It all set up a famous, but nervy, home decider. “It was a great experience that night,” he says. “We were struggling, but always felt we could nick a goal to win it. The penalties, well, it were a nightmare. They’d picked the first five to take them and I wasn’t one of them. You wouldn’t rely on me to take a penalty, but we were getting close – it was Chris and me being lined up so it was coming our way. We were quite nervous,” says Galvin, laughing, “so when Tony pulled that save off . . . I don’t think it’s about taking the penalty, it’s about what happens if you miss it. If you’ve got to take it, you’ve got to get up and just take it. But if you miss it they never forgive you forever and a day. It’s that fear.”
Galvin rates that win as the pinnacle of his time at Spurs. “That was the highlight. You were close to the supporters, it was our ground, it was nearly all Tottenham supporters, it meant something massive to win a European competition, there was the penalty shoot-out – it was all there. Afterwards we just stayed in one of the lounges upstairs – it was an impromptu thing and we just stayed the night.”
Times were changing, and after the popular Peter Shreeve was deemed not to have been a success in taking over after Keith Burkinshaw left, a promising young manager called David Pleat arrived. Almost from the start, he was a controversial figure, and for Galvin – like a number of other players – Pleat’s arrival was to prove the beginning of the end. “He was a very clever manager, and he played good football. He wasn’t particularly close to his players, but I don’t think he ever wanted to be,” Galvin says. “I often wonder if that was what he wanted, almost Brian Cloughesque, to unite the team against the manager and get them working for each other. I remember once we played Wimbledon and they had been bigging it up, saying they were going to kick shit out of Tottenham. And we hammered them. Hammered them. Good football, but we physically stood up to it as well. So I often wonder if we stuck together in spite of the manager.
“He bought Steve Hodge and wanted to play a different way with a five-man midfield. So I only got a few games, and I was quite happy to be – if not playing – sub. But the killer was the semi-final against Watford [in 1987] when I was expecting to be one of the subs and I wasn’t. You could sense we were going to beat Watford because they hadn’t got a goalkeeper. I’d been sub in the League Cup games against Arsenal, come on as sub in every single one of those games. How we lost that I don’t know. That was as down as I’ve ever seen that team: it hurt some of the people that had been there a while – badly. So not being picked for the FA Cup semi really killed me – it told me I was on my way out. I played a few games, the season ended with the cup final, and that cup final was a disaster. David Pleat set the team up all wrong for it. We got overrun down the right side. Mitchell Thomas had no protection. Dave Bennett was playing right wing and they ran us ragged – they looked fitter and stronger than us.
“So I’d seen the writing on the wall, and David Pleat did call me in and say, ‘You’re not in my plans.’ I did play some games at the start of the season, but then I got injured and he made it clear that they didn’t want me. I didn’t want to go, but when it’s made clear you’re not wanted there’s no point staying. It did piss me off that I felt I was being edged out when I didn’t want to go. So I went to Sheffield Wednesday, which looking back probably wasn’t the wisest choice, but it was a good experience. Totally different club and style of football. As it turned out, a couple of months after I went, Pleat had gone. So who knows what would’ve happened if I’d stuck around.
“I was due a testimonial that year, which in those days was quite important,” he says. “So I had to negotiate a game when I’d left Tottenham. We arranged this game and David Pleat had been totally unhelpful. It was a disaster because Tottenham weren’t doing very well. David Pleat had gone because of what had happened, Terry [Venables] had come in and the team was struggling badly. We played West Ham and it pissed down: about seven or eight thousand people turned up. I felt I’d been let down. It was a bit messy how it all finished.
“I see David now, and I’m not one for carrying things on. But at the time I wasn’t very happy. I’m not one to come out and start slagging people in the press though. I was offered quite a substantial amount of money by one newspaper while I was at Sheffield Wednesday to do a story about David Pleat. But I didn’t do it. I thought about it, but I didn’t do it.”
