‘I’m ambitious for Ralph’s sake. I know I’ll never achieve anything myself, but I might achieve it through Ralph. It’s nice for him to be somebody instead of anybody.

  ‘Ralph does want to be a success, but unlike me, he can’t bear to be an unsuccess. He’ll give up very quickly if he can’t do it right away, like mending something in the house. He hates it when he can’t do it at once. He took up cine films, but was furious when he couldn’t manage the splicing. He’s always taking up things and dropping them. He wasn’t brilliant first time at golf, so he dropped it at once, having bought all the gear.

  ‘He’s terrible on Saturdays. He hates it when people come to the house or anything happens to spoil his routine. He’s like a prima donna. If there’s any noise or disturbance he says, that’s it, now you’ve spoiled everything, and I have to calm him down very gently.

  ‘The psychology of being a footballer is very difficult. Ralph really is completely confident in his football ability. He has to be, otherwise he’d never go out there. Even at Burnley, when they were a goal down, he’d try even harder, convinced they could still do it. But the drawback about being a footballer is that, logically, you can do nothing else. Because you have to be convinced you are going to make it, you never have any interest in anything else. You end up being unable to do anything else. You know you’re going to be a footballer, so everything else is pointless.’

  Ralph finds it hard to express what he feels. He appears trapped by himself, in some ways, and by his own abilities. It’s sad to consider that to the outside world last season he’d been apparently one of football’s success stories, picked for England, a super-fit, highly paid athlete of only twenty-five – yet unable to sleep and reduced to sleeping pills because of worrying.

  ‘There is never any relief when the team is doing badly. They don’t know what it’s like at Spurs.

  ‘But I don’t regret having spent all those years at Burnley. If I was fifteen, I’d do the same again. But I know that at fifteen I enjoyed my football much more than I have done these last seven years.’

  He was unwilling to predict his future at Spurs or what the coming season might bring. Just the thought of being with a team bred on success rather than failure was enough to look forward to.

  ‘They seem a good set of lads. Very friendly, even the ones I was a bit worried about, the ones I might replace, Gilly, Jimmy Pearce and Jimmy Neighbour. They all came up and said hello and hoped I’d get on well, which was nice. I know the crowd will give me some stick if I don’t do well, but I’ll settle down.

  ‘Chivers and Peters were both saying this morning that they had a hard time when they arrived. They said I might find the same. It doesn’t worry me. It’ll be my problem, no one else’s. It’ll either be because I’m not training right or I’m not living right. I’ll find out the cause and put it right on my own.’

  Last season Spurs had finished third in the league. To Bill Nicholson, that was failure. At Burnley it would have meant dancing in the streets. Spurs had to be top. Otherwise, bodies would topple and the cheque book would come out. Ralph smiled and said it didn’t worry him. He would keep his place, as long as people didn’t expect miracles.

  ‘On the road walk this afternoon, they were all saying that everyone was convinced this was going to be Spurs’ season, that we’d do great and win something really big. I’ve heard it myself from lots of people since I arrived in London. The press are saying it. We’re being tipped by everybody.

  ‘As they were all talking about it, Alan Mullery turned to me and said yes, and it’s all up to you, Ralph. I know it was a joke. I think it was. But it’s a bit worrying, if it’s me everyone is depending on for the season ahead.’

  3. PRE–SEASON TRAINING

  * * *

  On the second week at Cheshunt it became a ritual every morning for all the players to stand around in the shade in the dining-room, waiting for the day’s work to begin. They stood chatting in groups, according to status. But there was another way of telling the stars. They were the ones opening letters.

  During the season, the players pick up their mail at the club, usually from Mrs Wallace’s office, the woman who looks after the general office. But during the four weeks of pre-season training they don’t go to the club. It’s all brought to Cheshunt. So first thing, there were always great shouts and laughs and jeers as players read out their fan letters to each other, taking the mickey out of yet another football magazine or comic which wanted them to put their name to some daft article.

