The specifics of coaching are something of an unknown quantity. Fans know that plenty of work is done behind the scenes away from games, but it is rare to hear from coaches as to what actually happens day to day. Over 25 years on, Shreeve sheds light on the ideas and practical work that he and Burkinshaw did to make Tottenham tick.
“To have a good team you had to make sure your tent pole made your tent secure: in other words, you had to have a very good goalkeeper of real stature; we needed two centre halves – we had that in Roberts and Miller so we had two solid defenders who, when the other team had the ball, we could get it back. We didn’t want them coming out from the back anyway, we would say to them, ‘Don’t think you’re Beckenbauer; you’re Paul Miller from the East End – just give it to the Hod Carrier and you’ll be all right.’ That’s what we called Glenn – the Hod Carrier.
“Steve Perryman was an excellent, excellent player. Nobody really appreciated how good he actually was. I’ve taken international sides – I was Welsh coach for a few years and saw some great players – but Steve Perryman would always get in my top ten. His technique was brilliant. He had a great jam tart and loved the club – he would have slept there if he could.
“With those tent poles in place, we went to work. Specific training would vary – at that time we won more often than not so you would work on different things than if you were losing, but normally on a Monday we would get the lads together. The boys would have had a sherbet over the weekend – that wasn’t a problem, they were young men and that’s how it was – so on the Monday we would get in amongst them a bit and play eight-a-side. As soon as those games started the competitive spirit would come to the fore and they would put the physical effort in. The quality would be top class. And the commitment . . . sometimes I would have to keep it in check saying, ‘Steady on, we don’t get a win bonus today.’
“We would do a lot of work with the two strikers. Keith would ask me to take a bunch of apprentices with them. I would put the strikers in white shirts and the others in blue, say. I would then ask questions of the strikers. ‘How can you help your partner? What do you want from him and what does he want from you?’ Then I’d develop little situations and routines. I would tell Archibald, ‘When the ball comes to you, you have got to hit it to me first time; you have no other choice.’ I’d say to Garth, ‘In that situation, what are you going to do to help him’? He would have to provide an outlet, draw away a defender or make a run. This was my natural way of coaching. I talked this way to international players, but I knew that I knew more than them – well, I’m not quite saying that, but I determined what we worked on.
“We’d work on all these little things so that they would become part of what players did. We were hoping that after this training session finished at lunchtime the two front players would have developed more of an understanding, that they would appreciate how to work as a pair rather than two individuals.
“Another day we’d work with Tony Galvin on his crossing because in the previous game he’d been hitting too many crosses into the crowd. We didn’t have any players in the crowd so that wasn’t what we wanted. We’d be playing balls out to him under pressure and make him clip his cross in – making him repeat the exercise again and again.
“We’d vary it, keep them interested. Once we’d done those little bits with individuals, we’d do something with the midfield players, on their choice of passes. Glenn could hit a ball 50 yards no problem. We used to get him in the right-half position and to hit a ball out to Tony on the back of the full back. In one fell swoop we’d got in behind the opposition – that’s silky soccer because we had got a ball at distance where it was effective and hurt the opposition.
“Then we’d say, ‘All right Glenn, we’re playing so-and-so this week; they are going to mark you man for man. I’m going to put a young kid against you. He can’t kick you but he’ll have a go at you.’ ‘Don’t worry Pete, that’s all right,’ he’d say. But every time he got the ball there was someone on him. But our golden rule remained: Glenn must have the ball. Players could not say, ‘He’s marked, I can’t give it to him’ – they still had to feed him, as he was our best player and would make the best decisions for the team.
“We didn’t bring all these details together until the last 20 minutes. We’d say to the front two, ‘Right, put it into practice; Tony, make sure it stays in play; get close on Glenn, don’t kick him because we want him fit but let’s see how he copes with it.’ This would have been the daily routine.”
