The Boys From White Hart Lane

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The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 17

by Martin Cloake


  “For all that, I worked really hard pre-season, but he bought Richard Gough, so I knew my days were numbered at the back, what with Gary Mabbutt playing at centre half as well. But I worked my way into midfield and played really well. As the season went on we were doing well, I was enjoying my football, but it was always in the back of my mind that Pleat didn’t want me, he was just using me.

  “I went and saw him as I wanted another year on my contract to get my testimonial – I still had two years left on the current deal and the extra year would have taken me up to ten years. Pleat said, ‘You’ll never get that.’ So I thought, ‘I’m just wasting my time.’ One day I went up to Glasgow and watched Rangers with Gough and Chris Waddle. On the journey back I sat next to a fella who it turned out was Souness’s brother-in-law. We got talking and he asked if I would be interested in going to Rangers. I said I’d go anywhere to play. Within two days a call had been made, asking if I was really interested and then it took about two-and-a-half months to negotiate the fee.

  “Pleat didn’t like my style of play. He liked a Fancy Dan player, so sold me and bought Steve Hodge. No disrespect to him, he was a good player. But the end of the day, Pleatie didn’t like me at all. The end came when I went into training one day. I was in the team to play Chelsea, but got a phone call at 4.30 in the morning. It was David Pleat saying, ‘We’ve sold you, you’re going to Rangers, don’t turn up tomorrow’. So I just put the phone down. I went up there, I just wanted to get away by then, things were miserable.

  “It was great going to Rangers, they were a fantastic club. But I came back from Glasgow on the Sunday, went to Spurs to get my boots on the Monday morning and all my kit had been chucked outside in a black bag. Unbelievable. I wasn’t even allowed to say goodbye to the office staff, anything. Then Pleat did a nasty article in the papers saying all I did was kick people and should have got sent off a lot more. But I still gave 150 per cent for Tottenham in the games I played.

  Roberts moved from Rangers to Chelsea in 1988, but reveals that he was lined up for a dramatic return to White Hart Lane. “Rangers wanted to sell me. They’d bought other players, Graeme Souness blamed me for a goal that wasn’t my fault and they wanted to get rid of me. Chelsea invited me down; they’d been relegated after losing a play-off with Middlesbrough but they still wanted me, and in the end I got a move there. At that time, in the summer, Tottenham were playing Dundee United and Chris Waddle was still at Spurs and told me, ‘Venners [Terry Venables] wants to sign you.’ I said, ‘I’d love to come back.’ Chris said, ‘All right leave it with us’ but then two days later they went and bought Terry Fenwick. I never got a phone call or anything; it went from them being really interested to nothing, so it made my mind up: Chelsea wanted me.

  “I went there, was made captain and got them promoted. The year after, back in the First Division, we played at Tottenham. It was hard going back. I had a lot of friends there and I felt that the supporters were still my mates. And to go back and win 4-1 – we absolutely destroyed them. But it was hard, I never celebrated any of the goals, because I don’t think you should milk it in front of other people and your own fans who you love. Don’t get me wrong, I love winning, Chelsea were paying my wages, and if it had been any other club I would have milked it, but I couldn’t do that to the fans at Tottenham.”

  So, for all the disappointments and the distasteful end to his association with the club, Roberts returns again to his abiding affection for the club and its fans. He’s had an eventful life since retiring as a player, both in work and in his private life. “I’ve had two wives and I now work from five in the morning all the way through to ten o’clock at night – I do quite a lot of TV work and I’ve got my own memorabilia company – and I’ve never minded hard graft.”

  But through it all there has been one constant. “I always wanted to manage Tottenham Hotspur. Always. I’ve done the non-league, went to Clyde, but I know I’m never going to get it because I’m not a big enough name. I’m absolutely gutted because I love the club and the club is in my heart. But that’s life, you get on with it and you have to move on. But I’m always there if anybody wants anything; I’m always there for Tottenham supporters.

