The Boys From White Hart Lane

by Martin Cloake

  “Wilf Dixon, a lovely man, was at Spurs as assistant to Terry. Wilf was the heartbeat of the club, an experienced fella who had coached at Everton when they won the title and I learned an awful lot from him. He did most of the daily work on the training ground, which was my strength as well. I couldn’t be doing with all the managerial side of things like contracts, media and non-footballing matters. I wanted to be out there on the field, working with and improving players. That was my forte. I was totally involved in what I did. At the start it wasn’t all about winning; it was about playing the correct way for the team we all worshipped.”

  Shreeve’s early years at Spurs coincided with the emergence of a crop of good youngsters like Paul Miller, Mark Falco and Garry Brooke. They and many more all pay tribute to Shreeve and his excellence as a coach, not least because he put his ‘silky soccer’ manifesto into practice at a club committed to improving its players’ skills and techniques. Reflecting on George Mazzon’s comment that Shreeve demanded his players ‘looked good’ in what they did, Peter says: “The style had to be right as well. Most boys don’t know that if you do something with your left foot you have to do something with your right arm to counter it and keep your balance, otherwise you fall arse over tit. The top half of your body has to be in tune with what the bottom half is doing. That kind of thing was drilled into everybody at Tottenham – technique, style, preparation. There was always method to what I did.

  “When Ralph Coates came to the club with Terry Yorath, they were senior internationals; Terry was captain of Wales. I said to them, ‘Look, rather than sit in your digs until your families can join you, come along to the ball court after training and do a few skills with us.’ They’ve both told me since that they had a look at what we were doing with the youth team and they thought, ‘We can’t live with this. We’re going to embarrass ourselves playing with the kids because they are so good.’ I had Brooksie playing the ball off the wall and Bilko [Mark Falco] coming in and scoring with a header; I had Glenn chipping it off the wall, chesting it, turning and volleying it into a little square painted on the wall – all sorts of tricks and skills that were technically difficult. They were brought up in that environment and learned those skills. Senior, experienced pros, top players, were terrified.

  “Ron Henry used to come in on a Tuesday and Thursday evening, and he was a wonderful character, the boys loved him. He used to give amazing team talks; we’d worked all week on silky soccer skills and Ron would be more old school, ‘Put your foot in’ and all that!

  “Together, the coaching team brought through these players but it would be fair to say I did help develop the likes of Mark, Paul, Garry and others. I knew them well – I got to know their mums and dads. Mark was a big old lumberjack of a boy playing for Hackney at 15; he had a good left foot, but we thought, ‘We’ve got to work on him, get his movement going’ and he became a big star. He was perhaps underrated at the time but I think people recognise now how good he was. And he was genuinely one of those who, when he kissed the badge, it meant something to him: that was his club.”

  Shreeve was similarly committed to the cause. “I scouted all over the place. At that time I got to the ground at eight o’clock in the morning and left at eight o’clock at night. And the day used to absolutely fly by. I never cared about how much I was getting paid; it didn’t bother me because I was doing something that I loved. When I talk to players now, I’m disappointed that they don’t love the game as they used to. It’s a generational change.”

  Shreeve was charged with bringing through young players who were technically equipped for life at the top level but also able to cope with the other requirements the professional game demanded. “What I looked for in a player changed over the years. When I first went to Tottenham it was all about technique. I’ve always kept that as my foremost judgement of a player – can he play, can he kick with both feet, can he receive it properly? But, when you join the big league, there are 11 other boys on the other team who want to stop you doing that.

  “When Glenn made his debut at Stoke, he came in on the Monday after and I said to him, ‘How’d you find it?’. He said, ‘You never told me about the short arm jab!’ I reminded him that I had when I told the players to go into the ball court on a Friday in the gym; I used to say, ‘Kick the what-have-you out of each other, because that’s how it’s going to be when you make it in the first team.’

