“But that season, everything was wonderful. Playing was such a joy. The team was really settled and that means confidence runs through the side. Then suddenly the war. For me, the world was turned upside down. It took me a long, long time to recover.”
It was April 1982 when it all kicked off over the Falklands. It was the month of the FA Cup semi-final, but already events further afield were playing on Ossie’s mind. “We played the FA Cup semi – won 2–0. But I was starting to feel uncomfortable. I thought it could develop into something big – I never thought a war. The relationship between England and Argentina has been always . . . tricky. Particularly because of the Falklands – or Malvinas. But at the time the relationship was good.
“There was a party after the semi-final and I remember saying to the boys that I was sure the press would be saying a lot of things about me. It had been on the front page of The Sun that I had been saying, ‘I’m going to kill the English’, that I was going to fight for Argentina, that I was the number one soldier – all complete and utter bullshit. But the press in Argentina were not much better. I couldn’t win – I couldn’t do anything. It was a very difficult moment for me and Ricky because the two countries we love were at war. The war was done for political reasons – both governments wanted to keep on in power, the generals in Argentina and Margaret Thatcher here.”
Despite Ossie’s distaste for the intrusion of politics into football, and his views of the motives of the respective governments at the time, he is keen to make his position clear. “The position with the islands is that I believe Argentina have more rights to them. Colonies we don’t see in the world any more in the 21st century. So I think it is living in the past to want to be a colonial power. The way the islands were taken, Argentina was a very weak country and England was very powerful. This is what it was at the beginning. Now of course, it is much more complicated, there are between 2,000 and 2,500 people who have lived there who want to be British and of course you have to respect that as well. But fundamentally I believe the islands are Argentina’s.”
Although at the time Ossie kept his counsel, the very presence of two players from a country the UK was at war with inevitably attracted the ire of some fans and the media. “Things started to escalate,” Ossie remembers.
The atmosphere was tense, but Ossie is also keen to make clear that his departure from England in 1982 to join up with the Argentine national squad was not something that came about because of the crisis. “A lot of people say I left because I couldn’t play in England any more. That’s not true at all,” he says. “We had a deal between Keith and [Argentina manager César Louis] Menotti that before the World Cup arrived I will go to be with Argentina. That was the deal, and we were going to stick to it. So I went – the decision was a football decision. Nothing to do with the Falklands.”
Eventually, as events changed Ossie’s circumstances, he did decide to leave Tottenham to ply his trade in Paris, spending a season on loan with Paris Saint Germain. “Ricky stayed but I decided to go,” he says. “I thought it would be impossible to remain in England. The club understood; they said, ‘You go for as long as it takes. We will keep on paying you, and when you feel it is good, you come back.’ I couldn’t face not playing football, so the first thing I said was ‘Transfer me’. So we came to a compromise. I would go to play somewhere else for a year, on loan – no money involved and no option to buy me. One year and I come back. I was six months in Paris; I play the worst football of my life. It was too much.”
It was a dark time and, as with Ricky, it still weighs heavily on Ossie’s mind, especially as he lost a relative in the conflict. “It took us a long time to recover,” he says. “Even when I came back afterwards, all the time at the back of your mind was the war, the war, the war.”
In fact, coming back afterwards was not to prove that easy. After the World Cup, in which he had a good tournament, a hitch in the agreement between Spurs and the French club meant Ossie would have to return to London temporarily. “I was supposed to go to Paris but they hadn’t come up with what they should have, so I was told we go back to London and think again. I needed a visa to come back to England, even though I was a resident here. We went to the British consulate – and they said ‘No’. No visa. I said, ‘But my family is there’ and they said, ‘Mr Ardiles – no.’
“So I said to Keith ‘How can I go back to play in England now? They won’t let me in.’ And he talked about maybe bringing me in through Ireland, all sorts of things. So I went to Paris. After three months, I have a visa. Spurs put a lot of pressure on.”
