The Boys From White Hart Lane

by Martin Cloake

  “Keith said he felt I was one of the better defenders. In his opinion I was an excellent defender with good all-round ability. But it was at a point at Tottenham when he had to start reducing the numbers. I left at the same time as John Lacey and Ricky Villa – and that was it, the end of my career at Tottenham.

  “I was disappointed, but hopeful that I had enough experience and quality to be attractive to other clubs. Four years at Spurs means you have a certain ability and I was confident I could continue my career elsewhere.

  “Things didn’t work out as well as I would have liked; it wasn’t only Spurs who were reducing their squads – most clubs were. I hoped to get in somewhere like Crystal Palace or another London club a division below, but I found they were cutting back as well. So I ended up at Aldershot Town. The jump down from First to Fourth Division wasn’t where I wanted to be, but nevertheless I was there six years.

  “I enjoyed my football at Aldershot. I was there with Teddy Sheringham when he was on loan from Millwall. Up until last year when he retired, I could always claim that there was one player I had played with who was still playing. But my time in football came to an end with the car crash.”

  It is a bombshell of a statement. Few Tottenham fans know the extra-ordinary coincidence that two of the younger veterans of the Tottenham team of the early 1980s were to have their careers cruelly ended by road accidents. Garry Brooke nearly lost his life, but while George’s crash was not quite as severe, its consequences for his life as a footballer were equally devastating.

  “It happened early on 26th May 1987. We were in the play-offs against Wolves to see who would be promoted to Division three at the time. We’d won at home and then 1-0 at Molineux so we went up. The night of the game at Wolves, we got a coach back to Aldershot, arriving about midnight. We had a sponsored car shared around the squad and it was my turn to have it that week.

  “My team-mates Glenn Burvill and Darren Anderson drove home with me. I lived in Kingston at the time; Darren lived local to me, but Glenn lived in Sussex. Because we had got back late it was decided we would drive him to Worthing and sleep at his house, then Darren and I would drive back to Kingston the next day.

  “We left Aldershot with me driving. I drove to just outside Worthing. I was the only one who had played in the game; I was getting very tired and was aching so asked one of the others to take over. Darren volunteered, so I sat in the back in the middle, put the seatbelt on and we set off.

  “There was thick fog. As the car turned a corner, it just didn’t respond and carried on going straight forward and into a tree. I saw it coming; I ducked down but the belt I was wearing just went across my midriff. As we impacted, my body twisted round, my head and legs went forward. Glenn had broken his forearm and Darren had cut his eye; I, as I later found out, had broken my back.

  “I actually got out of the car and said to Darren, ‘I’m not well, I think I’m seriously hurt; see if you can get an ambulance.’ I was in tremendous pain but we managed to walk to a house in the middle of nowhere, knock on the door and get this guy inside to call an ambulance. He didn’t have a phone but thankfully he took us to hospital. They found I had some internal damage but the worst thing was that I’d pulled my spine apart. I was operated on and put back together but was out of football for a year.

  “I remember waking up from the operation on my internal injuries, with a drip hanging out of me. I didn’t actually find out the extent of my back injury until a week later. I was continually complaining about the pain. The nurse said, ‘Let’s keep you alive. Have your morphine jabs every four hours and worry about recovering from your op and then we’ll look at the pains.’

  “After a few days they let me get onto my feet and walk around with a drip. A few days later, the Derby was on – I’d pulled a horse called Sharistani out of the sweepstake bag in the hospital. I actually pulled it out twice; the nurses knew I was a footballer and teased me saying I couldn’t have the favourite, but when they redid the draw I pulled it out of the bag again! I went for an X-ray that morning, and settled down in the afternoon for the race. Just as it started, with the horses at the gate, three doctors came down. They picked me up, carried me carefully back to the bed, and put straps over me to keep me from moving. ‘We’ve just seen your X-rays’ they said. ‘What job do you do?’ I told them I was a footballer. ‘Well, you won’t be doing that again,’ one of them said.

