Clearly the social bonds in the team were important to Ricky, but what about the ability of his new team-mates? Did anyone stand out? Ricky answers straight back with one word. “Glenn.” In fact, watching Hoddle on the training ground had a sobering effect on Ricky. “I said to Ossie, ‘Why the club buy us? He is better.’ I believe Glenn was a great, great player. He could do everything – long ball, short ball, go past people, attack people, good shot . . .” Ricky finishes with a sigh and a spread of the hands. It may surprise some that the pair weren’t aware of Hoddle before they came. Although still young, he had been central to the successful promotion season and his talents had already attracted plaudits. But as Ricky says, “In those days the communication was not that easy. Now in Argentina every English game on TV here is live in Buenos Aires. You can watch many players now, but back then . . .” This point leads Ricky to expand on the differences between the way the game is played and approached in each country, casting more light on his own philosophy.
“All the Argentinian people liked Spanish and Italian football. My family is 50 per cent Spanish, 50 per cent Italian so we believe Europe is Italy and Spain. Now it’s different. When I talk to Argentinian people they believe the English league is very entertaining to watch because it’s quick, no one wastes time, no one gets injured. The only problem for me in England is sometimes when it is 10 minutes to go you say, ‘How do you score a goal?’ Because everyone is forward or back, there is no space, so you need special players to make a difference. You have great players in England, but not to do special things in one second.
“We play a more individual game in Buenos Aires, and in Brazil. OK, we play like a team but in the last 40 yards, you decide; you can do what you want. In England, you still play like a team all the time. It is difficult for you to find another way to score a goal. You see the Brazilian player, or Argentinian, one moment he does a special thing and you score from there. I believe that if you are attacking people and you get past, there must be one player on your team who is free.”
Unfortunately for Ricky and his team-mates, it was early in that first season that Spurs found themselves on the receiving end of a football lesson. On 2nd September 1978, Tottenham Hotspur travelled to Anfield. The game was eagerly anticipated – the standard-bearers of English football fresh from consecutive European Cup triumphs against the side who were the talk of football. For Ardiles, Villa and Hoddle especially, it was the biggest test of their credentials so far.
Spurs began strongly, determined to show their skills, and this seemed almost to affront the home side, who were more used to teams coming to Anfield determined to limit the damage. Liverpool moved up several gears and overwhelmed Tottenham 7–0. Ricky remembers the day all too well, giving a rueful grin when asked if he thought he’d made a mistake coming to Spurs as he walked off the pitch. “Not really, because the club had come up from the Second Division,” he says. “You need to prepare for at least six months to play in the top division. This day especially I believe Liverpool were the perfect team, very quick, very skilful, every player looked great. It was very disappointing because if you lose 7–0 you must have had a horrible game. I said to Ossie, ‘This is difficult, we have to fight.’ After the game we spoke, we said this is the last time – it is impossible to lose 7–0. But Liverpool was a great team.”
It was a sobering defeat, one which prompted an upsurge in press speculation about whether the Argentinians would be able to handle the English game. And inevitably, questions were asked about whether the foreigners would ‘fancy it’ in the English winter. For Ricky, a man who is not slow to show his liking for the sun, the onset of winter was quite a culture shock. “In those days in Argentina, when it rained the game was suspended,” he says. “People don’t go to the stadium and the pitch is not in good condition. But in England it is prepared to be played in that position. So if it was raining Friday and then Saturday morning we’d think the game would be suspended. But in England – never!”
Despite the trials of the first season, Ricky and Ossie bedded in, and the team finished in a respectable mid-table position to consolidate their return to the top flight. “We were really happy because we finished in the middle of the table, we stayed in the top division,” says Ricky. “We felt comfortable after the season finished – we had signed for three years, and we talked and said we need to prove our quality as players. The first year was the bad one. The second year was easy.
“The worst thing was the language and the weather; the good thing was that we played football. Because football, whatever the country, is the same. It is 11 against 11 with the ball in the middle.”