Back in his adopted home after six months in France, Ossie was soon to have more changes to deal with. His great friend Ricky announced he was leaving Spurs to go and live in Florida and play in the North American Soccer League. “We talked a lot about that decision,” says Ossie, “and at the time I told him it was a very bad decision. Ricky wanted to go to the sun. I said the standard of football will be very different. After he scored the goal in the cup final, Ricky was wonderful, playing the best football of his career, but he decided to go.”
With Ricky gone, Steve Perryman became Ossie’s new room-mate, cementing a strong bond that lasts to this day. At the end of that 1983/84 season, Ossie was to give his UEFA Cup winners’ medal to Perryman, suspension having meant the captain missed out on the final and was therefore ineligible for a medal. It was an emotional occasion for many reasons. “We won the UEFA Cup,” says Ossie, “but this team was finishing its life.” Not only was that great Spurs team nearing the end of its days, manager Keith Burkinshaw had announced he would be leaving the club after the final. How did this news affect Ossie and the team?
“It was a very crazy decision,” says Ossie, shaking his head. “The team was settled, he was very settled with us, there were no problems whatsoever. It was perfect. But Keith didn’t like the way the new chairman was doing things. He was used to a different kind of management where the manager does everything, and now they were talking about taking some things away. I can imagine he was very happy about the commercial things being taken, but some other things he was feeling very uncomfortable about. He felt he couldn’t work with these people. So he took the decision, but like I said, crazy.”
Ossie had been carrying a succession of leg injuries ever since he’d broken his shin in his fourth game back in England in 1983, and he almost didn’t play the final at all. “I couldn’t possibly play, I was only 30 per cent fit. Keith took a big gamble on Gary Mabbutt, he was 60 to 70 per cent fit, but he couldn’t take a chance on me as well. But it came to the last 20 minutes and we were losing 1-0 and Keith decided I would play, so I came on.” Even a below-par Ossie managed to hit the bar just before Graham Roberts scored the equaliser.
While celebrations did follow Tottenham’s win, for Ossie there was little of the exuberance that had followed the 1981 FA Cup final. “We were very, very happy afterwards, but nothing like 1981,” he says. “The UEFA Cup was not, as you’d say, the first cup in Europe, maybe not even the second because you had the Cup Winners’ Cup. When you compare the UEFA Cup final with all the other finals . . . But still it was a beautiful European night.”
With Burkinshaw gone, more change was inevitable. Was Ossie worried about his future with the man who travelled across the globe to sign him now gone? He smiles. “Not really. I like Keith very, very much. But you know how you are as a football player – a new manager arrives and that’s it, you get on with it. Peter Shreeve was put in charge, John Pratt assistant, so basically we were going to be moving on with the same team. Players are very selfish, we just say ‘hey’ and carry on playing.”
In fact, it wasn’t the new manager that caused Ossie the problems – it was the persistent leg injury. “Peter knew what the core of the team he wanted was, but it all changed because I was injured all the time,” he remembers. “In 1986/87 when I had my last operation – I had my testimonial in 1986 – it was my last throw of the dice. I thought perhaps I am not going to play any more
. I had the operation, and by then I had a one-month contract. And then there was a kind of miracle. We started the season and I felt great, like I’d always felt before. I could forget about the leg; it was brilliant, brilliant. All my comebacks before had been the same, play one game in the reserves, someone touch the leg, oh no . . . play one game in the reserves, someone touch the leg, oh no . . . This time I played five or six games in the reserves – fine.”
You can still see the joy in Ossie’s eyes as he recounts the story of his comeback. “I went to the first team in 1986 again. That was the second best team I played in, a wonderful team, with Chrissy Waddle, Richard Gough, Gary Mabbutt at the back; Clive Allen . . .” Once again, Spurs, now under the management of David Pleat, were fighting for trophies on every front domestically – playing expansive, thrilling football the Spurs way. But the team began to run out of steam as the fixtures piled up. An epic League Cup semi-final saw Spurs agonisingly lose out to the old enemy Arsenal over two legs and the league title slip away under the weight of games. But by the time the season’s traditional climax, the FA Cup final, came around, Spurs were there, and hot favourites to beat Coventry City.
