“We knew something was happening the season before when we beat Man U in the cup,” says Steve. “We were desperate to win something then. But we were more able to accept the breaks the next year. When we had a front pair scoring like ours were, when Glenn was coming to the fore, Ossie was settling down more, it was all just building.
“At the time we weren’t consciously thinking we would win a trophy, but something was happening. The first bit of success was the hardest to get, because it gave us momentum. Everyone became happy, our standing with the fans improved and we were a big club again – it was the start of the winning sequence. But we had to get that first trophy under our belts.”
Home wins against Hull City, Coventry and Exeter took Spurs to the semi-final meeting with Wolves at Hillsborough. The game is remembered for two things. A frightening crush in the Leppings Lane end of the ground in which the Spurs fans were packed – the narrow avoidance of serious injuries an unheeded warning of the terrible events eight years later at the same stadium – was an incident barely reported. But the controversial way in which Spurs were denied victory by a late equalising penalty mistakenly awarded by Clive Thomas dominated the sporting headlines.
Seething with injustice, Spurs were determined to ensure there was no such travesty in the replay. That the game was to be played at Highbury gave the encounter added spice. With Spurs fans virtually commandeering the home of their fierce rivals, Tottenham were given the ideal platform to let loose their many talents.
Steve remembers, “We wore all white, that was clever, because it was the kit Bill Nick had introduced for when Spurs first played in Europe, so it had a bit of an aura about it. We came out firing; there was no way we were going to get beat in that game.”
To the accompaniment of a deafening atmosphere that shook Highbury to its foundations, Spurs didn’t so much beat Wolves as exact ruthless revenge for the Midlanders having the temerity to take the tie to a replay in the first place. Two first half goals from Crooks, the second an emphatic illustration of his ability to finish chances beautifully crafted by Hoddle, decided the outcome. Villa’s dipping, swerving, long-range effort in the second half merely emphasised the gulf in quality between the two sides.
So the boys from White Hart Lane were on their way to Wembley. The run was so entertaining it even had its own theme tune – the Chas & Dave-penned Ossie’s Dream. Tottenham’s name really did appear to be on the cup. The problem was that no one told the players of Manchester City, whose muscular approach in the final threatened to turn the experience into a nightmare for Spurs. “We won the semi in such good style, it was almost impossible to recreate that. Man City were poor in the league, Bond had bought in half a new team, it was the workers against the skill and we didn’t show any skill on the day.” Thankfully, an own goal from Tommy Hutchinson took the game to a replay and the rest is FA Cup history, written in a colourful, mesmerising Argentinian style.
Perryman had become the first Spurs captain since Dave Mackay in 1967 to lift the FA Cup. It was a proud moment for this Tottenham stalwart and reward for the loyalty he had shown the club through some lean times. Ever the professional, however, Steve saw the victory as the springboard for further success, and an opportunity to further hone his leadership skills.
“I actually probably think about it more now than I did at the time, having been a coach and a manager, and later realising how important a captain is as a player – both in terms of his own job in the team, but also how he can add something to the players around him. If you find a player like that, don’t let him go. Players need leading on and off the field.
“You got the clues about your team-mates from all kinds of sources. This is not my line, I picked it up from somewhere, but ‘the pitch is a reflection of life’. There’s good and bad, heroes and villains, all life is out there on that football pitch whether it’s the parks pitch or White Hart Lane, and it’s very difficult for people to be different characters on and off the field. One who was the exception was Pat Jennings. He was quiet off it, you’d struggle to hear him, but at Old Trafford in front of 60,000 people, when he wanted to tell you something, you certainly heard him. He could change his manner when it came to getting serious, he would find the venom. At that point he was serious.
“I put great importance on character and leadership. Judge me on my delivery of the ball or my fighting qualities and determination, but also what I gave to the other players. What sense of security or leadership I had I gave to them. I’m proud when I think back about the effort I put into that.”
