It seems an opportune moment to ask Roberts about Perryman’s judgement that, of the two tough guys at the heart of the Spurs defence, Miller was the hardest. Graham grins broadly. “Maxie was Max. He didn’t take any prisoners and he could be nasty. We didn’t have a competition between us to see who was the hardest; we were good mates. But I would disagree with Stevie: I would say I was harder than Paul, because when I would say ‘I’ll do it’, I’d do it, that was the difference. Maxie was more sly, but he was hard.
“To tell the truth Paul was a bit of an unsung hero. A fantastic footballer who knew what he had to do. Me and him lived in each other’s pockets. He knew how to wind people up, how to put them off, which is part and parcel of the game, but he was very talented and that shouldn’t go amiss; what he did for the club was superb.
“Take the ’81 semi against Wolves. In the first game where we went to extra time, it was only Maxie who really kept us together. I’ll always remember him that day, he was immense. Physically, vocally, everything, because we had just gone, we all looked at each other and thought, ‘We’ve thrown this away.’
“Keith tried to buy a few other centre halves in Gary Stevens, Paul Price and Gary Mabbutt, but couldn’t get a better pairing because we had a great understanding. We were good together; we’d played in the reserves and knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Maxie would set our victims up and I would welly them.”
With Miller and Roberts, it was a case of friendship allied to mutual respect, a snapshot of the bond between the players that lay at the heart of the ’80s Spurs side. Much of this was forged away from the game, with the kind of socialising that would have modern day managers and tabloid editors in a frenzy. “I can remember Micky Hazard had a stag night in midweek. We went to training the next day and everyone was still paralytic. Shreevesie wouldn’t have it and sent us home. He said, ‘I want to see you back here tomorrow at two o’clock; we’ll have an hour’s training and if you don’t win on Saturday then all of you will be fined.’ We beat Stoke 1-0.
“That was the difference: we knew what we had to do. And that’s the mentality we had in the team; we were good. Everybody went out and had a drink; everybody stuck together. After games on a Saturday night coming back from Manchester, or Leeds, we’d get back to the training ground at Cheshunt and we’d go to the Bull’s Head, stay there till two o’clock in the morning and get the wives to come and pick us up. We were all very honest with each other, no one held back, and that’s what made us a better team because you could speak your mind and the lads would take it.”
It is abundantly clear that Roberts still retains huge affection for his friends and colleagues of that era. From Chris Hughton (“a marauding left back, and a proper Tottenham man”) to Tony Galvin (“absolutely fantastic, a straight-talker who worked very, very hard for the team, another unsung hero but a big, big part of the success”), Roberts is full of praise for his team-mates. Given the similarity in their non-league backgrounds, it might be assumed that Galvin and Roberts would have a stronger affinity than with the others, but Graham is keen to emphasise the all-round friendship within the squad.
“Tony and me came at the same time and we were good friends, but that was the same with everybody; the team got on. Tony was different in that he had a degree in Russian – and you didn’t find too many people like that in football – but we all just got on. We worked hard, we trained hard – we were just happy to be there. As the years went by we just gelled with everyone there.
“The young lads were very good because when we first arrived we had the likes of Garry Brooke, Mark Falco, Terry Gibson, Tony Parks, Pat Corbett, Jimmy Bolton, people like that who made you welcome. So did Peter Shreeve, and Robin Stepney – the reserve team manager – he was one of us. A down-to-earth person who just wanted you to work hard and play football the right way.
“The bond was and is very close. We had the 25th anniversary of the ’81 cup final a couple of years ago and everyone turned up. How many clubs get that? If they had one for the 1991 cup-winning side I’m not sure everybody would turn up. That’s the bond we’ve got; we’re still friends, still mates. We’ve got different lives now, but I would think that if anybody was really struggling, everybody would pull together for him.”
Not everyone, however, was quite so enamoured of the close team ethic at the time according to Roberts. “I think there was one player that didn’t like it so much, and that was Stevie Archibald. He was a bit of a different character, but the fans loved him and rightly so, because he was a fantastic goalscorer. Archie was his own person; I lived literally two minutes from him and we used to travel together, roomed with him a long time and I got on all right with him.”