  “Glenn would say that I taught him all these lovely skills, but come on, he had them – all I did was just help tease them out of him. But they all had to come to terms with the power and the pace of football at the top level. It’s like standing on a railway station platform and a train flies by at 100mph. You think to yourself, ‘I can’t get on it, I can’t make it stop.’ When a young boy goes into the first team for the first time, that’s how it is. Every one of the players I helped develop said that. ‘I couldn’t get hold of the ball, Pete.’ The step up was severe and is even more so today.

  “I had to ready them for that. I was firm with them – I wouldn’t stand for any backchat because I had to have that discipline. They didn’t answer back then, and I taught them how to conduct themselves. I sussed people out. I would know, for instance, that a boy who came over from Ireland was likely to get homesick pretty quick.

  “I used to get all the boys on the bus up to the training ground and sometimes I used to drive it. I used to say to them, ‘Any of you got any girlfriends yet?’ ‘Girlfriends? Don’t have time for girlfriends, Pete,’ they’d say. ‘Oh right’ I’d reply. ‘Let me tell you. There’s about 14 of you on this bus. About five of you – and I don’t know which five – will go away from the game because you’ll find out about girls and drink.’ ‘No!’ they’d all say. ‘I’m telling you, in 12 years time I’ll bump into some of you and you’ll be saying, ‘You used to be my coach’.

  “My role was therefore all-encompassing: coach, mentor, stand-in parent, babysitter. I got a close bond with them. There was an element of psychology involved. You had to make sure they could cope mentally with professional football. Everybody’s different, but basically they were all working class kids, none of them were posh. At the start of every season 40 triallists would turn up. I’d sit them down and go through the names. ‘Paul Miller. Where you from Maxie?’ ‘Bethnal Green,’ he would say. ‘Bethnal Green,’ I’d reply, ‘Lovely, I like Bethnal Green.’ I’d say to the next boy ‘Tommy. Where you from Tommy?’ He answered ‘Hampstead.’ ‘Hampstead? Let me tell you Tommy – I have never signed a kid that comes from Hampstead. So you prove me wrong, but I don’t think you will.’ And I still have never signed a kid from Hampstead,” says Shreeve, laughing. “The reason is obvious – kids from Bethnal Green look around them and think ‘What am I going to do here?’ Football gives working class kids an opportunity in life to move forward. They have that hunger and desire.

  “They make silly mistakes, of course. I got a phone call once from the police. ‘Sorry to trouble you Mr Shreeves, but there’s a boy in our cells who says he’s a youth team player at Tottenham.’ They gave his name and I confirmed it was true. I said, ‘You look after him for now and I’ll get down there and sort things out.’ It would happen with kids not from London who came to Spurs and would be living away from home for the first time. All of sudden they had this freedom and would go over the pub when they’d finished training, come out and fall over drunk and get arrested on Tottenham High Road. There were three or four instances when that happened. I would have to say to them, ‘Do you want to be a boozer or do you want to be a footballer?’” Asked to mention names, Peter declines. All these years on and he’s still protective of his lads.

  So, as someone who learned the cruel lesson of how transient a career in football can be when he was forced out of the game through injury, did Shreeve find it difficult to tell a youngster he wasn’t going to make it? “I think it was a social skill I acquired over a period of time. I had a son and daughters and I knew how disappointment could hit a family, so I
knew how to respond to young people.

  “Letting them go was part of the job. I knew when I had to make that difficult phone call, or have that difficult conversation. I took on that responsibility because it’s on your mind and you have to get it out of the way. I’d sit the boy down and say, ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve had you for a year, you’ve enjoyed it, but I, along with the management and other coaches, have to make a decision and we don’t feel we can offer you an apprenticeship. What I can do is help to find you a club somewhere else.’ Because I’ve had this conversation with lots of boys and half of them proved me wrong – they go somewhere else and make a name for themselves. Basically, you are telling these young men the worst news of their lives and trying to do it in such a way that it won’t destroy them.

  “The hardest one was Carl Hoddle, Glenn’s brother. Everyone turned up for his funeral when he died this year. It was a very sad day. That’s when you see what a club is about. Everyone who was in his youth team turned up at Harlow for the ceremony.