  The reserves, of course, and the youth players, not being names, don’t get any letters or offers. They tended to talk even louder in their little groups, pretending they didn’t care, keeping half an ear open, hoping to hear about the latest free money which was being thrown at the big stars, who already, God knows, got so much money for nothing just by putting their name on the dotted line.

  One morning Alan Mullery had about fifty letters. They must have included a backlog, accumulated during the summer months. As captain of the team and an England star, he’d be expected to get most. He opened a few. They seemed to be mostly from schoolboys, wanting his photograph. He stuffed the rest in his pocket, to open at home. He intended to answer them, he said. He always did. He looked upon it as his duty.

  Martin Peters had a questionnaire from a magazine called Shoot! asking him his favourite TV programme and other important things, for a fee of course. Chivers had something from a TV rental company asking him if he’d like a free colour TV set.

  Cyril Knowles gave a great shout. He had an invitation from a girl asking him to her party. When he turned over the page he found out she was aged eight. Six of the players had the same letter. Joe Kinnear had a postcard from a girl which read ‘I am seventeen and very pretty and I would like you to take me out.’ But there was no address. He held the card up to the light for any secret messages.

  When Bill Nicholson arrived, he’d also had a letter. Someone was getting up a petition to stop the government taking over a local sports centre. He got the players together and told them about it. ‘The government wants to turn it into a centre for drop-outs, hippies and other wasters,’ he said, making it very clear what he thought of such awful people.

  ‘For Roger Morgan,’ said a voice at the back, and everyone laughed. Bill Nicholson paused for a minute, realising perhaps that everyone didn’t share his attitude.

  ‘Any views?’ he said, stopping and pausing when the laughter died down. Nobody answered. ‘Right then, I hope you’ll sign the petition. I’ll leave it here.’ Then they began the day’s work.

  Since the first couple of fairly gentle breaking-in days, they’d got down to some very hard work. The road walks gave way to runs, either on the road, round the pitches or up and down a nearby canal. One of Bill’s favourites was a fast sprint for seven hundred yards along a canal bank, followed by a fast walk round the houses, then a sprint back down the canal bank.

  In the second week, Bill Watson moved on from straightforward physical exercises to weight training. He keeps it up every Tuesday and Thursday during the season itself. He arranged his weights on the lawn in front of the dressing-room in twelve little piles, like the twelve stations of the cross. Some bars had to be lifted high in the air, others across the shoulders, or backwards, lifting them behind the legs. Each player had to do four sets of ten press-ups on each station, doing each to the whistle, and then moving on to the next station, completing all the stations in twenty-five minutes. Bill Nicholson went round each station, urging on each person, making sure nobody cheated. A few did, like Roger Morgan, doing only three press-ups instead of ten, if he thought Bill wasn’t looking.

  When it was the youngsters’ turn they did the same exercises as the big lads like Chivers and England had done. No allowances were made for their tender age or their strength.

  Ralph Coates had never done exercises like these at Burnley, not for ten years when, by a coincidence, the same Bill Watson had travelled up to Burnley for a spell to train their players. Coates struggled manfully with the weights, having forgotten the technique. ‘I thought you did them ten years ago,’ said Bill Nicholson.

  ‘Yes, when I was about twelve,’ said Coates.

  ‘You’ve got a birth certificate like Gilly,’ said Nicholson. Alan Gilzean is the oldest Spurs player, but looks even older than he is because of his lack of hair. The club keeps his date of birth very quiet.

  ‘Now this is called the Hack lift,’ bellowed Bill Watson. ‘Named after George Hack, who died last year at ninety-three.’

  Bill Watson always puts a lot of show into his exercises, laying on a big performance with lots of grunts and loud breathing. He’s very proud of all the teams he’s coached over the years and the new ideas he’s thought up. He also takes West Ham two days a week for weight training, giving them similar exercises to Spurs.