Did Ricky feel at home at the end of that first season? “Not really, when you believe you are established at one club it is not a good thing. You have to improve all the time. Especially for me it was very difficult to play in English football. I was a very hard-working player and I never played in between – I was either bad or good. So when I play badly everybody know. Ossie all the while is moving, he’s quick – even when he played badly he was not that bad.”
It’s true that the press at the time seemed to praise each one of the pair only at the other’s expense, saying Ossie wouldn’t last the winter while Ricky’s strength would see him through, or that Ricky didn’t have Ossie’s skill or reading of the game. Ricky is philosophical about all this. “The press is a very important part of any game – you have to accept that. You can never win with them, so I just accept it. Everyone looks at football in a different way, but who is right?”
There was one other tradition in England that particularly stood out. “The surprise for us when we arrived here was how the people were drinking. In Argentina for social life, we eat, we say, ‘Come to my house to have a meal.’ In England it was, ‘Come to my house to have a drink.’ Not only the players, all the people in England drink – this is part of the culture.”
But Ricky is measured when pressed on the drinking culture that was prevalent at the time. “Everybody was very responsible, not drinking three or four days before the game, but the players in those days would drink quite a lot after the match. I think in the end it was a normal situation. Maybe some players, some coaches, do drink a little bit too much, but I think this is if they can’t take the pressure.”
Ricky and Ossie settled in and, by the 1980/81 season, the classic Tottenham Hotspur line-up of the era was coming together. That season’s FA Cup was to bring one of the club’s, and Ricky Villa’s, finest hours.
“We didn’t believe the FA Cup was that big, or how important it was for the people,” says Ricky. “Now, I understand how it is a big, big thing for English people.” This prompts the question of when he realised his goal in the final had captured the imagination to the extent it has. He laughs. “Now. Only now I realise this goal has – what is the word you have for it? Immortality. I realise this only now.”
But as Spurs progressed through the competition, Ricky certainly realised it was pretty important. “The semi-final I remember especially,” says Ricky. “We really enjoyed playing that kind of football. I remember training every day and we would all compete between ourselves to do special things – Glenn, Garth, Stevie Archibald, Stevie P – they were all good footballers. In this game, the replay, we played really well. After the game everybody was very, very happy, and we were confident for the final too, because if we played that way no one could stop us.”
Spurs were favourites to beat Manchester City in the final. All the omens were right, they had shown themselves capable of producing thrilling, flowing football – even their cup final song was riding high in the charts. The scene was set for a showpiece 100th cup final. “But that didn’t happen,” says Ricky. “When you are at Wembley for the first time, it is very difficult to take the pressure. I remember walking on to the pitch before the game and it was too much pressure to take. Maybe if you go into the dressing room and you pray it is easier, because you don’t think too much. But when you are walking around and you see th
e fans and see it is a big, big party, the pressure is coming on all the time.”
Is this why he played so poorly in that game? Ricky still looks pained at the memory, and for the first time seems to struggle for the right words. “Not really . . . well, maybe yes. Who knows?” The image of an utterly disconsolate figure trudging off the pitch is the defining one of that first game. What was going on in Ricky’s head as he made the walk? “I was feeling very unhappy with myself. I didn’t agree with Keith Burkinshaw taking me off, but I hadn’t touched the ball or done anything, so you have to make change. When I walked off the pitch, we were losing 1-0, it was a horrible moment for me – the team was losing, I was going off, and I was disappointed with the manager. But he had to make a decision. Now it is easy to understand, but when I walked into the dressing room I was very, very disappointed. I felt very depressed.”
Steve Perryman says he told Burkinshaw not to pick Ricky for the replay, “because I didn’t think his head was right”. It’s not hard to see why Perryman came to what was a tough decision about his friend and team-mate, but the captain’s job involves tough calls. Burkinshaw, however, had a hunch that Ricky had got his bad game out of his system, and told him almost immediately as the team gathered in the dressing room that he would be playing in the replay.
