It wasn’t to be. Instead, after nearly two decades of loyal service, Perryman was deemed surplus to Spurs requirements. The unsavoury nature of the parting still has a bitter taste.
“It leads on to me being released – fine, no problem, that’s what happens. But how you could possibly let someone like me out of the door over the difference between a two or one-year contract, is just . . .” Steve’s voice trails off. Twenty years on he still cannot quite fathom how the club was allowed to decline and how he and others from the team weren’t around to help carry the good work on. “Listen, I don’t think I’d have played the second year but I would have been an influence. But obviously not the influence they [the board], and David Pleat when he arrived as new manager in 1986, would have wanted.
“As per knowing what Tottenham is about and what it should be, I could have had a role. With me involved since youth team level, I had learned lessons that would have been of benefit to the club. Liverpool were great because the lessons they learned were all in-house. If you kept bringing new people in . . . Pleat, for example, was going to have to learn the same lessons as Keith did ten years before. Some were just Tottenham lessons because you were dealing with the Tottenham style, the people etc. That’s where they went wrong. By alienating Keith, it stopped what should have been a progression.
“I should not have been allowed to leave. Everyone since has been a little afraid of me and there’s no need. If you’re honest, if you do it right, I’m your man. The line could have carried on through me. I didn’t need to be manager, I haven’t got that ego. Clem could have been manager.”
Perryman’s final days at White Hart Lane were not the way such a long-serving player would want to end his association with a club he had joined at 15. Having played a full league programme the season before, Steve took to the field just 23 times in the 1985/86 campaign, uncomfortable with the direction the club was heading in. “It was a difficult season. I was getting old, I was disenchanted with Scholar, but Spurs was my team. I saw the Scholars of the world change things.
“I started to realise I was getting angry with myself, and I was getting moody with other players, getting frustrated when they couldn’t do things. I got mad with Maxie in training once, he gave me a pass that bobbled and I smashed it over the stand and said, ‘Don’t ever give me that shit again.’ And we had a row before it all got broken up, but before I would have just said ‘That’s Maxie’.
“So it was probably right in a way for me to go. But it weren’t done right. I’d lost a bit of faith in Scholar, that’s for sure, but it wasn’t the end of the world, on to the next and all that. It was disappointing, a hell of a wrench, but I’d had 19 years of driving round that North Circular and that was enough. My legs were going: if it had been a pure footballing decision it would have been right. But can you imagine that club not being better off with me? If you said to an Arsenal supporter today, ‘We’re playing Spurs next week – would you prefer Steve Perryman to be in Tottenham’s camp or out of it?’, I think the Arsenal supporter would say, ‘out of it’. That suggests I should be in that camp, in some capacity.”
Spurs, perhaps, have lived to regret Perryman’s absence. The collective remorse for players and supporters of that era is the failure to add a league title to the list of honours. It is a lasting frustration that, with the best team since the Double side, Tottenham could not land the big prize. Though a passionate disciple of the ‘Spurs way’ Perryman is no romantic when it comes to analysing why the title was not won.
“I think if you look at 1982, there were only 13 players who played a high number of games. Others just played a handful, but there was no real depth. Our style of play wasn’t suited to grinding out league wins. I said to Keith after we won the cup a second time, ‘Keith, for want of a better word, let’s go Arsenal style, as per the league. You have got so much backing now having won two cups, let’s close the doors and be a bit more ordinary, but on our bad days get draws – because when we’re good we’ll beat anybody. You can’t stop Glenn being good, and when he’s good he’s great – it’s carnival time when he’s spraying the ball over the place. But maybe we get sucked into that way of playing out on the field.’
“Keith said, ‘Steve, if you ever sit behind this desk, you’ll know that’s not possible.’ Keith lived by the Tottenham tradition. Which is right, but it’s not right we didn’t have a serious go for the league either. If we’d have gone my way, maybe we’d have been nowhere near it and not enjoyable to watch, so who knows?”