From his vantage point, Roberts felt that Archibald found more of a bond with his attacking partner Garth Crooks. But while Archibald was comparatively reserved, Crooks was an outgoing extrovert. A case of opposites attract? “They were fantastic together. I think when you get a friendship like that, it works on the pitch. Archie was more . . . not selfish necessarily, but more single-minded, which is what all good strikers are. I’ve not got a bad word to say about him. Crooksie on the other hand was jolly, a Jack the Lad. Sometimes he had to be brought back to earth,” says Graham, laughing at the memory, “but he was just a happy lad. He was pleased to be at Spurs. I don’t think he ever wanted to go into management but he wanted to be active in the other side of it, the media work. He’s got what he worked hard for and that’s a great life.”
Given his comfort in front of the cameras or behind the microphone, it was perhaps inevitable that Crooks was well to the fore when the 1981 Cup Final squad recorded Ossie’s Dream. “Ah, it was a good experience,” says Graham, laughing and wincing slightly at the recollection. “Well, there’s not many teams that get to number five in the charts is there? It was a bit of fun; everybody enjoyed doing it we had a few beers. And then we went on Blue Peter – how many people get to go on that? And I got a Blue Peter badge! Not many people get them.”
It is an unlikely yet strangely comforting image to think of the Tottenham hard man as the proud recipient of a Blue Peter badge, sitting side by side with the medals he won for his wholehearted football exploits. Established in the team through the 1980/81 season, time and again Roberts ran through metaphorical walls for the Spurs cause, most notably in the tense and physically demanding first game of that season’s FA Cup final epic. But having suffered a gruesome injury after an accidental clash with one of his team-mates in the first half, it appeared Roberts’s Wembley debut was going to be short-lived.
“I got my teeth kicked out by Chrissie. I shouted at him; he says he never heard me, but as we both challenged for a ball on the touchline I headed it and he stuck his foot in my mouth. I went into the dressing room, it was just before half time and I was a bit dazed, blood was pouring out, the doc came in and he said to Keith, ‘He shouldn’t go back out.’ But there was no way in a million years I wasn’t going to go back out on that pitch. It was a cup final, we were losing 1-0, I knew we needed everybody on the pitch to get back into the game. I said to him, ‘No chance fella, I’m going’ and I just walked back out on to the pitch. They’d have had to break my legs to keep me off.
“I was fine; I actually felt the fittest I had in my life until half time of extra time. One of the physios threw a bucket of water onto my head to cool me down as it was very hot and that was it – my legs went and turned to jelly. Within five minutes of the restart I was gone. I don’t know if it was the water or whatever but I wish they had left me alone. That whole period became just a non-game. We all went; so many went down with cramp.”
Thankfully, Roberts and his team-mates recovered for the replay. The centre half played his full part, breaking up a City attack and instigating the move that ended with Villa’s piece of FA Cup immortality. “I tackled one of their players on the edge of the box and hit a pass to Tony Galvin who ran down the line, cut in to Ricky and that was it. I was thinking, ‘Pass, pass!’ B
ut no one closed him down; no one tackled him and once he got in the area they were all frightened of him because he had those quick feet. We knew he could do that. When we used to train, no one wanted to go man-for-man on Ricky because you never got a kick of the ball. That’s how good he was. At the end of it when he did what he did, it was like the longest 12 minutes ever. But the relief at the end of it – cor!”
In 1981 and 1982, Spurs played at Wembley a remarkable seven times in little over 15 months. For Roberts, who was playing non-league matches and grafting in a dockyard just a couple of years before, it represented a remarkable turnaround in fortunes. But the heady night of the 1981 replay provided an emotional highpoint.
“My mum and dad were the proudest people in the world. My mum’s dead now, but my dad’s still alive; they came to the game, and afterwards she was in tears . . .” For a split second, her son himself appears to waver, but regains his train of thought. “I’d done something I wanted to do. If you talk to older players, they know what I mean. I heard Ray Wilkins the other day get asked what the FA Cup means to him. He said, ‘Getting to Wembley meant more than anything when I played, I wanted to get to that final.’ And that’s what I couldn’t understand when Arsene Wenger played his young team [in Tottenham’s 5-1 defeat of Arsenal in the 2008 Carling Cup semi-final]. You’re one game away from a cup final at Wembley. Dave Kitson said this season that the FA Cup doesn’t mean anything. Well, trust me, the FA Cup is the biggest cup in the world, that’s what it means. Every Tottenham fan would love to see their team win the cup at Wembley. For a player to come and say the Premier League means more – yeah, money-wise it does – but getting to a final, that’s what means a lot.