  “The club means everything to me. My ambition in life has been to do something to help Tottenham because I came from being a 21-year-old kid, had all the knock-backs, went to Spurs and felt I gave them seven years of service, getting better every year. I know I’ll never get back there but I love the supporters. I’ve been to Rangers; they’re fantastic, Chelsea were great for me; but Tottenham is something special. When you’ve played there for that length of time, won the UEFA Cup, won two FA Cups, they are a big part of your life. I just hope one day that there is something for me to do.

  “Do you know what? I would go back and clean the boots if they asked me. Just to be a part of the football club, that’s how much it means to me. It’s not about money. It’s about wanting to do things in life. I never, ever played for money: we were well rewarded, but I gave up two jobs to become a pro footballer when I was earning twice as much money. These days, bad players become millionaires.

  “At the end of it I’ve made a living out of it. I’ve lost it through ex-wives, but that’s life, you get on with it. But I love Spurs. And I think hopefully we’ve got the right manager now and we can win things if he can build on what he’s done so far. We’re going to go places.”

  There is one incident, a famous episode from recent Tottenham history, that cannot pass without comment, a legendary incident that has earned Graham Roberts immortality among the Spurs faithful – the 1986 derby when Robbo dumped Arsenal’s then superstar Charlie Nicholas in Highbury’s East Stand with a tackle that even has its own terrace song.

  “It’s why I’m well liked by Arsenal fans,” Roberts laughs. “I used to enjoy those games; I hated the Arsenal and I really wanted to beat them. It was New Year’s Day and freezing cold. They had undersoil heating but one of the pipes wasn’t working and that part of the pitch was still icy. It was right in front of the dugout. We had a corner; it got knocked out to the dugout side and I was running after it but Charlie got there just before me. I just sort of shoved him, elbowed him, and he went flying over by the side of the dugout, over the metal bars and into the crowd. I rolled into the dirt. Everybody jumped up and their physio jumped up and said to me, ‘Are you all right?’ I said, ‘Yeah’ and then he gave me a right hook and said, ‘You ain’t now,’” Roberts says laughing. “But it was icy, that was my excuse.”

  Perhaps Roberts was just ensuring both sides of Highbury were treated to his obvious affection for the Gunners. The season before, after Spurs had scored the winning goal in a 2-1 victory in the same fixture, Roberts had given the West Stand a V-sign salute. “Did I?” he asks with unconvincing innocence. “Did we only get two points then? Ah well, that would explain it, I was just reminding them of how many points we’d won.”

  8

  TONY PARKS

  “YOU JUST PLAYED FOOTBALL BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO BE IN A CUP FINAL”

  “Never can a man have become such a legend on the basis of just one game,” writes author and Spurs fan Bob Goodwin as he introduces Tony Parks to his list of the 100 greatest ever Spurs players in The Complete Record of Tottenham Hotspur. Mention Parks and immediately the picture of a May night under the floodlights at White Hart Lane in 1984 is conjured up, of the keeper’s two penalty saves in an extraordinarily dramatic end to the UEFA Cup final against Anderlecht, and of Parksy deliriously racing away across the pitch.

  Nearly a quarter of a century later Parks is still involved in football as a goalkeeping coach with the FA. The 15-year-old Hackney boy who loved his football so much he left school early to start his apprenticeship has been back to school to get the qualifications he needed to keep working in the game he loves, now involved with the goalkeeping elite all over the world. And he talks engagingly about the game and frankly about his own career. “I think I’m a better goalkeeping coach than I ever wa
s a goalkeeper,” he says. “That comes from all the mistakes I made as a player. I never lacked ability; I always thought I was a gifted goalkeeper. But I don’t think I was blessed mentally to be able to deal with life at the highest level.”