  “It transpired that I’d pulled my vertebrae apart. They explained that if you look at each bone as being a plug and socket that interlock, with tendons that hold them, I’d pulled the plug out of the socket but fortunately not separated any tendons. They had to put the plug back in the socket, and put chicken wire around it to hold it together. I had to wear a body cast for six months with other bits of metal inside me. Most of it has come out now, but I’m left with a bit of chicken wire holding part of my back together.

  “I had been very fortunate that there was no damage to the spinal cord but it had been exposed, which was why they were very careful about lifting me and strapping me up. I guess I shouldn’t have been walking around. I had contact with one person at Spurs in the shape of a get-well-soon card from Ossie while I was in hospital. I didn’t expect anything more; to be honest I didn’t expect anything and Ossie’s card was a nice touch.

  “I got a few visits from team-mates at Aldershot and the club sent me up to Harley Street and I was put back together again at University College Hospital in London. I was out of football for a year. When I’d recovered I trained, got fit, but my problem was half time – the moment I stopped I would freeze, my whole body would go rigid. Seize up. While everyone else went in for a cup of tea, I had to run round the pitch just to keep going.

  “I ended up playing about four games the next season, 1988/89, but I was sub for the last game of the season against Sheffield United in 1989 and didn’t get on. At that point Aldershot said they were going to release me. OK, I had to make a decision. I had to be realistic. I couldn’t run, half time killed me, so I made the bold decision to leave football. I was 29, no kids but a girlfriend and I needed to earn an income. The plan was to get employment outside of football first and then see if I could get into non-league. I tried, but I was advised by various people that the moment I left football I was never going to get back.

  “Which proved correct. I wasn’t going to realise my dream of climbing the ladder, aspiring to be an international, whatever it was going to be. I’d had a good ten years in this game but I had to face facts and live a life outside of it.”

  Faced with such a terrible personal blow, many players might be expected to have reacted with anger and a ‘Why me?’ sense of resentment. Yet, like Brooke, George found a way to rebuild his life, has prospered and found contentment, without a hint of bitterness.

  “I had to get a job. I joined Bovis and I’ve been with them ever since. I worked my way up to the position I am in now. Good, bad or indifferent, that’s where I am now. It’s not my chosen career, football always was. But I had my chance, my time in football and they were the best years of my life. I’d recommend to anyone who has the opportunity to seize it. I accept that’s a lifetime ago. I have a wonderful family, married to Karen with two children, Ellie and Tom, a career with a lot of responsibility, things of other and greater importance. But it’s amazing to think what I experienced. I got a call the other day from Steve Perryman; I haven’t spoken to him for years, nor any of the others. In 25 years I’ve been back to White Hart Lane once, to see a game against Newcastle with my brother-in-law who’s a Geordie and avid Newcastle fan.

  “The keenness to get back into football had always been there but I had to concentrate on building a career away from it. I needed regular work and a regular income, and I never did return to football in the end.”

  It seems sad that George lost contact with his old pals; does it suggest that when players go their separate ways, football can be an unforgiving game? “Possibly – you develop relationships and friendships
but they can fade. The first time I saw Garry since I left Spurs was two years ago when he walked past a site I was working at on Liverpool Street. We have never talked about our shared experiences in having bad car crashes. But then a couple of months later we all met up at the 25th anniversary of the 1981 cup win at the Dorchester. It was great to see them. What is silly, though, is that Bovis have a charity match against a Tottenham XI every season and they keep asking me to play. What I should do is play for Bovis one half and Tottenham the next. But I know I’m going to hurt myself; since quitting I’ve played three times and each time it’s agony. Mentally I want to do it but the body won’t take it. A shame, but there you go.

  “Football has helped me in my career now, for certain. There are a lot of similarities with construction and football: you have to look at strengths and weaknesses. Everybody’s aim is to succeed, you have to communicate, work as a team, compensate for any individual shortfalls. If nothing else, football has allowed me to understand how to make the best of what you can in the situation you are in and to your greatest benefit. You could be 3-0 down to Man United, but if there’s five minutes left do you give up or try and draw, maybe even win? It’s the same here. If things are going against you, do you give up? No, you keep going, keep striving. Keep making the best of it. Football provides lessons for life generally.