Coupled with the on-pitch training was the off-pitch innovation that Spurs became renowned for. Like Perryman and the players, Shreeve pays generous tribute to John Syer’s sports psychologist team. “We all learned. I learned so much from them, as a coach. In the meetings they organised, we would split the players up according to formation – defenders together, strikers in a group, etc – and tell them to talk to each other.’ ‘What about?’ they’d say. ‘What do you mean ‘what’? Talk. Talk about football. What do you want from each other? What do you want from the midfield and the back four?’ They would have their discussion and then we’d bring them together. Then they’d all have to say what they wanted. Voices would get raised, but we worked it out that with all the people and various permutations involved, we could have about 100 conversations and set-ups with everyone’s antennae going off – what does the right full back want from the central midfielder, what does he want from the centre half etc.
“It was to make us a better team. We were communicating at the highest level. I have to give John and his colleagues great credit. We were into man management, but they taught us a lot. They would talk about what music to have playing in your car before coming to a game. They’d say to Glenn, ‘Who’s your favourite artist at the moment?’ He’d say, ‘Christopher Cross.’ When we went up Wembley Way two years running we had him playing on the tape. It started because one day Glenn had a particularly good game and he said he’d been listening to Cross on the way in. He scored two goals. So it was the association of getting in the right frame of mind.
“It was about preparation and thinking positively. I managed to get an edited videotape of some of our best bits of play in the dressing room on a TV before a match. So when Archie was doing his bootlaces up, he’d look up and see himself smashing the ball in the net from 25 yards. We never lost a game in the dressing room. Because they were all thinking good things – positive mental attitude it was called, or PMA.”
Shreeve was also forward-thinking with his focus on nutrition. “That was us being a little bit before our time, maybe. We gave them the correct food at the training ground before anyone knew what ‘correct food’ was. Before we made changes, anyone in the first team used to get steak for their pre-match meal and the youth team got eggs on toast. But the eggs were much better for you. We changed it around and some complained but we were adamant and said, ‘No, those days are over.’”
For all the devotion to the ideal of silky soccer, Burkinshaw and Shreeve worked the players hard, with arduous cross-country runs in Cuffley Woods just down the road from Cheshunt. It was there, however, that the real importance of football was brought into sharp relief. “The runs became famous within the club. Everyone was pleased once they’d done them but not while they were doing it. Whenever I think about that place though, there’s a very sad memory associated with it concerning when Pete Southey died.
“It chokes me now to think about it. He was a good player. I was the old boy – well, I was around 40, but I was quite fit. Nonetheless Peter, at one of the Cuffley runs, was jogging alongside me. I said, ‘What are you doing here? You should be up the front?’ He said, ‘I don’t feel very good, gaffer.’ I told him he would have to drive on if he wanted to progress. In the end I said to the doctor that I was a bit worried about Peter. So he gave him a blood test and it came back that he had leukaemia. The doc said, ‘There is no nice way of saying this – the boy’s days are numbered.’ When I recalled that I had had a go at him for n
ot keeping up with the lads, well, it struck home.
“Peter’s death showed how the club was really together. When he died everyone who worked at Tottenham got on a coach and we went over to his funeral in Putney. It bonded us, showing this respect for our young colleague. He was an England youth international. It was such a fantastic thing – no one said they couldn’t make it; we all wanted to be there. His old man worked at Heathrow. Every time we landed there he knew about it and he would come to the plane as it landed and shake hands with all the lads; he knew the club had done well by his boy.”
Southey’s tragic death came in 1983, shortly after Garry Brooke’s career-ending crash. They were two of the players Shreeve had nursed through to the first team squad, their fates providing a sobering reminder of the vagaries of life and putting football into true perspective. Up until then, however, Shreeve had experienced all the good things the game had to offer. Back in 1980, he saw that the team was coming together and, playing a full part in its success, it would furnish him with his happiest football memories.