The next few years saw Spurs re-established as one of the top sides in the country. The 1981/82 campaign was another productive, trophy-winning season, but there was a nagging feeling of ‘if only’ by the time the campaign ended. Playing with a sense of endeavour and flair at odds with the physical English style of the time, Spurs were a joy to watch but occasionally a frustration to support. In the end the sheer volume of games caught up with them: “We played 10 games in 20 days,” Steve points out. “Can you imagine? I played in all of them. I spoke to Maxie about this the other day and he said, ‘Look, we played 17 games from the middle of April’. He said we played Man Utd and set a record for catching people offside, they got flagged for offside 35 times in one game. So much so I had a bad shoulder from putting my arm up. It was because we had bad snow in January, we didn’t play for a while, and had to play all those games at the end.
“For the 1982 FA Cup final, five of us had injections to play the game. I had one, and I still have a lump in my thigh as a result: I never recovered from it, not that it hurts or anything, but it’s still there. We didn’t have any of that going into the 1981 game. But by the time 1982 and 1984 [the year of the UEFA Cup win] came along, we had that experience from all the big games we had played in.”
Perhaps a lack of experience and competitive nous was what told for Spurs, however, in the game Perryman feels became pivotal for the club in that period and possibly for the years beyond. With three minutes to go in the 1982 League Cup final, Tottenham were beating Liverpool thanks to an early goal from Archibald, but a late equaliser from Ronnie Whelan exposed a tired Spurs to extra time in which they succumbed to a 3-1 defeat, thus ending the club’s proud record of having never been beaten in a domestic cup final.
“I read in later years,” Steve says, “that [Bob] Paisley used this tactic called ‘treacle’ – he would pick out a main player in the opposition and he would talk him up because it would soften them up for the day. He did it to me. He wrote a whole big thing in the Sunday Mirror about how good I was. I’m not saying I played particularly well or bad that game, but it showed the experience from them to know that’s the sort of thing you had to do. They were battle-hardened. Liverpool, as great as they were, won many games in the last five minutes – that was part of being great, they never gave up. Our legs went. We sat down for the extra-time team talk; they didn’t. I saw a picture where I was stood up talking to the other players who were sitting down on the turf. Maybe they were too tired, but Liverpool had this thing over us.
“We dipped away through tiredness. I don’t think it affected us at all in terms of team spirit, we just moved on to the next game – the confidence of beating Man City the season before, and being in Europe made us fairly sure of ourselves. But I think if we had won the League Cup final, we would have won a lot more. If we’d overcome Liverpool in a major game, that would have been a hell of a step forward. It didn’t knock us, but we could have won so much more had it gone our way.”
Despite this setback, by the time of the 1982/83 season, Hoddle, Perryman and Spurs were reaching the peak of their collective powers. The skipper had been made the Football Writers’ Player of the Year (with Hoddle as runner-up) and, having earlier in his career set a record 17 appearances for the England under-23 squad, Steve was finally called up into the senior national squad. He won his solitary cap coming on as a substitute against Iceland in Reykjavik, a long-overdue acknowledgement of his consistent
but undervalued quality.
Though the 1982/83 season was to prove trophyless, Spurs continued to entertain, finishing fourth in the league and gaining more valuable experience in Europe. For the following season’s campaign, that familiarity with continental opposition was to prompt arguably the side’s competitive high watermark, in a famous home leg UEFA Cup meeting with Feyenoord in October. It was billed as a clash between the great midfield talents of successive generations. The Dutch side fielded Johan Cruyff, Spurs had Hoddle.
In the end it was no contest. Playing with a degree of outlandish skill rarely seen in an English side, Hoddle and Spurs demolished the visitors, racing into a 4-0 half-time lead. If the 1960s generation have the epic 8-1 European Cup demolition of Gornik to remember as the pinnacle of the Double side’s awesome powers, Spurs supporters of a later vintage have that humbling of the Dutch side to cherish. So what did it actually feel like to play in that team?
“We were one. I’d love to see that on tape, just to see if it was as good as I thought it was. Everything we practised, everything we did on set pieces, it all came to fruition. Your 11 players feel like they are worth 13, it seems like you have so many men on the field they can’t cope with you. Like Liverpool were. We never quite matched that standard again, for whatever reason. That night it just all clicked.