After helping to keep Wednesday up, Galvin negotiated a free transfer to Swindon Town after he was called by their manager – one Ossie Ardiles. “It was his first job and I think he wanted a few people he knew around him,” says Galvin. By now his thoughts were turning to what to do after he stopped playing. “We had these pensions, but you were never in a position where you didn’t need to work again. And you shouldn’t be in your early 30s, you need to go away and do something else. I did a bit of coaching at Swindon, and went to Newcastle with Ossie as his assistant manager. I’d done my coaching badges. I applied for a few jobs, but my heart wasn’t really in it. It was a difficult time to be at Newcastle because we got a fair bit of abuse, even though we were just using kids.
“So I’d had enough really. I didn’t think I was particularly cut out for coaching, wasn’t really in love with football. You could see it changing then in the early ’90s. Players getting a bit big for their boots – players who’d achieved nothing. You had players near the bottom of the old Second Division giving it the Billy Big Bollocks, and I thought, ‘I’ve had enough of this.’
“So I just went to work in a college, into teaching. From about 1992, for the next 14 years I taught in colleges, became a manager in a college and worked up. I always did some sport, coached teams. I managed Royston Town for a couple of years, quite low down amateur level, and really enjoyed it. And I felt there was a big gap between me and professional football – it was miles away.
“I’m at Royston Town now doing the coaching on Saturdays. I’ve got no interest in professional football to be honest. I get more enjoyment from what I’m doing.”
A few days after the interview, Galvin answers an email sent asking for his reaction to Spurs winning the Carling Cup and, just maybe, starting to lift what he saw as the burden on his team. “They’ve got to build on it now,” he replied. Bill Nick and Keith Burkinshaw would have been proud.
7
GRAHAM ROBERTS
“MY GAME WAS ALL ABOUT HEART”
“I love this club,” says Graham Roberts. “I really love this club.” Of all the clichés footballers both past and present are likely to utter, it is declarations of undying affection that supporters view with most scepticism. In the modern game a player expressing emotional ties to a club, like the maximum wage and terraces in the stands, seems to be a relic of another age, a quaint but outdated symbol of the fabled good old days.
Sitting in a west London café, over mugs of tea and the background chatter of builders, Graham Roberts is having none of it if such cynicism is aimed at him. “I love Tottenham. I actually pay now to go and watch them play, I’ll always do it. Tottenham gave me my opportunity in football and I’ll always love the supporters. Always.”
There are plenty of fans for whom the feeling is mutual. A generation on, Roberts is still one of the most popular players from this Spurs team. Right on cue, as he settles down to reflect on his own glory days, a passer-by bids him ‘Hello’, her greeting warmly reciprocated. “She’s wonderful – a big, big Tottenham fan. When I went to Rangers she travelled up on the coach for my first game just to wish me luck. That’s what you call a fan. Either that or she’s a stalker.”
Laughing along with the joke is Paul Merson, with whom Roberts has an appointment to open a new bookmakers down the road. “Is this just going to be about Spurs?” Merson asks. “In that case, I’m off.” Roberts takes the opportunity to remind him about Tottenham’s recent humiliation of the Gunners in the Carling Cup. “5-1, Merse.” Spoken like a true Tottenham fan.
It is this bond with his supporters that marks Roberts out.
Ask anyone among the generation that saw him play, and his or her favourite will probably be cited as Hoddle, Ardiles or one of the other magicians that graced that flair-packed side. Yet push them further and Roberts will invariably be mentioned as the one they really cherished most – the superstar footballer they could identify with. A rugged centre half who provided the definition of ‘no-nonsense’, his committed, fearless and often match-winning displays granted him enduring cult status.
For someone reared in the school of hard knocks, he’s aged well. Dressed in a smart suit, he looks every inch the businessman and media performer he has become, but with the relaxed, confident demeanour of a middle-aged man in good physical nick. Twenty years on from his playing days and with a slight burr, he talks as he performed: direct, forthright and uncompromising. Matters he takes issue with are tackled head on the same way he did on the pitch: fairly, for the most part, but always firmly. It’s a style that occasionally got him into trouble during his playing career and has done so since he retired, but as one of the few genuine hard men in a sport awash with pretenders, Robbo was and still is a terrace hero.