It was not to be. “The final in 1987 was one of the biggest let-downs in my career,” says Ossie ruefully. “We were convinced we were going to beat Coventry.” Much has been made of a row over shirt sponsorship that erupted in the dressing room, a row which saw some players take the field bearing the sponsor’s name, and some in plain shirts with no sponsor’s logo. But Ossie dismisses this explanation. “The row about the shirts was nothing,” he says sharply, “It had no effect at all, we didn’t even know about it until afterwards. Maybe we were a bit complacent. Because we were much, much better than them, the better team without a shadow of a doubt. But we didn’t perform.”
At this stage, a difficult question needs posing. Interviews with many of those who played under him and observation from afar of his two tenures at the club suggest that David Pleat is not the most popular character ever to have graced White Hart Lane. So why was this?
Ossie weighs his words. “Look. David Pleat’s football intelligence was very, very good. Maybe the problem was to do with man management. A lot had to do with his choice of number two, Trevor Hartley. He made a lot of people very uncomfortable. He created friction. The team were fighting each other, it was not good. But David Pleat knew about football. He was very, very good.”
It’s clear Ossie is not going to be drawn further, so we move on, this time touching on Ossie’s relationship with another Spurs manager, Terry Venables. Chairman Irving Scholar had brought Venables back to England after a successful spell with Barcelona. When Venables took stock of the team he had inherited he decided it was time for major changes. And Ossie Ardiles was not part of the future he envisioned. So how did Ossie feel after ten years at the club?
“Maybe Terry Venables felt a bit threatened by me,” he says. “Whatever it was, he decided to make a new team.” But Ossie recognised that things had changed for him on the pitch too. “I remember playing in one game,” he says, “and someone, Dennis Wise I think, had the ball. I went to close him down and – choom! – he was gone. I remember thinking ‘This can’t be right, it is impossible.’ So I started to feel I was not the same player, I had less quickness. I knew that something had happened that meant I could not play football for Spurs any more because Spurs’ level was very, very high. So it was agreed between Terry and me that I should go.”
So whose decision was it? “He suggested it,” says Ossie. “Blackburn wanted me to help them go up, so we did a deal for a kind of loan for a month. With respect to Blackburn, and QPR afterwards, it was a step down and I seriously began to consider retiring. I was spending a lot of time injured, I was not the player I had been, I was not enjoying football. So that was the beginning of the end.”
And so, after ten years during which he played in two of Tottenham Hotspur’s finest teams, Ossie Ardiles drifted quietly out of the club he’d travelled across the globe to join. But his love affair with the game was not over. A stint at Second Division Swindon Town saw him become first a coach, then manager, in July 1989.
“I wanted to carry on being involved in the game,” he says, the sadness with which he recounted his last days at Spurs gone. “To play football is the best thing in life. For a professional footballer being a manager will always be a kind of substitute when you are not able to play any more. Of course, it is wonderful when the team is playing in the way you want them to play.”
Ossie’s Swindon, employing a flamboyant style, won promotion to the top flight ten months after he took over, but were then demoted for making irregular payments to players. Once more, events off the field impacted on Ossie’s football dreams. Spells in charge at Newcastle United and West Bromwich Albion followed, before the call came to manage Spurs. Although, once again, the circumstances were controversial – club chairman Alan Sugar having just ousted Terry Venables in acrimonious circumstances. Despite all this, Ossie had no hesitation in accepting the job.
