, you needed some kind of home-grown player, but they were coming up, be it Maxie [Paul Miller], or Chris [Hughton]. When you think of the balance of all that with two non-league players from Goole Town and Weymouth [Tony Galvin and Graham Roberts respectively] – can you imagine players like that getting in Tottenham’s team now? With two World Cup winners, two strikers later bought for big money, home-grown full backs? The mix of all that was fantastic.
“Teams evolve. It’s one of the things I look back on. I was on the list of players who, every year, someone had to judge. I now know how it works as a manager with budgets and stuff, to say ‘You gotta go’. That’s what happens. I guess I just survived the cull for 20 years.”
Steve’s presence was invaluable for the first season back in the top flight. After a good start away to Nottingham Forest in which a Ricky Villa goal earned a draw, Spurs came resoundingly back to earth in front of their own fans with a 4-1 reverse to Aston Villa. Humiliation later ensued with a 7–0 thumping at Anfield, a record defeat in which Spurs had no answer to the relentless red machine that was the Liverpool side of the time.
“I don’t think we ever went to away games saying, ‘Let’s just get a draw,’” Steve recalls. “The day we got beat 7–0, we changed everything we normally did – we flew when we normally went by bus, in fact the only thing we didn’t do differently was walk there. On this day, Keith filled the team with footballers. And guess what – we never had the ball. We got overrun. Ossie said to me afterwards, ‘Stevie, no problem’. I said, ‘What do you mean? Ossie, we’ve just lost 7–0, I think that’s a problem.’ Ossie replied, ‘Stevie, trust me. This Liverpool team is on drugs!’”
As time wore on, however, it wasn’t just Ardiles’s humour that impressed Perryman. His intelligence, quietly expressed initially as he and Villa adapted to a British football culture and learned the language, began to tell and helped mould Burkinshaw’s side.
“We’d been on tours, we’d seen the World Cup, but it was just staggering that we’d signed these two players. Everyone was thinking, ‘What were they going to be like, how were they going to train, how would they be in the winter in the snow and the mud?’ Ossie was just very, very clever, as a footballer but also as a person, very intelligent. He smashed everyone to bits in a table-tennis competition in his first training camp in Holland, wiped Prattie away who was our best player. He got through life with English or without by being very funny: his face was funny, his actions were funny, he was just a proper live wire.
“He could cope with the mickey-taking from when he first came in. Someone in the dressing room might have had a cheap shot about a foreigner who didn’t understand the language. I think Ossie maybe didn’t understand the words, but he saw the face and thought ‘OK’ and laughed. And his expression would be, ‘You wait and see’. Very clever.”
As the South Americans adapted, so too did Spurs. The 1979/80 season climaxed with a narrow 1-0 defeat to Liverpool in the quarter-final of the FA Cup, but the run provided vindication of the club’s direction. “It started to turn, we were scoring goals, competing against the best teams. When Ossie and Ricky came, we started to get the glamour back and therefore neutrals would come to watch us play. We got our sense of value back, I suppose. I watched a DVD of the 1-0 win away at Man U in the third round cup game from that season the other day, which Don McAllister sent to me. The Ricky goal at Wembley – he did that at Old Trafford about 10 times in this game, but no one remembers because it didn’t end up as a goal. He did that type of thing, taking the pressure off us. To win there at Old Trafford in that style – fantastic. It was nailed on we were going to get beat for that replay, but we won it.
“That was when Ossie really began to show his worth. Ossie is so mentally strong. You could see the wheels working in his head. You never saw him nail someone, but as the winger was taking me on, this little sod would be around him like a bee. ‘You need me Steve,’ he would say. There was always a bit of humour in our games – it was lovely.
“In the Liverpool game we played poorly but faced them in the league three weeks later. Keith had a talk about how to play them. I said to him, ‘I don’t care if we get beat by ten as long as we have a go, because we didn’t do that last time’. So we played 4-2-4 to stop their full backs who were usually dominant. I never saw a pair of full backs knock the ball out of play so often or be so ruffled before, they were taken by surprise. It was tactically really brave. The problem with that was that it was brave off the back of such a poor first performance – you have to be brave first time. But we beat them 2–0, deservedly.”
In any successful side, as Spurs were soon to become, there are many ingredients that turn a group of individuals into a cohesive and effective unit. Primary among these is team spirit and at Tottenham that vital commodity was in abundant supply. “We used to have an honesty hour where you could say what you want and no one could take offence to it,” Steve says. “There was that spirit about us. A fan spoke to me the other day and he called us a pub team. He wasn’t saying we were unprofessional, but that we were so close to the supporters. ‘You were like us,’ he said.
“We used to play silly numbers games. After a match in Austria we were given a load of cake as a gift. Someone had a taste and it was evil, so we played a forfeit game called ‘Buzz’ and if you made a mistake, instead of having a drink you had to eat some of this cake. Can you imagine professional players, finely tuned athletes, doing this? Someone, I can’t remember who it was, had to eat about ten pieces of this cake in a three-hour coach journey. But it was funny.”
As befits the times, many clubs had a strong drinking culture and Spurs were no exception in Steve’s eyes. As captain, he inevitably made his contribution. “We were really good at knowing the rules and the rules were not so tough. One was that you never went out from a Thursday onwards before a Saturday game if drink was involved. You could go to a restaurant as long as you didn’t drink. I don’t know of that ever being abused.
“Keith said to me one day, ‘Someone told me that you were drinking in the Coolbury Club at 2.30 the other night after the game, and I don’t think it’s right that you were.’ I said, ‘Keith, you got that wrong. It was 4am, and although there was drink involved I was there with Pat Jennings, George Graham, Frank McLintock and John Docherty, and we were talking football like you won’t believe. That was the reason we were there. And actually, Keith, I’ve learned as much in those ses
sions as I have on any coaching field.’ ‘Well, I don’t think that’s right,’ said Keith. But I was right: we’d just beaten Bayern Munich, I was 32 and we were off the next day, so there was no problem.
“I knew where Keith was coming from. But you hear about the likes of Liverpool and Man U and we certainly were never big drinkers like they were. I saw that when Spurs and Liverpool were on tour in Swaziland and we were nowhere near them when it came to drinking. We had a good time and enjoyed ourselves. There was no nastiness, no malice, nothing like that at all, we just had a good time. I remember the quote from Maurice Norman [veteran defender of the Double side] when we got relegated, and his reaction was, ‘They don’t even drink together!’ A stunning comment, but back in his day they really did drink!
“We did, of course. But the truth is the players didn’t need to engineer bonding sessions, we were forced together. Bus journeys, train journeys, airports. Take the 1981/82 season, the amount of time we spent in hotels we thought we owned them in the end. We were always in that environment, so what are you going to do with your time? If you don’t like each other’s company, you’re in trouble.”
What differed at Spurs was how that team spirit was fostered. In a then revolutionary move for a football club, Burkinshaw secured the services of a team of sports psychologists led by John Syer. In a dressing room environment, where close-knit privacy is fiercely protected, any intrusion is treated with suspicion – even from other ‘football people’, let alone an outsider from another profession. The club had retained a deep-seated doubt over the wisdom of admitting strangers ever since Hunter Davies was a fly on the wall for the 1971/72 season, chronicled in his incredible book The Glory Game, because it broke the golden rule of keeping what went on in the dressing room in the dressing room. So to bring in Syer and his colleagues was risky to say the least. Their arrival was understandably low key.
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 2