“That was the only way I could play,” he says. “I couldn’t go and be a Fancy Dan player. I was a 100 per center. I think my ability got better over the years, and it showed on the night of the 1984 UEFA Cup final when I think I led by example with my skill and my physical effort. But at heart I was a winner and there was no way that we were not going to win that cup; it was going to be over my dead body.”
That never-say-die attitude was a feature of Roberts’s career. His path to the European final was an unlikely one, punctuated with frequent moves and setbacks. Football is littered with hard-luck stories of gifted youngsters who never quite made the grade, and early on in his embryonic career it looked like Roberts was going to be one of those cruelly discarded. Yet his own determination and a chance encounter between Tottenham’s most famous son and a mystery train passenger at a quiet country station enabled Roberts to get his career back on track.
Born in Southampton in 1959, Roberts had trials with his local club, but was rejected by then manager Lawrie McMenemy. “He said I would never make a football player.” Brief spells at Bournemouth and Portsmouth followed until a serious injury threatened to derail his career before it had even started. “I broke my ankle. Jimmy Dickinson [Pompey’s record appearance holder] had taken over. He put me in the squad to play Aldershot pre-season and they were going to give me a contract that night, but the first tackle – my ankle went. So they released me a week later.”
Unlike many other aspiring youngsters experiencing demoralising rejection, Roberts at least had an alternative to fall back on. “At the time I was an apprentice ship-fitter’s mate. I came out of that and got a job at Fawley refinery, then left there to go to a shipbuilding firm. I was a pipe-fitter learning the trade, but football was all that I wanted. I knew that if I got back into non-league football and played really well there might be a chance. The old Ipswich keeper Dave Best took me to Dorchester, and then I went on to Weymouth. I was only there for six months, but they were what a conference club is now, and I played really well. It was a good club, Andy Townsend came afterwards, and it provided a decent grounding for people.”
By the summer of 1980, Roberts was being courted by a number of clubs and had a move lined up to West Brom, then managed by Ron Atkinson. What happened next must rank as one of the most fanciful of career developments, a switch in fortune for which Roberts owes an eternal debt of gratitude to a nameless individual he has never met.
“Bill Nicholson was the one who scouted me,” Graham recalls. “He was on his way to look at a young lad at Swindon, but the game was called off. He was sitting on a train station platform and got talking to a fella there. The fella asked, ‘What are you doing down here?’ and Bill said he’d come to watch a midfield player at Swindon who had been recommended. This bloke said, ‘Well, do yourself a favour, get down to Weymouth because they’ve got the best non-league player in this area.’
“I’ve never met this bloke but he was the man responsible for Bill Nicholson getting on a different train and coming to watch me. I was going to sign for West Brom the following week because they had made a bid of 30 grand. But Bill must have liked what he saw because Tottenham got in touch while I was actually at West Brom having talks and made the same offer.
“It was a twist of fate. I don’t know who that man is, what he is, where he is. I just got a phone call from my manager at Weymouth, Stuart Morgan, to say that Tottenham had come in for me. Ron Atkinson wasn’t happy and didn’t want me to leave his office without signing. I then travelled to Tottenham on the Thursday; I said I would give my answer to both clubs on the following day. On the Friday I was at Spurs, training with the likes of Stevie [Perryman], Glenn, Ossie, Micky Hazard, and Ricky; I never got a kick of the ball in the gym – I ran round and round for an hour and a half, lost about a stone in weight, and came out of there wondering whether I would be good enough.
“But then I met Keith and sat in his office. He offered me £185 a week and a four-grand signing-on fee, which would go towards my house. The truth is I was on more at Weymouth. Well, I was getting £250 from my job and I was getting £150 for playing football. So I was on £400 a week and Spurs were offering me £185,” Roberts laughs. “But it wasn’t the money; the money never came into it. It was just about playing football.