Perryman’s relationship with Spurs, or at least the people who now ran the club, was broken. “John Moncur rang me one day and said, ‘I don’t know if I’ve done you a favour or not, but we’re obviously toiling. We had a meeting and Pleat said, ‘We need someone in here who can link all the different parts of the club together. Anyone got any ideas?’ John said, ‘Steve Perryman.’ Pleat said, ‘Hmm, I thought you might say that. Anyway, anyone got any other suggestions?’”
Steve did eventually return to sit behind the manager’s desk, as assistant to Ardiles when the Argentinian was installed as boss in the aftermath of new chairman Alan Sugar’s ugly clash with then boss Terry Venables. Ossie and Steve may have been the right appointments at the right club, but it was the wrong time and both were dismissed when Sugar swiftly rang the changes in 1994.
For all the disappointments at the end, however, Steve still has plenty of time for his beloved Tottenham people. That relationship, with the supporters and the backroom staff he remembers so fondly, is a strong as ever. It is why, for all the regrets about how the modern Spurs has turned out, Steve can still proudly say, ‘This is my club’.
“As players, we made people feel important. We would go to the leaving dos. We did one for one of the security guys, Gerry, lovely fella. It was like a This is Your Life theme – fantastic. The office staff were part of us; when we played they went to the game and wanted us to win. It was a family. Great people.
“People like Mickey Stockwell [Tottenham’s legendary former groundsman] – bless him, he always used to walk around with this two-by-one bit of wood. One day I said to him, ‘Mick what’s that all about?’ ‘You got to have something in your hand all the time,’ he answered, ‘that way, no one can say you ain’t working.’ Real proper characters who wanted you to win. Tottenham people.”
2
PAUL MILLER
“LOOK THE PART, ACT THE PART, BE THE PART”
“I used to come into the tunnel before we played and the other team would be there and I’d say, ‘Listen lads, this lot are expecting to get beat today; let’s not disappoint them.’ I wouldn’t say that against Liverpool, obviously, but most of the sides I would. People who played for West Ham, Birmingham, all them, that I’ve spoke to over the years said that used to drive them mad, and wind them up. I said, ‘Good, that’s what it was for’.”
That’s Paul ‘Maxie’ Miller all over. Typical Cockney, always looking to get one over. But Maxie is not flash. Confident, yes; direct, streetwise, fiercely competitive – but it’s all based on a knowledge that you need more than front. Miller is what Steve Perryman calls “a proper bloke”, and while he rarely features in the lists of Tottenham’s greatest players, he was a vital part of Keith Burkinshaw’s great Spurs side because of his influence on and off the pitch.
These days, Miller is a little stockier, there’s some grey hair, but the face is still instantly recognisable. There’s still the twinkle of the cheeky chappie in his face, but also the flash of steel that was a key part of his game. He’s well turned out: flannel blazer, quality shirt, nice pair of trousers and good shoes, blending in well in the foyer of the Lanesborough Hotel by London’s Hyde Park Corner where he has asked to meet. “I use this place as an office,” he says as we walk through to the drawing room, all plush furniture in reds and golds. Miller’s now a businessman, a successful one, dealing in property. And we’re not talking suburban semi-detached. An Italian waiter dressed in crisp black and white looks
up from behind the counter as we walk in, his face opening into a beaming smile as he greets “Mr Miller” and the pair clasp hands. “Nice to see you,” says Paul, “can you bring us over some tea?”
Miller is pleasant company, with a sharp wit delivered deadpan for killer effect, and a keen mind evidenced by the speed at which he delivers his thoughts. You sense that, as many a top player found in the ’80s, little gets past him. A tidy fella, as they say in the East End, and one whose observations prove eye-opening.
The question that will always be asked of that team is why they didn’t win the league title? Maxie’s view is clear. “We would’ve had more chance of winning the league, and we had a good go at it for two years, if we’d have tightened up defensively in front of the back four.