  “It was hard to let him go. I pulled Glenn to one side and said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to tell your brother we’re not keeping him on.’ ‘He’ll take it hard,’ he said. I knew he would, but I had to do it. They would bubble up and cry; that’s natural, but they got over it. We found them other clubs; Carl went to Leyton Orient and Barnet, so he had a career. It was more difficult for him because of his name.”

  But amid the hard decisions there were also laughs to be had and Shreeve was one of many jokers at the club. Reminded of Brooke’s story of the day his taxi-driving coach left him standing at the bus stop on the way into training, Shreeve laughs at the memory. “I think you have to have banter with the players and that was part of it, a little wind up. Sometimes I would do that because I knew that Garry would be moaning saying, ‘That Shreevesie, do you know what, he drove straight past me!’ Garry was a lovely lad. I saw him playing for Walthamstow schools and recognised this great prospect.”

  Shreeve’s nurturing of young players like Brooke and his success with the youth and then reserve teams made people at the club sit up and take notice. Keith Burkinshaw had arrived at Spurs around the same time as Shreeve and, as the successor to Neil, chose to make the popular coach his right-hand man in 1980.

  “What happened was that I’d had these boys on a daily basis in the youth team and a fair few had progressed to the reserve team group. Some of them asked if they could stay with me as their coach as they liked what I did. They were told no, but they still said they wanted to work with me. Keith eventually recognised that; I’d become reserve team coach as people moved on and Pat Welton, someone I had a lot of respect for, was then head coach; Keith decided to make a change and I joined the first team set-up.

  “I hadn’t had much involvement with the first team before then. Keith first arrived when Wilf was still there, and Keith told me early on, ‘I can’t get a feel of this club. They brought me in as first team coach, I’ve got the experience, but I’m not doing what I should’. I said to him that he would have to have a word with Terry and ask, ‘Am I first team coach or not?’ Keith from then on got more involved.

  “As a Londoner it had been easier for me to settle. Keith was a straight-backed Yorkshireman who took a bit longer to get to grips with what the club was like. He didn’t get involved in many pranks, but there was some wind-up or trick being played every day and you had to take that in your stride.

  “Keith got caught out once when we went on tour to Japan in 1979. Terry Naylor was still at the club. Terry was the funniest cockney I ever met in my life. We got invited to the British embassy in Tokyo for a very esteemed and formal function; Terry gave me the wink. He said, ‘Do you know what, Keith, I was here before in Japan. Everywhere you go you have to take your shoes and socks off.’ Keith didn’t say a word, but we went down to this function at the embassy and he took his shoes and socks off. The master of ceremonies announced our entrance saying, ‘Mr Keith Burkinshaw and members of the Tottenham Hotspurs football squad!’ – and Keith walked in barefooted. The only one there without shoes and socks! Terry goes, ‘You all right, Keith?’ Keith had to learn to take all that.

  “Nutter was up to that kind of thing all the time. When we signed Don McAllister from Bolton, he arrived as a full back. On his first day at Spurs, Don was naturally worried and nervous. Terry came in to the dressing room and said, acting dead serious, ‘You’re Don McAllister, ain’t you?’ Don said ‘Yes’. Nutter said, ‘You’ve come to take my place in the team, haven’t you?’ Don said, ‘Er well, no, I mean, I can play centre half?’ Terry said, ‘No, you’re a right back, I’m a right back; you’ve come to take my living away from me. You’re very quick, ain’t you?’ Don said, ‘Yes.’ Terry said, ‘Right, here’s half a quid, now eff off to the bakers and get me some jam tarts and make it quick.’ And Don took the money!

  “On another occasion we went down to Plymouth and the weather was boiling hot. Terry walked bare-chested into the five-star hotel where we were staying. Not out of disrespect but because it was hot and he’d forgot to put his shirt on. The manager at the hotel said, ‘Excuse me, are you a member of the Tottenham Hotspur football club?’ Terry, without batting an eyelid said, ‘Yes – and are you the manager of this hotel? Because when I walked into your hotel, I had a shirt on my back. Somebody’s nicked it!’ The manager fell for it straight away and asked, straight-faced, ‘What colour was it?’