“I remember all of the games I played in. People say to you, ‘Oh, what about this or that game?’ and I remember every one because you don’t forget the good times. With the Spurs players now, they are getting 30, 40 grand a week and they’ve only just won a trophy. I’ve got two FA Cups, a UEFA Cup, Scottish League, Scottish Cup, the divisional championship with Chelsea – but I wouldn’t swap any of that for money. I’ve got all those experiences and nobody can take them away from me. You can’t put a price on it.”
‘Price’ played a significant part in one of Roberts’s less happy memories, when he was dropped for the 1982 League Cup final in favour of Welsh international Paul Price. “He came in when I got injured, and I couldn’t get my place back at centre-half. I was playing in the team, though. I’d been pushed into midfield and was playing well but by the time the final came round, Ricky miraculously recovered from his injury and was in the team instead of me. He wasn’t fit to be honest. Keith told me I wasn’t playing. I was gutted. I told Keith that, I said I didn’t think it was right. He said he had to go with what he felt was right and I respected him for telling me, but I wasn’t happy.
“Heading off for the final, I didn’t want to be with the boys. It was the only time I didn’t want to be part of it. Keith said to me, ‘We’ll get to the FA Cup final and you’ll play in that.’ My response was that, ‘If I’m good enough to play in that, why aren’t I good enough for the League Cup final?’ We lost 3-1 so it came back to haunt him, I suppose. I thought I was a better player than Paul Price. It was a sickener for everyone, but I got back in the team and we beat QPR in the FA Cup final, so there we are. It was gut-wrenching missing out, but you have to take your knock-backs and you have to come back stronger. Stevie helped me through that; he knew because he had the experience – it was my first knock-back. But I got over it and hopefully I repaid Keith with the UEFA Cup. And the 1982 FA Cup when I fell over in the penalty area when Tony Currie brought me down. Whether we deserved it on that night I don’t know, but you make your own luck.”
Given his struggles to break into the professional game, it was Roberts’s determination that had much more to do with his successes than luck, accidental or self-made. He has a sharp recall of individual matches and the events surrounding them, the highlights remembered as a contrast to the days when it seemed he might be destined not to make the big time. One league game in particular stands out, when he exacted a kind of revenge on one of those figures who had earlier doubted his ability. “We beat Southampton 3-2 in March ’82, and I got a hat-trick. I was a Southampton boy and loved the place; my family all lived there. But that game gave me fantastic joy that day, with probably the most unexpected hat-trick ever in the way I got it – a diving header, a miskick and a volley. I spoke to Lawrie McMenemy after that game because you don’t forget when someone releases you and says you’ll never make a football player. I said, ‘Sorry about scoring three goals’. He said, ‘Well, Graham, you’ve proved me wrong. And that’s what football’s about, proving people wrong.’ He congratulated me, which was good of him.”
There are many other encounters that stand out for Roberts: the tumultuous 1981 FA Cup semi-final replay at Arsenal’s Highbury when “we destroyed their ground and destroyed Wolves”; the bruising Cup Winners’ Cup meeting with Barcelona in 1982 when Roberts scored Tottenham’s equaliser and was chased behind the goal by enraged Catalan players. There is also an unforgettable league game against Everton that features prominently in Graham’s mental scrapbook. In the 1984/85 season, both sides were fighting for the championship and the battle reached a crescendo on an April night in north London. The visitors won 2-1 in front of a fevered 49,000 crowd, despite the heroic efforts of Roberts and his team-mates. He scored a thunderbolt from 35 yards and nearly forced an equaliser but for the brilliance of Everton keeper Neville Southall.