“That’s the thing about being a player. At a certain point, the penny absolutely drops how to play. With me it did. Then it was like reading a book. I knew what was going to happen next, I knew where I should be, I was in absolute control. It didn’t mean we were going to win every game or play great every time, but there were fewer and fewer surprises and that was a consequence of learning through experience. My purple patch – between when the penny dropped and my legs started to go – began at 27, and I kept going until I was about 35. I knew what I was doing, so much so that I could help others and advise them. I’m sure I had a voice before I was 27, but I had a more committed voice after that.
“But I don’t think we were consistent enough. We could be sparkling – we were 4-0 up at half time against Feyenoord and then we lost the second half 2–0 which put us in jeopardy for the second leg which, thankfully, we came through, but that first half was probably the best Spurs performance I’d ever been involved in. What a display. What do you say to a team that’s been playing that well at half time?
“It didn’t happen that often. We played at Forest one day and beat them 3-0. Clough came in afterwards and said, ‘Unbelievable. If you’d have done one more back heel I was going to fuck off home.’ But for that Feyenoord game it was like we were an engine, with all the parts functioning right.”
Games such as this were convincing evidence that Burkinshaw’s prediction had come true – Spurs were a team again. Europe had always seemed a natural home for Tottenham and the three campaigns that the manager oversaw set the seal on the revival, culminating in yet more trophy-winning glory. The lessons in how to succeed in Europe had been hard earned; the first venture ended with a hard-to-stomach defeat against Barcelona in the 1981/82 European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final. An infamous 1-1 draw in the first leg, in which the Catalans bullied, fouled and intimidated their opponents, led to a similarly fractious encounter in the return, with a 1-0 defeat sending Spurs out.
“Their intimidation against us at home, the way we matched it and overcame it worked against us there. For the return, the ref went in both dressing rooms and said, ‘If there’s anything like that again, I’ll call the game off.’ In our naive English way we sort of believed him. The Spanish ignored him and just went at it. They weren’t ever going to call it off!”
The following season, Spurs were out of the same competition by early November after a humbling 5-2 aggregate defeat to Bayern Munich. But even this stood Spurs in good stead for the victorious UEFA Cup run of 1983/84. “We were battle-hardened. If we had gone into every away league game with the same mentality as we went into in every away European game, I think we’d have been all right, we’d have been a better team. I think we used to overindulge ourselves at times. If we played well and lost we would settle for that and that’s not enough – you have to have more of a winning mentality. We went to Feyenoord in the second leg in 1983 with fear. But we learned what to do.”
Though suspended for the 1984 UEFA Cup final in which goalkeeper Tony Parks was the penalty shoot-out hero against Anderlecht, Perryman picked up a second European winner’s medal to add to the same reward 12 years earlier. In retrospect, it might be seen as providing a tidy conclusion to his Tottenham career, complemented by the MBE he received that year for services to the game. But football was changing and Steve was caught up in the upheaval and off-the-pitch turmoil that has been a feature of Spurs virtually ever since.
Back in 1984 a new board under the commercially minded Irving Scholar and Paul Bobroff had arrived and made Spurs the first publicly listed football club. The ethos now was that, though the new brooms were genuine supporters, Spurs was going to be run like a ‘proper’ business. People had to pay their way; financial considerations were key; trust that the players would be seen right on a handshake and a promise became an outmoded, almost innocent, way of thinking. Thus, for all his long service to the club, when it came to negotiating a new deal, Steve was treated as if those years of graft and toil were by the by. Suddenly he was one of those players who might not survive the annual cull.
Steve’s contract disputes with the board and Burkinshaw just before the 1983/84 season had caused serious disagreements and blazing rows that echoed through White Hart Lane’s corridors, though the relationship between manager and skipper was not permanently harmed. But the disagreement reflected wider-ranging change at the club. According to legend, Burkinshaw departed from White Hart Lane in the immediate aftermath of the UEFA Cup win uttering the immortal phrase, “There used to be a football club over there.” Steve is among those who isn’t sure it was quite said that way, but he recognised the sentiment.