  Most of Bill Watson’s successes are printed so large on the top of his headed notepaper that there’s hardly any room for his address. ‘First Middle-Weight in British weight-lifting history to clean and jerk more than 312 pounds over-head’, so his notepaper announces in heavy large blue type at the top. ‘Originator of the Dumb Bell Agility fitness system for football’. His house is called Olympus.

  ‘Never call it weight lifting,’ he said. ‘It’s weight training. What footballers need is agility, flexibility and strength. We want explosive power. Weight lifting would give the wrong sort of hefty muscles. We want athlete’s muscles.’

  His exercises are worked out progressively, starting at the beginning of the season with about fifty sit-ups at a time. By Christmas they would be at their peak with each player being able to manage two hundred sit-ups. He’s written two books and sends leaflets on agility and fitness for footballers to thirty-two League clubs, in Britain and in Germany.

  ‘I suppose Chivers is the best of this bunch. He can lift those hand weights like peanuts. But the others are very good.

  ‘Some people think Mike England can’t be very strong. For the size of him he’s got very slender legs. But look at the separation of those muscles, look at the definition. It’s quality, not quantity, you want.’

  Bill Nicholson was watching every movement, jogging in his tracksuit, keeping his own sweat on by doing some of the exercises. ‘Martin. Don’t hold on to your thighs. That won’t help. Nice pair of toes there, Skip. Keep at it, all of you. Nobody told you to stop.’

  Steve Perryman, the youngest first-team player, had his eyes fixed almost manically, pummelling himself to greater effort. Some of the older players like Mullery, though working no less hard than Perryman, from time to time exchanged looks with each other, putting on the groans. Kinnear smiled at Chivers as he was reprimanded for holding his thighs. Peters went about his work quietly, in his own world, showing no emotion.

  ‘How many have you done, Jonesy?’ said Nicholson to one of the reserves.

  ‘Free,’ said Jones.

  ‘You mean three,’ said Nicholson, pronouncing it for him in his flat Yorkshire accent. ‘Didn’t you go to school?’

  Terry Naylor complained that the light-blue paint – Spurs’ colour – was coming off the weights onto his sweaty hands. Nicholson was very scathing. Imagine worrying about a bit of paint.

  Bill Nicholson missed half an hour of his lunch break that day. There was the usual count-up of balls after each session, but this time two were missing. He and the apprentices, whose job it is to clear up, all went round the hedges at the side of the pitches but couldn’t find them. The professionals had raced for the showers and the dining-room the minute the last exercise had finished. They didn’t care about lost balls.

  The two balls never turned up – it was presumed later that some kids amongst the spectators had nicked them when the players were busy training. Before the afternoon session, Bill warned them to be more careful. Whoever kicked a ball into the hedge had to bring it back. He’d looked everywhere but hadn’t found them. Roger Morgan asked loudly if he’d looked in Cyril Knowles’s Volvo.

  ‘You’ve not got to be hard on Dainesey,’ said one of the older players to Eddie Baily when that day’s training was over. Barry Daines is the young goalkeeper, deputy to Pat Jennings.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Eddie, all injured innocence.

  ‘You upset him today. You’ve got to be tender.’

  ‘Tender! Christ Almighty,’ said Eddie, looking round, opening his eyes wide. ‘At his age I had a bloody rifle stuck in my hand.’

  It was during the second week that Bill gave his little pre-season team talk, telling them details about the coming season. He told them about two friendly matches in Scotland that had been planned, against Rangers and Hearts. He warned them that all travel arrangements were private and not to be told to the press. He said that if they wanted extra personal insurance, they should see him that day. He warned about any fiddles in the carpark this season. He said how lucky they were to have such a carpark and how he always fought on the players’ behalf to get them one pass each. But some people last season had been bringing two cars in, giving their car to their wife or a friend and coming in someone else’s. It wasn’t fair. Because of this they’d had trouble at the last match of the season when some of the Arsenal directors couldn’t park in the carpark.