  “All of us in football had lovely careers, particularly those at Tottenham, experiencing the best days of our lives. Football can’t last for ever. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  It’s a typically philosophical approach from a man who has got what really matters in life fully in perspective. But it’s not just the memories of Spurs that he holds dear, for George Mazzon, or ‘Giorgio’, also has some physical mementos of his time as one of the boys from White Hart Lane – a couple of facial scars and that broken nose, for starters.

  “The scar above my eye was because of Glenn Hoddle. We were playing in a friendly. Glenn played a ball up in the air and in trying to challenge for it I had a clash of heads with another player. I blacked out and can’t remember it, but was told that I ran around like the Incredible Hulk, I charged into the stand, went mad, and Graham and Mike Varney had to jump on me to calm me down. All I remember was waking up in hospital. I had to rest for a week because it was a bash against the temple.

  “As for the nose? I don’t know, it’s been busted four or five times. I got a boot on the face when a player tried an overhead kick in a game. One I got at Aldershot when Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris was manager. He used me as an example of the type who would put my head in where people wouldn’t put their feet – and I guess my nose proves it!”

  10

  PETER SHREEVE

  “THE JOB WAS MADE FOR ME – AND I WAS MADE FOR THE JOB”

  As someone who was one of the principal architects of the second most successful side in Tottenham Hotspur’s illustrious history, it’s a small but curious detail that many people still get his name wrong. “It’s Shreeve without an ‘s’ on the end”, says the man commonly known as Peter Shreeves.

  “Because some people wrongly called us ‘Tottenham Hotspurs’, perhaps they thought they ought to add an ‘s’ to mine,” he says. “My real name is Shreeve, but over the years I’ve had so many people getting it wrong that in the end I thought, ‘Why not – it’s Shreeves.’ I’ve looked in the club handbooks and I see that one year my name is spelt with an ‘s’ at the end, the next year it’s ‘Shreeve’.

  Whether he is known as Shreeve, Shreeves or Shreevesie, there is no doubting the importance of this widely admired coach and manager who played a key role in taking Spurs to cup-winning glory. Chatting amiably in the reception of a hotel close to the M25 just a few miles from White Hart Lane, Shreeve cuts an unmistakable figure and there are various glances of acknowledgment from passers-by. Looking supremely fit and well for a 67-year-old, dressed in a smart but not showy suit befitting his standing as a respected football professional, Shreeve has a voice that prompts instant recognition. It’s that familiar chirpy accent that found such a natural home at White Hart Lane. “I was a cockney at a cockney club; I knew how it worked, understood its culture. We were a good fit.”

  His conversation is strewn with shrewd observations and neat little phrases: ‘silky soccer’ is the most common – succinctly conveying in a nutshell Shreeve’s overriding football philosophy, and providing further indication of what a good match he and the club were. In the modern era of repetitive sound bites it might be mistaken for just another bit of football lingo, but ‘silky soccer’ encapsulates what Tottenham were about during Shreeve’s time at the club.

  It was management speak with a purpose. “My nickname at Spurs was Smooth, everybody knew me as that. The reason was twofold: I was a smart dresser; secondly, I liked silky soccer. I used to say all the time, ‘Are we going to play kick and rush, or are we going to play silky soccer?’ When you’re at Tottenham, you had to play silky soccer; the fans would not have stood for it or accepted crash bang wallop football. Every day we were working with the ball, improving technical skills.

  “We used to come back to White Hart Lane after training three afternoons a week, from Tuesday to Thursday, and religiously work at our skills. Everyone did, not just the young players but the established stars as well, including Glenn Hoddle. We’d go up in the ball courts for two hours and longer. Sometimes you’d have the ground staff knocking on the door saying, ‘Come on, is anyone going home today?’ This constant willingness to improve was a passion.

  “The respective philosophies of the club and myself were a good match. I was right for the club at that particular time.”