  We’re sitting in his flat on a new-build gated estate in a north London suburb. Parks is not long divorced, and he’s out of the country with FA youth teams a lot, so aside from a few family pictures and a stack of Friends DVDs in a rack interspersed with football discs – ‘England 3 Argentina 2’ stands out – it doesn’t look particularly lived in. Parks is immediately warm and friendly when we meet. His build is pretty much the same, he looks relaxed in a polo shirt and training bottoms – always the football man – but there’s a piercing intensity to his eyes. He’s one of those guys who looks you straight in the eye when he’s talking and, as we sit and chat over mugs of tea around a glass table in his front room, he is disarmingly honest when assessing his own life in football. For Parks had it all, and then . . . it just wasn’t there. The 1984 UEFA Cup final man of the match, the penalty shoot-out legend, never reached those heights again, endured a long drawn out departure from the club he loved, and drifted around the fringes of the game. There’s a toughness about him, something that suggests he’s looked at himself in the mirror and confronted his faults – he’ll admit doing as much later – but no hint of self-pity or regret. Tony Parks has had quite a journey in football, and now has the air of a man on top of his game. “I genuinely love the game,” he says. “I’m a good developer of young goalkeepers, working now with the elite end – young, professional international goalkeepers – for the last six years. I absolutely love the job.”

  It’s hard to imagine sitting for three hours over cups of tea with any of today’s Spurs side. “It would’ve been nice to be able to retire a millionaire, but that’s life,” reflects Parks. “The game moves on and that money wasn’t about then. But the game means more to me than I think it does to some of them nowadays. People wanted to be footballers because of the football, now they want to be footballers because of the lifestyle. I love the game.”

  It was that love of the game that took young Tony Parks from Homerton in East London to the park to play endless hours with his mates. “You just played football because you wanted to be in a cup final at the end of the season, you wanted to be at Wembley,” he says. “When I played with my mates over the park I wanted to be Bob Wilson or Pat Jennings; you always tried to emulate those great people, and fortunately enough for me at the age of 12 I got the opportunity to train with Pat Jennings a couple of times.

  “I played for a Sunday league team called Tiger FC and in that team at the time were Terry Gibson, David Boulter and three or four other lads who were already training at Tottenham. At the age of 11 I went to QPR and was really disillusioned with what I saw as professional football. It wasn’t a particularly well-run club, so I made my mind up that Sunday football was for me. I enjoyed playing Sundays; we had quite a decent team, we’d been together for a while. But the manager was also a representative of Tottenham and he said, ‘Why don’t you come along to training on a Tuesday night?’ I remember getting two buses down from Hackney, the 277 up to Dalston Junction and the 149 down to the ground. I walked in and was pretty nervous, although as I knew three or four lads there already I was OK. I walked into the training session with Ron Henry and Peter Shreeve and just fell in love with the place straight away. This was totally different from what I’d experienced at QPR. This was what a professional club was all about. The professionalism of the people, it was well organised, the coaches were qualified to coach – at QPR they had a training centre in Bethnal Green where they sent a couple of players if they could spare a few hours. At Tottenham there were people like Peter Shreeve who was really dedicated to the youth policy.

  “I also knew two brothers, Pat and Steve Kavanagh, who played for Spurs, who lived not far from me in Homerton and I used to listen to them talk about Tottenham. So I had this sort of affinity with Tottenham; I half knew the place even before I’d been there. The training was very enjoyable, you got loads of encouragement. So I went there when I was 12; that was my club. This was about 1976/77.”

  Quite what an impression Spurs made on the young Tony Parks is underlined by another piece of information. “As a kid I would always be at Arsenal,” he says. “My family were big Arsenal supporters. My dad and my older brother – who also played at a young age – were fans. My dad thought my brother had a real chance. He was offered a trial at Arsenal but he didn’t take it up: he wasn’t interested enough in football. I remember going to watch Arsenal in the ’71 season when they won the Double. I remember being in the Clock End with my dad and my brother. My dad would stand at the back with his mates and me and my brother would have our little stools and go down the front. In those days the adults would get out of the way for you, let you stick your stool at the front and we could stand right in the corner where Pat Rice would go bombing down the wing or take corners. It was a special place, Highbury. I never lost that feeling for what was a wonderful ground. As a supporter I was an Arsenal supporter, but the day I walked into Tottenham I became a real convert. Tottenham was the club that I loved as a footballer.”