  Away from all the laughter and banter, Shreeve and Burkinshaw and the rest of the coaching staff got down to the more serious business of assembling and developing a side that would restore Tottenham’s reputation. Even before his promotion, Shreeve was privy to the team’s rebuilding. “We survived relegation. The supporters gave us a standing ovation the day we went down. I couldn’t believe what I saw, because I thought they would be throwing tomatoes at us. And the directors kept faith with the management team, which wouldn’t happen now – it would be ‘Goodnight, vicar.’

  “The Argentinians coming was special. I went to meet them at Gatwick because the team was playing up north somewhere. The first thing Ossie did was walk me over to the London Underground map. He said, ‘Where is Totten-ham?’ He saw Tottenham Hale and thought that was it. I said, ‘No Ossie, not there. Don’t go there, it’s a bit of a dodgy area! Our stadium is a bit further on.’

  “When we got them into the team situation, we found we had a bit of a problem. They were both ball-playing midfielders but neither of them was very good when we didn’t have the ball. I said to Keith, ‘We’re gonna get murdered: teams are going to come straight through us.’ The first home game against Aston Villa, we got thrashed 4-1, despite all the fanfare and ticker tape, and we knew it was going to be a long haul. What did we need to do, could we cope with what we had or did we need to bring in a ball winner?

  “It took a while for them to accommodate themselves into our system. But they also passed on quite a lot to us, and me as a coach. Ricky, for instance, would get out wide. We knew he wasn’t just going to cross the ball to the back post, let the keeper come and say, ‘Thanks very much’; he would dribble back in and lay off a pass. ‘That’s good,’ we thought; if we can get someone on the edge of the box as he drills it across we could be in. It was case of learning from each other.

  “Ossie was the best player I ever coached or managed. People think it would have been Glenn, but Ossie could do everything. He could run with the ball on his feet, make runs, get the ball back. If he was to be analysed by ProZone, it would be phenomenal to see the ground he covered. He was outstanding. Never went out on the pitch to do a warm-up – he used to sit inside the dressing room doing the crossword. Me and him at a quarter to three. He’d say, ‘Pete, what’s this clue, nine across?’ And then go out and be the best player on the field.”

  Ardiles and Villa fitted into the “silky soccer” philosophy, but it was tested when the newly promoted team suffered that infamous thrashing at the hands of Liverpool. “I was taking the reserve tea
m that day, but when the score came through – 7–0 – it brought into sharp relief that there are only two things that happen in a game: you either have the ball or you don’t. When we didn’t have it, we were crap. We had to keep the ball or do our utmost to get it back. We started to do more training sessions on closing people down, getting fitter, working harder. It wasn’t all about pass, pass, pass.”

  “By 1980, we had more of a mix with Argentinians and a Scotsman and a couple of northerners, but we still had the same belief about the way we wanted to play football – it had to be about passing and movement. We signed good players that fitted into that system. And meanwhile Keith and I developed into a good partnership. Our contrasting characters complemented each other. Keith was a very good manager, I was a very good coach – we knew that and used each other’s strengths.

  “If you’re the manager, you have to deal with the player knocking on the door – the usual comments of, ‘Why aren’t I in the team?’ from players, or getting offers for players that are accepted by the club but the player doesn’t want to go. You have to deal with the media, the board – who, I have to say, were fabulous then, just a group of businessmen who loved the club. But there are all sorts of things that are important but aren’t a great deal of pleasure.

  “Keith would have to deal with all that when what he really wanted was to be out there with me and the players on the training ground. Instead he got all the phone calls. I would take training more often than not, though it should be noted that Keith was a very good coach – that’s what he was brought to the club as. But the other part of his job got in the way.

  “Keith would seek advice but make his own decisions, I could never tell him what team to play. He was the boss. He picked the players and then it was my job to make them into the best unit we could possibly have. Keith would listen but you don’t become a good manager by listening to other people all the time; you have to be the boss, and he was a good boss. But it was a good partnership and we’re good friends now; we still argue on the phone about various things – strictly football I should point out. We’ve always bounced off of each other.”