  Shreeve spent a total of 13 years at Spurs in two spells, progressing from youth team coach through to manager, returning for one season at the helm in 1991. He’s seen it all at Spurs, from relegation to European glory. Intimate with what happened both on the training ground and in the corridors of power, his insights are unique and he casts a sober and perceptive eye on the saga from the vantage point of someone who played a key role in influencing affairs.

  The journey to White Hart Lane began in 1940 in Neath, where the Shreeve family were evacuated during the Blitz. He was born in South Wales, but soon went to live in Islington when the family returned to London. Unsurprisingly, Arsenal were his team – “Being a scallywag along with all the other kids from my area, I used to go to Highbury because it was local and we could bunk in for free” – but a trip to White Hart Lane soon changed his allegiances.

  “Supporters might find it strange now but in those days, there wasn’t such an intense rivalry – people used to go to Spurs one week, Arsenal the next. I had a feeling for Arsenal, my dad took me to my first game and that’s a feeling you never lose, but one Friday night someone took me to White Hart Lane for a floodlit game. They used to have a pen for the kids where you got in for a reduced fee. Spurs won the game 5-2 and this was a whole new adventure for me. I was about 12. I thought, ‘Cor, I like what I see here.’ That turned my head a bit – this refreshing team playing lovely football. From then onwards, I followed the fortunes of both clubs but became a Spurs fan, if you like.”

  Like most kids of his generation, football was an all-consuming interest. “I played all the time. I was captain of Islington and I played for London Boys and Middlesex, but the making of me was the Boys Brigade. Islington then was a very tough district, and plenty of kids went to borstal. But I avoided all that because I was in the BB just around the corner from Upper Street where I lived. I was there every night doing gymnastics or swimming; I used to run the football section. It gave me an ability to talk in front of people and learn about discipline. The BB gave me a very, very good start in life.

  “I got picked to go to an international BB camp in Jamaica when I was 17. I captained the football team that beat Jamaica 3-1, and was captain of the cricket team that got absolutely mullered!”

  Spotted playing for non-league Finchley by scouts from Reading as an inside left – “number 10 in the old m
oney” – Shreeve moved to the Berkshire side for what promised to be a rewarding professional career. But at 18, and on the verge of a call-up to the Welsh national team, his chances were ruined by a serious injury. “It was a really bad leg break, broken in two places. I had to have a bone graft taken from my hip. I thought I might get back playing, as I was only young, but I decided to give myself something to fall back on.”

  Showing an intelligence and resourcefulness that marked him out from many of his contemporaries, Shreeve completed ‘the Knowledge’, the notoriously rigorous and demanding test to become a qualified London taxi driver. It became one of the famous facts about Spurs during the 1980s – ‘Peter Shreeve is a licensed cabbie.’ “That was mentioned in every newspaper, every article and every report about me when I became Spurs manager. But at 18 it seemed a pretty good idea to me. I knew then that I was probably going to live until 60 – I’ve got beyond that and I’m still going – but I was courting a young lady, having a family was likely and I was going to have to put food on the table, so I gave myself two options: football and taxi driving. The latter is hard work, but it did pay. I also took all my coaching badges. I was a fully qualified coach at 21. Without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I had a natural flair for it – it was just something I could do. The BB had given me the grounding to be able to manage and teach people so I didn’t have to think about it. It came naturally.”

  With his playing career over, Peter gained experience coaching anywhere and everywhere, from non-league clubs to the England women’s team, before his early Arsenal associations were rekindled when he was invited to join Bertie Mee’s set up, training the likes of Graham Rix, Frank Stapleton and Liam Brady. Mee wanted to offer Shreeve a full-time job but didn’t have an opening so instead recommended him as youth team coach to lowly Charlton, then managed by Theo Foley. Success there brought him to the attention of Terry Neill. “When Terry got the manager’s job at Spurs in 1974 he headhunted me to become Tottenham’s youth team coach; I knew Terry from the BB in Ireland so once again I had the Brigade to thank. And that was the start of the most wonderful years of my career.