“The warning signs were there. Scholar was very difficult with us as a group of players, which I was involved in, naturally, as captain. There was an issue over bonuses for the UEFA Cup. Bill Nick had set up a scheme back in the 1970s, whereby if the club got paid well, the players got paid well. If you were to play, for example, Rejkyavik in front of 10,000 you’d get less than if you played in front of 50,000 v AC Milan. I think it was a third between all of us and it was all worked out on Bill Nick terms, very fairly – proper. If you won it [the trophy] it was kind of backdated so that instead of getting £100 for beating AC Milan, you got £500.
“All those years later, this arrangement was still on the players’ contracts. We were still going to get a third of the revenue that was made from the final. But Scholar didn’t want to pay. He knew there was £100,000 of TV money coming in. He didn’t want to give a third of that away. The issue was whether the TV money should be counted as part of the earnings of the game or not. I suggest it should have been. I thought at the time, ‘Do yourself a favour, Irving. Bill Nick’s office is there, you bought him back to the club, you ask him what he meant when he put that clause in the contract.’ But he wasn’t interested.
“It knocked us for something like £200,000 between us when all the revenue from the cup run was taken into account. So we went into the next campaign angry. Bill Nick had realised the bonus schedule was wrong and put it right. Scholar thought differently.”
Burkinshaw’s decision to go was a shock at the time and a generation on it still seems an unnecessary one, but Steve’s analysis places the abrupt departure in context. “Keith was discontented the moment Scholar took over. He knew what was going on, the interference. Keith said he ended up logging phone calls he got from the chairman. Once there were 36 in one day. It could be, ‘Do you know so-and-so’s available at Roma?’ ‘Er can’t say I do, but in a day or two, I will.’ Another call: ‘Next pre-season we’re going to America.’ Keith would say, ‘I think you should leave that to me.’ Every angle to a football club, 36
0 degrees, Scholar came at it. Keith got fed up and couldn’t put up with it.
“Keith told me that at the after-game function when we beat Austria Vienna in 1984, Scholar called him over to meet their coach. Keith said, ‘I know him, I just played against him twice.’ Scholar responded, ‘I’ve just agreed with him that you are going to visit next summer to look at his training techniques.’ Keith said, ‘Er, I don’t think I’ve got a free week.’
“Scholar used to approach me. He would say, ‘Steve, I’ve been looking for you, what do you think of that?’ He showed me a pencil. ‘I can get these in Spurs colours with ‘Tottenham Hotspur’ on them for 3p from China and sell them for 50p.’ ‘Great. Well done,’ I thought. He was so up himself, so excited. Can you imagine the doors that opened for him being part of Tottenham? It was like a dream for him. I don’t think he was a bad man – just misguided.”
In the wake of Burkinshaw’s resignation, with assistant Peter Shreeve taking over management duties in what appeared a fairly seamless transition and leading the team to a third-place finish in the 1984/85 season, it appeared that matters on the surface at least were relatively calm. Behind the scenes there was an undercurrent of upheaval. It is common knowledge that Alex Ferguson had been considered for the manager’s role and, coupled with uncertain futures for several of the first team, there was an air of discord. “We might have thought we were ready for a change,” Steve recalls. “Jack Charlton talks about five years being enough of the same voice. With Peter there was continuity, but I think the biggest shame out of all that was that we should have convinced Keith not to go, we should have turned him around.
“But the biggest problem – and I’m being selfish here – was that should have been it for the next 20 years: Keith to perhaps go upstairs, Shreevesie to be manager, me to be youth team manager or reserves or whatever. That should have been the start. Glenn’s been England manager, Ossie’s won titles, I’ve won titles, Ray Clemence, Chrissie Hughton, none of us are mugs. There was the base there of something really proper. They shouldn’t have let that opportunity go.”
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 4