“When I had the Spurs job, for me it was a dream come true. But like any dream, you have to be very careful. If at the time they had offered me Real Madrid or Barcelona or Spurs, I would have taken Spurs, no question. That’s how much I was in love with the club. Chris Hughton was there; everything seemed to be in place.” It did not take him long to see what he had inherited. “Looking back, well, the house was on fire really. There had been great animosity between Terry Venables and Alan Sugar. I didn’t want to get involved at all, but somehow the press made me be involved. The players didn’t want to play for Spurs, or rather they didn’t want to play for Alan Sugar. All the supporters were very much against Sugar, and at the time there were only two people who could put the fire out – Glenn or me. It was Glenn first, and he said, ‘No, I am going to Chelsea’. So I became the manager.”
Ossie remembers “a very painful time”, when even the players he knew couldn’t be persuaded to put the effort in because of all the politics going on behind the scenes. On top of all this, Spurs had also been hit with a points deduction and a ban from the FA Cup as a result of allegations of illegal payments made during the split between Sugar and Venables. “It was very hard,” says Ossie. “We just avoided relegation; there was no money to spend so we had to buy cheap; we had the points deducted when the FA tried to make an example of us; we couldn’t play the FA Cup. It was unbelievable. And very hard to sign players.”
It’s clear Ossie is still angry about much of what happened during his return to Spurs, especially as he maintains he had begun to turn things around when the axe fell. “The second season, we had a decent team, but I paid the price for the first season. My biggest mistake was not resigning when I should have done. I should have resigned when there started to be a lot of interference, after he appointed Claude Littner and he started to run the club in a kind of, well, put it like this: a ‘no bullshit, kick some arses’ style.
“I had some differences with Littner, because it could be embarrassing at times. We talked to Alan Sugar and he said, ‘Carry on’, but after that he never backed me as perhaps he should have. Maybe because he trusted Littner more. At the time the club needed to be better run; I had no problem with that. But he didn’t support me in the way that he had. And I should have resigned.”
The popular wisdom is that, whatever the dysfunctional state of a club that had prided itself on behaving like a family when Ossie first joined as a player, it was Ossie’s cavalier approach to playing the game that really did for him. Does he think this has ruined his chances of managing in England again?
“Absolutely,” he says. “All this stuff about the tactics, the five attackers – it was not true. Look, in the 1981 side I played in, we had one midfielder whose job was to be a little bit defensive, but everyone else went forward when they could – that was the idea. I didn’t want to compromise. And with the team I had, what could I say, ‘Teddy, you stay back’, ‘Jurgen, you stay back’ . . . We had real
, real class in this team.”
Whatever the cause, the results proved decisive, but since then, Ossie’s management reputation has been restored thanks to three successful spells in Japan’s J-League. “Japan was very good to me because it rebuilt my confidence which was shattered after Spurs. I am the second most successful manager there,” he says.
Despite his bruising experiences, Ossie is bullish about his career. “I’ve judged myself and I think that I work very well when things are straightforward,” he says. “My problems are when things become very political. The problems I had with management in England at Newcastle were incredibly political: John Hall was taking power, many things were happening. When the political things come in I am not very happy because I am not a political person. And I would like one day to manage in England again.”
5
GARRY BROOKE
“IT WASN’T WORK – IT WAS GOING TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE TO DO”
If Garry Brooke is bitter, it doesn’t show. As a footballer who weathered more than his fair share of setbacks, he could be forgiven for harbouring resentments – there aren’t many players who have had their top-flight career cut short by the consequences of a road accident that nearly killed them. Instead, Brooke retains all the chirpy humour and warmth that made him one of the most popular members of the Tottenham squad of the early 1980s. Mention the name Brooksie to any of them today and a smile invariably appears on their faces.
It is easy to see why. A conversation with Garry is full of laughs, with a fund of anecdotes spawned from a lively dressing room. He has a reputation for being one of the quieter members of the gang, and chooses his words carefully to begin with. But as he gets into his stride, he emerges as an engaging storyteller with a thoughtful take on the game and a sharp insight into the vagaries of success and failure it can provide.
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 10