“I don’t remember exactly what happened in the dressing room,” says Ricky of the aftermath of the first match, “but he sat with me and said, ‘You’ll play the rematch’ and this was a great thing for me. A very important part of managing is to decide who will play the next game. Maybe you get it wrong, but you have to make a decision quickly. A manager has to be confident, to believe in the player.
“When I talked with Keith recently, he said, ‘I knew from the first touch in the first moment of a game whether you would be in good form or bad form.’ Maybe I have one or two bad touches and I give up. As I said before, I am either very good or very bad. In football, the most important game is the next, and I was happy Keith gave me the chance to play again.
“We had a game on the Monday, so we came back to training, and then we started thinking about the FA Cup again,” he says. This time there was a quiet confidence. “We were more confident about the second game than the first. Not many of us had played in the FA Cup final before. In the first game everybody knew we had a 50 per cent chance, but in the replay everybody looked more sure.’
So when it came to the game, what did Keith Burkinshaw say in his team talk? “The good thing for me was that Keith never talked about defensive play. All the time we were going for winning games, and this is risky sometimes, because playing Glenn, me, Ossie, Tony Galvin – it’s not a very defensive team. And I agree with this kind of football. When you go onto the pitch, you must think about winning, not about losing – that is the worst part of the game. And Keith was always about that, about giving you confidence that you could win the game. We played football all the time.”
So what of the game itself, and that marvellous goal? “I scored an easy goal in the first 20 minutes, which maybe gave me confidence,” remembers Ricky. “I was thinking before the game, to play worse than the first game – impossible! When you have a bad game, like I did before, you can only improve. So I scored the first goal, the team started doing well, then I finished with the winning goal.”
But that winning goal was football at its most mesmeric. Ricky’s powerful, surging, jinking run almost half the length of the pitch through the ranks of pale blue City shirts is just a part of a rich tableau of images. Like the seven City players surrounding him as he squeezed off the final shot. Like the sight of Garth Crooks, on the edge of the box, nervously miming kicks with his right foot as Ricky goes further, and further, and further. And of Steve Archibald away to Ricky’s right in acres of space, screaming for the pass.
For Ricky, of course, the memories of those moments are quite different. “When I had the ball I was thinking all the time – ‘to the goal,’” he says. “I didn’t see Steve Archibald [screaming for the ball] because I was concentrating on playing. I didn’t have time to watch the other players. When I put my head up, the goal was really close, and I lost control before I should, but in the end it finished in the net. My dream was to score a great goal in a great place, and this happened in the ’81 final.”
There can be no greater contrast with the crestfallen, substituted figure of the first game than the sight of Ricky picking himself up from the turf as the stadium erupts and running, his mouth wide with the roar of success, his arms fully extended as if he is about to take off, racing along the wing towards his team-mates. “I felt like the happiest man in the world,” he says. That goal was voted Wembley’s Goal of the Century in 2001.
The cup was Tottenham’s, and the triumph was to prove not just a single trophy victory, but the catalyst for one of the most sustained periods of success in the club’s history. “When you win it is a great, great moment, and there are not many in football, not many,” says Ricky. “I have two or three great moments in my career. In the World Cup I didn’t play very often – I won but I didn’t feel as if I won it. This time I played, and I had played in the semi-final. For me, the big moment in football was ’81. People in Argentina say, ‘But you won the World Cup,’ but I only played a tiny part in the games.”
The following season saw Spurs challenge hard on four fronts – three domestic trophies and the European Cup Winners’ Cup – and more glory for Ricky. He scored his only hat-trick for the club in the 6-1 thrashing of Wolves on the day Spurs opened the new West Stand at White Hart Lane, and was a fixture in the side that finished fourth in the league, reached two cup semi-finals and retained the FA Cup. But the season was soured for Ricky by events far beyond his control, events which meant he did not return to Wembley to help defend the Cup he’d done so much to win the season before.