“I knew we had a very good team. We had Glenn, Tony Galvin – an unsung hero, whose work rate was phenomenal; Stevie P’s record speaks for itself; Maxie and Robbo – when I became manager for the second time a few years later, everyone used to say, ‘Why haven’t we got two centre halves like Miller and Roberts?’ Yet when I was there when Maxie and Robbo were playing people would say, ‘They are no good. They can’t play.’ As soon as they were missing, people realised how good they were and that they could play. We had Chris Hughton, an elegant, right-footed and left-footed full back who would pay one-twos with the centre forward. With Ossie and Ricky and the two up front it was coming together.
“But to be frank, going into the 1981 final we had been pretty average. In the build-up to the game I did my homework on Man City. I told the lads, ‘They are going to stop us playing, you know that?’ I used to compile my own dossiers and did a lot of research on other teams but I didn’t pass that on to the players; I just summarised things for them. Footballers have short attention spans and 20 minutes before a game you need to drive the message home quickly and succinctly.
“Man City had a midfield destroyer, Gerry Gow. I was wise enough to suggest that our midfield would not be given any space. Glenn said to me, ‘It’s at Wembley; they won’t be able to get near us on that big pitch.’ ‘Excuse me? I said. ‘That pitch is about the same size as any other.’ To be fair, Glenn half said after the first game, ‘Pete, I doff my hat to you; you called it right. They stopped us playing.’
“If you look back from a Man City point of view, they were unlucky not to win the first game. Steve Mackenzie who scored that fantastic equaliser for them in the second game – he could have been a Spurs player. I had him as a boy in the youth team, but I couldn’t win his old man over, and he signed for Palace. But we were fated to win the replay after all that had happened with Ricky being taken off.
“On the Friday before the first game, unusually, I gave a little talk to the boys. I always had something to say but this was more of a speech on my part. The boys have said years afterwards, ‘That was great what you said.’ And it went something like this: ‘Do you remember when you were ten years old? Playing in the playground, ball on the penalty spot? What did you imagine? I know what you thought – last minute at Wembley. ‘Peter Shreeves strides up, yes! Strikes it right in the corner!’ I bet you all did that, imagining you were scoring, didn’t you?’ They all nodded. ‘Well,’ I said ‘you are playing at Wembley on Saturday – it’s the cup final, you’re there! You’re not ten any more, you’re a man and all the world is going to be looking at you.’ I translated that fantasy to reality. Archie always reminds me of that. It was just something I wanted to say because I loved football.
“I used to play in the five-a-sides as I wasn’t a bad player and could hold my own. I used to say ‘Gimme the ball; leave that mug Hoddle out; don’t give it to him, give it to me. I’ve got a plan.’ I always used to say that: ‘I’ve got a plan.’ That became a bit of a catchphrase for the lads – ‘Give it to Shreevsie; he’s got a plan.’ It was me having a laugh, encouraging a bit of banter. ‘Don’t give it to that mug Ardiles; he’ll only give it away. Give it to me; I’ve got a plan.’
“Going into the first game the plan was we were going to win, so we booked the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane for a reception afterwards. We’d only drawn but we still had to go to the Hilton – no one had planned for that. It was such a flat evening, but me and Keith started talking. We thought we were lucky to have gotten away with it, but we’d been given a second chance. He told me then that he had already spoken to Ricky and told him he was going to play in the replay. ‘OK,’ I thought, but we’ll need to do some different work with him and the boys to get them better prepared.
“There were no big speeches before the replay. The preparation was that we said, ‘We could have lost that chaps; we could be crying in our milk. But we’ve got a second chance. All these fans are coming, your families will be here, you have the chance to go down in history here.’ We did some light training on the Wednesday. But the real worry was Stevie Perryman. Not many people know it but he very nearly didn’t play. On the morning of the match on the Thursday I took him down to Cheshunt to do a fitness test – to be honest, what we thought would be a ‘no hope’ test. I was experienced in conducting them and as soon as I asked a player how he felt and he said ‘Not too bad’ I knew he was not going to make it because the ‘Not too bad’ is a negative thing and an indication there was doubt in his mind. I took Steve through his paces. He side-footed the ball. ‘How’s that?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, it’s good’ he replied. So Steve played, but with a thigh strain that I thought would rule him out. I don’t know how he possibly made it because he could hardly run the day before.