  Parks’s arrival at Tottenham didn’t come about through any particular dedication to working the system. He really did just play and got his break. “You just played football because you loved it,” he says. “I wasn’t the brightest of kids and I didn’t like school. I went to Upton House in Homerton, an interesting place to put it mildly. It was a horrible school: seven storeys; looked like a prison block; 1,200 kids, all boys; and it was a pretty tough place. I played for the school and county teams. You thought you were the real thing when you did that. Whenever the teams were picked I was always the one they wanted. That’s a real confidence booster and I played without fear.

  “I think being in a school where sport was important gave me a bit of respect. It can work in your favour. And because I played in the teams for the year above me from an early age most of the kids knew who I was. And I was at Tottenham as well, so most people knew I was a decent goalkeeper, I’d been to Lilleshall for England youth trials too. Towards the end of school I didn’t bother going at all, I just used to want to play football. Fortunately enough Peter Shreeve – most of the kids in my generation at Tottenham would have a lot to thank him for – realised there was no point in me bunking off to roam the streets and get in trouble, so he did a deal with the school – ‘We’ll take him Monday to Friday: he’s off the streets, you know he’s safe and he’s getting a football education.’ The school at the time saw it as more important for me to play and represent them in big games so they agreed to that. So the only time I ever went to school in the last 15 months or so was when there was a match to play.

  “The nice thing about Tottenham at that time was that during the school holidays we would get to go to the training ground at Cheshunt as a group of schoolboys and train. We could mix with the first team players and be around the workings of a pro club from Monday to Friday, not just for a couple of evenings a week, which was a real eye-opener. It gave you a taste of where you wanted to go.

  “At Cheshunt they had three pitches. The bottom pitch was for the schoolboys and the youth team, the second pitch was where the reserves played, and the top pitch was where the first team trained. There was the same structure in the dressing room too, so there was always a target, I want to get from that pitch to that pitch, from that dressing room to that dressing room. It was always, always about football. I don’t think I ever once thought about becoming a millionaire.

  “Being an apprentice was the happiest time I had as a footballer, and I had 20 years as a professional. It’s a harsh place inside a football club, whatever age you are. You’ve got to be able to deal with it. But those three years were the best. On an average day we would get into the club around eight o’clock. The first-team dressing room would be looked after by Johnny Wallis, who was the first-team kit man, bu
t the apprentices were in charge of the rest of the pros’ kit and boots. There were two dressing rooms at White Hart Lane where all the kit was washed and stored, the first team and the reserves. It was an awesome place to be. We’d look after the young pros, people like Paul Miller, Tommy Heffernan, Mark Kendall. We’d need to make sure we had the right kit for them, get it packed, get the boots packed, and have a journey up in the minibus to Cheshunt and the training ground. That was always fun because Johnny Wallis was the most miserable old sod in the world and we used to love taking the mickey out of him. He would take us on long detours to try and make us late.

  “Once you got to the training ground you would lay the kit out and then go and do your training. Once training was finished you’d have to do your jobs, which is something kids don’t have to do today as apprentices. We’d have to scrub boots, clean toilets, make sure the first team players’ requirements were looked after, and in the first year I felt there was more of an emphasis on us doing our jobs, being disciplined, making sure we’d done stuff right and being on time. It gave us a discipline and a respect for the club hierarchy and I think that was a good thing. Saturday morning was always brilliant because we’d be going to Cheshunt to play in the youth teams. You’d wait on a Friday afternoon for the team sheets to go up and in them days you’d play a corresponding fixture, like the reserves did, against whoever the first team was playing, so we had some great games against the Arsenal and people like that. That training ground was an awesome place to be. It was a brilliant place to go and just savour football.”

 

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