“I believe in retrospect that we should have had one team for playing at home and another for playing away. I’ve talked to George Graham about this many times over the years, and he certainly believes that you should change two or three faces to play away. You do get more freedom at home, and obviously the other team are a bit more negative. Where we persevered with Glenn and Ossie and Ricky and Mickey Hazard when he came in, we only had one grafter – Tony Galvin. We did used to get overrun a lot. People used to criticise us as defenders sometimes, but basically Chrissie Hughton was like a flying winger so it was me, Stevie and Graham Roberts against the world – we’d have five against three all the time. It was no wonder we were getting suspended a lot, we had to belt people because we were getting overrun. I would love to have seen us be a bit more defensive, but you had no chance with Keith.”
But Miller is never less than a fierce advocate of the team as a whole. This team was a tight-knit unit and Miller, as social secretary, played a key role in making sure everyone knew what was expected. “We’d sign a new boy and I would take him and his wife out to the West End for dinner,” he says. “Archibald, Crooks, Ossie – you name ‘em, I took ‘em out to dinner. I used to take them to one of the casinos and have dinner, followed by a night out in Tramp. That was like an initiation for them and their wife. I’d tell them about London and where to live, where the best shops were, whatever. It’d be like saying, ‘This is Tottenham, this is what is expected of you, who we are. Remember who you are, what you are and who you play for. It was a Bill Nick thing: smarten yourself up – haircut, clean shoes – we were very into that. The London boys made the others very aware of it and slaughtered them if they didn’t do it.”
At its heart, this was a London team, its confidence, swagger and grit a reflection of the capital’s character. It’s one of the reasons the team was so fiercely loved by supporters, and much of this character goes back to Miller and his background in Stepney Green – a background he values without romanticising it.
“If you talk of Stepney and Bethnal Green, where I was born and brought up, it wasn’t just West Ham – more of an Orient, Millwall, West Ham, Arsenal and Tottenham area. I’m a Cockney. West Ham is east London, but where we were we were in the heart of it, within the sound of Bow bells. If you lived south, it would be more Millwall, or Chelsea maybe. Chelsea were very popular when I was growing up ‘cause of the ’60s: it was all King’s Road and all that. I loved Chelsea when I was a kid because of the way they played, they were the glamour team and an exciting side. But I never really supported anyone specifically. I played for a youth club called Senrab, which is very famous, it’s still turning players out now. Chelsea supplied all our kit so I went and trained at Chelsea when I was ten years old – training at Stamford Bridge first, then at Mitcham at the training ground. Hell of a journey, by the way, for two young Stepney boys, me and a lad called Jerry Murphy, who eventually played for Palace and Chelsea, getting on a train and going to Morden in Surrey. I don’t think I’d let two ten and 11-year-olds get on a train like that now, but being two Cockney kids I suppose there weren’t too many that were going to start on us.
“I spent three years at Chelsea, then they had a lot of financial problems that I was starting to read about, so I started doing the rounds. I went to most of the clubs. I remember speaking to Bobby Moore, who I knew through a family friend. I was about 13 and I said, ‘Which club should I sign for?’ and he said, ‘You’ve got to sign for a London club because you can’t leave home. And there’s only two in London you should sign for anyway and that’s Arsenal or Tottenham, because you get a good education.’ So I went to them both. Arsenal I felt was a bit cold at the time, and I had good chats with Bill Nick, so I went with that.
“And I know it sounds strange, but I also looked at the Tottenham side and I thought, ‘They’re getting old: give it three or four years and I might play, it might happen for me’. And it turned out well.
“I saw a chance; financially it was quite good. It was going to get my parents out the East End, and me as well. It was a tough place, a bit of a ghetto. There was two ways out, sport or crime. Education really wasn’t on the agenda. Thankfully, I had the sport side. I was given every encouragement by Mum and Dad to go and be a footballer. But it was a good place to grow up: good values, family values, and it gave you a lot of character which was important because in football you take a lot of knocks.”