“We absolutely battered them that night, I still can’t believe we didn’t win. The way I hit it and beat Southall, who was probably the best goalkeeper in the world at the time, was something special. It was right in the top corner, brought us back into the game, but then the save he pulled off later on was unbelievable. Devastating, really. I didn’t like losing, that was my problem. I used to dig Glenn and Ossie out when I was captain, say to people, ‘Come on, you’ve got to do more, we need you’. That’s the way I was and I think the lads understood that.”
Once again, Spurs were to come up short in pursuit of the league championship. Roberts agrees with the view of fellow defenders Perryman and Miller that the way the side played hamstrung any title challenge, but also shares Burkinshaw’s attacking philosophy.
“I thought we should play to our strengths. I didn’t think we should go defensive; we had the people who could defend but we didn’t fear anyone at home, we knew with players like Crooks, Archibald and Glenn and that we were likely to score a goal. When we went to places like Liverpool, that was hard. But when we were on song there were days when we could have beaten teams 8 or 9-0. We felt that in our blood; it wasn’t being big-headed. We looked at the other teams some of the time and thought, ‘They haven’t got any fight in them.’
“We beat Newcastle once by five and not long after Chrissie Waddle left them and joined us because they all wanted to play for Spurs. The way we played and trained, we weren’t big on tactics just a lot of five and eight-a-sides. None of that ProZone stuff. Shreevesie would tell us, ‘You mark him’ etc, but we played off the cuff. That’s the best way to be. Not now though, it’s more technical. I would argue that Spurs recently have lost games because they haven’t rehearsed set pieces, even with all the ProZone stuff now. You know why that is? It’s laziness. That’s the bottom line.”
Disappointment in 1984/85 did nothing to dampen the joy of winning the UEFA Cup final the year before, however. Made captain on the night, it was Roberts’s high-water mark as a footballer. Today, the happiness at recalling the memories is evident. “If you have a look at that night, we were without so many players – no Crooksie, Ossie, Ricky, no Glenn, no Stevie Perryman, no Ray Clemence. The players that came in were just fantastic and we just had it in us. We probably had the best squad of players that any team in that era through the 1980s could have wanted. Because we had the likes of Micky Hazard, Falco, Mabbutt, Stephens and Danny Thomas in reserve – the q
uality of those players proved how strong the squad was.
“That night will live with me for the rest of my life. I watched a DVD of it the other day with my girlfriend and some mates, and I still get goosebumps when I see myself going through to score.”
The manner in which Roberts grabbed the equaliser is perhaps the perfect illustration of what made him such a good player. Bursting through into the Anderlecht penalty area after Ardiles had struck the bar seconds earlier, Roberts didn’t just blast the ball or launch a wild header, but with admirable composure chested it down, took a touch and lashed it into the net.
“That probably came from me being a centre forward earlier in my career. Mark Falco did fantastic for me; he pushed the lad in front of him. Mark was going to head it but I shouted, ‘My ball’ and went through. You just think to yourself then keep cool, keep cool. The noise that greeted the goal, my word, I’ve never heard anything like it. They said there were 50,000 in there, but it must have been 70,000.”
Privy to the upheaval that followed Burkinshaw’s controversial departure, Roberts views the period up to his own exit as, “A shame, a disaster for the club. All of a sudden the team started to dismantle and it was all through I think what Scholar did to Keith. I played under Peter Shreeve; I’m not sure if he was a top-class manager but he was a top-class coach, absolutely fantastic on the training pitch. He knew his tactics, and I think if he’d have been given the chance he could probably have stayed there longer. Circumstances happened and he had to leave. We had a good chance to win the league under him, but too many games caught up with us and that was the best chance we had of lifting the title.”
Within two years, Shreeve was replaced by David Pleat and so began the most hurtful episode in Roberts’s long association with Spurs. The wounds may have healed, but the scars are still evident as Graham surveys the sad and fractious end to his time as a Tottenham player. One individual in particular comes in for stinging criticism as tough as any of the challenges Roberts made on the pitch. “It was end of season and I was in my garden. I got a phone call from Pleat. The first words he ever said to me were, ‘You’re not my sort of player, you’re on the [transfer] list and as soon as I get the right offer you’ll be sold.’ With that I just put the phone down.
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 16