“So the situation was that Weymouth had accepted offers both from West Brom and Tottenham. When I went into Keith’s office and he offered me this enormous sum of £185 per week, the last thing he asked me was, ‘What position do you play?’ He’d never even seen me play. But he knew Bill Nicholson had and his recommendation was good enough – and that was also good enough for me.”
It seems extraordinary now to think of a part-time, non-league player moving to a top-flight club and having to take a wage cut of more than 50 per cent, but Roberts’s route to the top of professional football was as unorthodox as it was eventful. Most players never experience the ‘real world’ of work until their playing careers come to an end, but Roberts’s time in the dockyards provided a degree of perspective, and one that perhaps strengthened his bond with the supporters, many of whom laboured in similar surroundings.
“I think it gave me more hunger and desire. I wanted to succeed. I mean, I could have lived an easy life, I could have played non-league football for ten years and earned a good living, but I just wanted something else; I wanted to be a professional footballer; I wanted to go in and train every day. When I went to Spurs I wanted to work hard at my game.”
If the financial rewards were oddly inverted between league and non-league, the gap in quality of football was more predictable. “Peter Shreeve said to me, ‘We’ll make you a better player but your touch needs to improve.’ I went back in the afternoons and trained with the reserves, which I didn’t mind; I wanted to get out there and into the first team, but the only way you can do it is to work hard.
“My first proper training session was a culture shock, but I learned to do the easy things quickly. My game was all about heart. I was a tough tackler and I was a winner; that was my game. I didn’t care if it was Glenn Hoddle or whoever, I was there to win the ball and win the game. It didn’t matter to me. Whoever I played against and whatever team I played in, I would give 100 per cent and more, the very best that I could. If it wasn’t good enough on the day then so be it, but no one could ever say of me that it was for lack of effort – that’s how it was. Playing in the team and training with these players brought me on.”
Coming into a club like Spurs there was little danger of Graham getting too big for his boots, even if he had had the inclination. The young defender arriving from a modest south coast background was suddenly thrust in among a bunch of confident, streetwise Londoners whose jovial if merciless disdain for ‘country bumpkins’ could have cowed weaker characters.
“Flash cockneys? Yeah, there was bit of that,” he laughs. “I got the piss
taken out of me for the way I dressed. I would come in with a woolly polo neck and I would get the mickey taken out of me, because you had the likes of Paul Miller and the other Londoners and they had all the fancy dress sense. But I wasn’t there to be smartly dressed: I was there to play football and win.
“I knew a bit of what to expect. I’d played against Paul and Chrissie [Hughton] before when we got to the semi-finals of the FA Youth Cup when I was at Portsmouth. We drew with them 2-2 at White Hart Lane and then at Fratton Park we lost 2-1, and I remember Maxie saying something to our lad when we had a penalty in the last minute. Maxie had a right go at him as he’s about to take it, saying, ‘You ain’t strong enough to take this penalty’, and the lad missed it. But that’s what it was like, how you became in their company – not flash, necessarily – but one of the boys. I became one of them – a Tottenham player.”
Given his chance Roberts soon shone. Instrumental in the way he eased into the role was skipper Steve Perryman. “What can you say about Steve?” says Roberts. “He was a fantastic influence on me. He would keep your feet on the floor; he would do everything to make sure you didn’t get too big-headed.
“He taught me how to be a professional footballer, taught me how to be a captain, learned me the trade of the game. He was a superstar. People say to me, ‘Who’s the best player you played with? Well I played with people like Glenn and Ricky and Graeme Souness, but Stevie Perryman was the best. His distribution was fantastic and nothing was ever too much for him if it would help the team out, help his team-mates. He would bollock you – but in the right way; it was only for your needs and benefit. That’s what a captain is, a leader from the front and that was Steve. I was very lucky to play under such a fantastic person.
“It’s a shame he never got the opportunity to manage the club. I know he went back under Ossie, but Steve is Mr Tottenham through and through. He would be the right person because he knows how Spurs should be run. He knows what the supporters are like, and what the supporters want.”
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 15