On 2nd April 1982 Argentina and England went to war over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands – which left two high-profile Argentinians living in the UK in a very difficult position. Ossie was eventually to leave the country; Ricky stayed, but it was not thought appropriate for him to play in the FA Cup final.
“There were some difficult days,” he remembers. “In the end I couldn’t play the final the next year, but the history is there. What could I do about the Falklands? They were very unhappy days. I believe football should keep clear of the political scene, but it was impossible then. The politics sometimes come in and touch football, and there is nothing we can do about that. These days were very unhappy because I don’t like war. If I have a problem with you, the best thing is to talk.”
The pain still shows on Ricky’s face and it’s obvious he’s still uneasy talking about the episode. But he does talk about how it affected relations between him and his team-mates. “The feeling was that the English people know what was going on because you had conflicts with other countries before. I talked with the players and said, ‘It is nothing between you and me, it is a problem between the government of Argentina and the government in England.’ I’m a normal person, a professional. I have a country here, and I have to respect that. And people treated me very well. I can imagine the other way it would be impossible for an English player to play in Buenos Aires. English people are very polite, despite what happened.” In fact, despite some comments in the press and the inevitable terrace taunts, Ricky found little to prompt him to leave the country, unlike Ossie who went to Paris Saint Germain on loan. “I never thought like that,” he says. “People treated me very well – why should I move? I didn’t decide to have the war, I played football. It never came into my mind to leave the country.”
Ricky returned to play another 33 games for Spurs the following season, but a corner had been turned. It was the final year of his contract and when it ended he decided to move to Miami to play for Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the North American Soccer League. He remembers it ruefully. “Maybe I made a wrong decision. I finished my contract. When you are a player, you are always unhappy over one little thing or a
nother – it’s silly. I believe now I made a mistake, because I went to Miami to play football and the football in America is low level.”
But was he ever offered a new contract by Spurs? “I don’t remember. I don’t know how to explain it – America for me was another dream. Miami especially with the way the life outside the house was. When I was younger I thought I would live in Miami one day.” For Ricky, the lure of the sun was too strong, but as we talk he seems uncomfortable people might think such a big decision turned on such an apparently trivial thing, and he expands on his point. “It was OK to live in Miami, but not to play football. It is a very enjoyable part of the world, because it is sunny, there’s the beach . . . but not to play football. Afterwards I went to Colombia to play for Deportivo Cali but the level was still going down. And I was getting older. I have to accept I made a wrong decision – maybe I could’ve played two more seasons in England – but it’s too late now.” He grins and gives a resigned laugh.
Throughout our chat, Ricky has been anxious to emphasise his affection for England. In many cases this would come across as someone trying perhaps too hard to say the right things to the right audience, but Ricky’s feelings seem genuine. “Our children were born here, they are English, they have the passports, I’m pleased with that,” he says. “The British citizen is respected around the world. The reputation of English people is good’.”
And it’s not just what he says, it’s what he does that underlines the depth of his feelings for England and for Tottenham Hotspur, the club he still – “of course, of course” – considers his team. A few seasons ago, there was a commotion just before the game in the away section at Fulham’s Craven Cottage as Spurs prepared to take on the Cottagers. People were standing, looking towards the middle rows of seats, and applauding. The chant of, “There’s only one Ricky Villa” went up and in the midst of the throng on a balmy evening a bearded figure could just be made out, smiling and a little shyly acknowledging the ovation. After the game, those who’d been next to him told how Ricky had just bought a ticket and turned up to sit with the ordinary fans and watch his team. He chatted, cheered the team, signed autographs and then, as the crowds streamed home, waved goodbye, jumped on a bus and disappeared into the night. When reminded of that evening he flashes that trademark grin. “I like to go to see Spurs. It’s a nice feeling for me; people still recognise me and give me a good reception. This is nice. It doesn’t happen in Argentina.” And Ricky seems genuinely touched, if not a little amazed, that he is still held in such regard in this country so long after he played here.
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 8