Signing for a side in decline in order to get into the first team quicker was an astute decision typical of Miller. The early days were rocky though. “I signed, then I had three managers in two years,” he remembers. “I thought, ‘Have I done the right thing here?’ I joined when Peter Shreeve was the youth coach, with Ron Henry, from the Double side, and it was a fantastic experience. Along with me at that time were Glenn Hoddle, Chrissie Hughton, Mark Falco, Micky Hazard and we provided the nucleus of the youth team. We had a terrific young side coming and Keith [Burkinshaw] had to go with youngsters because the club wasn’t flush with money, unlike today, and he persevered. Then we bought a couple of non-league players in Graham Roberts and Tony Galvin – I think they cost us £45,000 the pair of them, which was unbelievable – and Garry Brooke, a bit younger than us, he came through and all of a sudden half the team were homegrowns. It was a good time to grow up at Spurs.”
Much of Miller’s growing up came under the shrewd tutelage of Peter Shreeve, who Miller retains a huge amount of respect for. “The first two years at the club I never played centre half, I played right back or central midfield. Peter Shreeve wanted me to see other things on the pitch,” he remembers. “It made me a bit more aware, a better player, improved my passing which was one of my great strengths. But eventually I settled at centre half.”
The arrival of Keith Burkinshaw gave everyone at the club a fillip. Including Miller, whose reaction to relegation was typically positive. “I thought I’d get in the team even quicker!” he laughs. “I used to drive the manager mad every Friday. I’d knock on his door and say, ‘Why ain’t I playing?’ and he’d say, ‘Because you’re only 17’, so I’d say, ‘Well, I’m good enough.’ I used to drive him absolutely crackers, Burkinshaw, every week. He’d tell me to piss off and go home, but I was captain of the reserves and we were flying. We’d turn over any team. We broke the Combination record and won 29, 30 games on the trot. The Combination was a very difficult league to win back then, because half the teams against you would be first team players. And at our place at Cheshunt, first team v reserve matches were very tight affairs. On a Thursday morning we’d have a lot of people come and watch the games because they were very competitive. It became so bad that Keith wouldn’t let me play against the first-team centre forwards in case I injured them. I was eating raw meat then and I couldn’t wait to play.”
Miller’s chance eventually came – away in the north London derby in Tottenham’s first season back up in the top flight. “I’d gone to Skeid FC of Oslo in Norway on loan for the summer which done me fantastically good – finished top European overseas player, qualified for Europe, became a big fish in a small sea if you like. That set me up nicely: I was always coming back to Spurs, no doubt about that, but having tasted that limelight I wasn’t going to let it go. So
I drove Keith absolutely potty and in the end, we’d had some bad results and he called us all together. He was thinking about bringing some of the youngsters in. I’d been in the squad a couple of times, I’d been 13th man and I’d travelled. So we had tea and toast at the ground before we left for Highbury. I remember seeing the chairman at the time, Sidney Wale, walk across the car park, and he said to me, ‘Good luck tonight.’ I thought, ‘That’s strange, I’m not even playing’. And you don’t think anything of it. Bless him, Sidney wasn’t the best expert on football. So we get in there and obviously there’s only 13, 14 of us, so we had eggs and toast and Keith then says to everyone, ‘OK, I’m going to make a couple of changes from Saturday. I think it’s a chance to bring someone a bit different in and, by the way, he’s driven me fucking mad for a year, so Maxie, you’re going to get your chance. Let’s see what you’re made of.’
“So that was hardly inspiring,” he laughs. “I didn’t have too much time, so I phoned home to my mum and dad – they went to all the first team games – and I said, ‘I’ll leave you the tickets, I’m playing.’” It’s no surprise that Miller relished the challenge. “It was a fantastic place to go and play. Sixty-odd thousand people, including a lot of people I went to school with, a lot of them would know me. I have to say we absolutely hammered Arsenal. Pat Jennings had a magnificent night, he saved four or five one-against-ones, and Stapleton scored in the last minute. He lost me on a cross, and maybe Barry Daines might’ve done better but he scored and we lost 1-0: same old Arsenal. But I think I done well and made my mark, and I stayed in the team, played the rest of the season. Then we went on tour round the world, and that was it, I was in.”
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 5