“We knew then that we had three or four days to get Steve physically fitter. The mental thing with Ricky was something different. We had to be positive. For cup finals in those days you could not go out on the pitch and warm up. You could have a walk around in your suits but not a warm-up. The first time players saw the pitch when in their kit was when they walked up the tunnel for the presentations and the kick off. But in the replay – you could have a warm-up.
“So for the replay I went out with Ricky while the band was still marching up and down playing. I said to Ricky, ‘Go the other side of the band and chip the ball over them towards me.’ He looked a bit dubious and said, ‘Ooh no, I might hit someone.’ ‘No you won’t,’ I said. ‘You’re a great player; you’ll be fine. Chip the ball over that band and see how you shape up.’
“What I was trying to do was boost his confidence. By the time we got to kick off, Ricky was up for it, raring to go. His mind was right. It was ludicrous that at Wembley for the first game you couldn’t warm your team up because the procedure and ceremony was more important than the result: ‘We can’t disturb the royal box’ and all of that. But for the replay we had more of the genuine football fans, not so much the prawn sandwich brigade there for the ‘event’.
“I think we got Ricky in the right frame of mind. He knew that he had let the club and the fans down on the Saturday – and Argentina. He was a very, very proud man was Ricky and he was broken-hearted at his performance, thinking he had let the whole world down. We had to take him from that frame of mind to be confident in the space of four or five days. It was good man management.”
Bursting with renewed confidence, Villa weaved his way to football immortality. The details of his winning goal and the reaction it caused are well known, but hitherto the thoughts of the Tottenham management team have been something of a secret. Here, Shreeve conveys what it meant to him and the professionalism he and Burkinshaw displayed in the immediate aftermath of incredible sporting drama.
“It was the greatest moment of my career. Euphoric. It started when Ricky picked the ball up almost on the half-way line, ran on and went past an opponent, and I said to Keith, ‘He’s gonna have a run here.’ Every ti
me he went past a player, I was nudging Keith with my shoulder or arm, mirroring what Ricky was doing each time he dipped his shoulder; I knocked Keith about four times. I said, ‘He’s effing going to score, I’m telling yer!’ Eventually he did score and well, what joy. But my professional instincts immediately kicked in. Keith remained calm, sitting on the bench and allowing himself a brief round of applause. I got up on my feet thinking, ‘We haven’t won this yet; there’s still time to go.’
“An experienced coach is almost programmed to respond that way. For that first minute after scoring, the players were on cloud nine, so we had to apply a golden rule we had developed. Whenever we had scored and the opponents kicked off, if we hadn’t regained the ball after two tackles or challenges from us, the third tackle had to be either us winning possession or conceding a free kick. If we gave away a free kick in their half of the field it was to our advantage.
“Picture the scene: the opposition kick off and the pass normally goes back. I used to say to our players, ‘Go in and rattle them.’ We may concede a free kick, but we will then be automatically focussing on defending. The instruction was always, ‘Either win it back or stop them getting it forwards.’ It focused people’s minds, made them think about getting into position or picking up their player. So the moment when we scored was pure elation but very quickly we had to get back to business.
“Sometimes at Wembley the game can pass you by; you are that hyped up that you don’t ‘see’ the game. The final whistle goes and you think, ‘Well, what happened there?’ In the first game we were all too busy waving to wives and family up in the stands and all that pomp-and-circumstance nonsense. The first thing I said on the Thursday was ‘I don’t want to see anyone waving at anybody. We’re here to win the game, and you can kiss your wife after we’ve won.’ Even now when players are at Wembley, they still wave to their wives; as soon as I see a team do that I know they’re in trouble.
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 24