AN ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY MAN
Of all the many club managers I’ve met in the course of my life in football, Bill Nicholson of Tottenham Hotspur would rank among the very greatest. A blunt Yorkshireman, he was completely devoid of BS (all right, bullshit). “Any player coming to Spurs,” he once said, “must never be satisfied with his last performance, and he must hate losing.” He had this very direct way of talking and thinking, and had probably the best man management skills of his generation of club managers.
“It’s better to fail aiming high than to succeed aiming low,” he loved to say.
On the day in 1958 that he was appointed Spurs manager, Tottenham Hotspur won their first game under his management — they destroyed Everton 10 – 4 at White Hart Lane. But greater things lay ahead.
Under his guidance Spurs entered the history books by winning the first “double” of the 20th century. That was in the 1960-’61 season when they won the FA Cup and the Football League Championship.
About 10 years after Bill and Spurs parted company I had the great privilege of spending over an hour-and-a-half with him in his modest office at White Hart Lane. It was late April 1984, and Bill did most of the talking. What a treat it was to listen to this brilliant footballing man talking with enthusiasm and insight into the sport he had graced.
On the matter of cleverness and intelligence, he said that intelligence alone didn’t make anyone a good footballer. “If it did, Oxford and Cambridge would have the best teams, wouldn’t they? No, it’s a football brain that matters.”
He talked about the great double-winning team’s training, and about their most memorable matches, and about the outstanding players — iconic figures like Danny Blanchflower, Dave Mackay, Cliff Jones, John White and Ron Henry.
And he described how the in swinging corner kick had evolved from players at the training ground in Cheshunt trying to score into an empty net, direct from (a) the halfway line, and (b) the corner flags. The condition was: the “goal” would count only if the ball entered the net without touching the goal line!
Nowadays inswinging corner kicks are no more unusual than chilblains in cold weather.
Talking about Blanchflower’s mazy runs into opponents’ halves, he said, “Blanchflower couldn’t be controlled, but when things went wrong, the great Dave Mackay was always there to cover for him.”
The 90 minutes I spent with Bill Nicholson was a magical interlude, crowned by him phoning the then manager Keith Birkenshaw, and arranging for me to spend the day at Cheshunt with the squad. Lunch in the players’ canteen was included.
Want to know how the day went? Watch this space.
Johan Cruyff took the above photo of Bill Nicholson and I .