  He also warned them about swearing during training, now that so many women were coming to watch and soon even more kids, during the school holidays. ‘I don’t mind a few words, but you know the ones you shouldn’t use. So for Christ’s sake, lads, cut down the swearing.’

  It was during this talk that he officially introduced Bobby Scarth, the boy with hearing difficulties. He said most of them were probably aware he’d joined them. He had decided to try out the youngster for a season and he hoped that everyone would help him as much as possible. He explained that Bobby couldn’t hear at all, but that he could lip-read and say a few phrases. Any questions? There were none.

  By the third and fourth week of the training, the players got down seriously to planning the new season’s tactics. They were still doing their morning physical exercises, weight training and ball skills, the sort they do all year round in their daily training, either at Cheshunt if it’s fine or in the gym or ball court at White Hart Lane, but now in the afternoons they tried to use the practice matches to develop tactical moves.

  Bill Nicholson had warned them in his pre-season chat that they had a hard season ahead. With being in Europe for the first time for four years (by virtue of winning the previous season’s League Cup final at Wembley), they had a lot more matches to get through. It meant that till Christmas at least they would be playing almost every Wednesday, in one sort of Cup tournament or another, with League matches every Saturday.

  Once such a season begins, and such a season is now normal for any top team in the English First Division, there is rarely any time for tactical training. If, for example, a set-piece is going wrong, they seldom have a chance to go back to square one and correct it. It has to be dropped. The best they can do in the season between games is practise ball skills and get the injured fit.

  One of their main pre-season concerns revolved round dead-ball tactics. A dead ball, or a restart, is a movement which begins when the ball is stationary, after something like a free-kick, a corner, a throw-in or a goal-kick. When the restart is from a good position it’s possible to create in training a move which could lead to a goal in a real match. It does work, in the case of Spurs, a surprising number of times.

  You could easily miss these set-pieces, even if you knew what to look out for. They don’t get down in a huddle like American football. It’s not like chess where set moves are part of the game and everyone knows them. No two moves in football are exactly the same.

  It’s the free-kicks, throw-ins and corners that are the most important. They’re explained with diagrams, at the end of the book (see Appendix 1). They’ve been developed out of the unique skills of certain vital players, such as the ability of Martin Chivers to throw a ball a good fifty yards, Gilzean’s unequalled gift of flicking the ball with his head and Martin Peters’ talent for hitting a dead ball and sending it precisely where he wants it to go, floating it, bending it, spinning it at will.

  In all the tactical talks and trials, when they went over and over the same situation, everyone had an equal chance of giving his opinion or suggestions. When Nicholson shouted at them for not doing their part correctly, there was little hesitation about arguing back, explaining why they thought it had gone wrong. At least the older players did. The younger ones tended to keep quiet. But Nicholson was keen to hear all their views.

  Apart from dead-ball tactics, they also practised many passing moves. Such things as wall passes, where the person receiving the ball hits it straight back at an angle for his partner to run onto, or overlapping, where a player runs up from behind and goes past on the blind side of the opponent and down the wing into space, are used by all teams.

  One afternoon they practised long passes into a space on the edge of the penalty area. ‘If there’s nobody there to pick it up, it looks diabolical,’ shouted Nicholson. ‘So everybody must be thinking all the time. I want a placed pass. Not a centre or a cross. It should curve round the defence and into space for the winger to run on to it. Before it’s made, the player making the pass should cut in so that he leaves more space on the outside.’

  When it was Jimmy Neighbour’s turn to make the pass, rather than receive it, he was going too far down the wing before passing, ruining the move. Mullery ran over to him and went over what Bill had been saying, explaining that if he cut in instead of going towards the wing he would be creating more space for his pass. By going down the wing, the defence were spreading out and covering men and space.

  It’s the sort of tactic, passing into space, which is sometimes hard for the fans to appreciate. So often it can look like a wasted ball. Some players have an instinctive sense of space, like Peters, but with others it has to be developed by making them think all the time. No wonder so many footballers come off the pitch these days with a headache.