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Bill Nicholson: Football's Perfectionist by Brian Scovell
Bill
Nicholson is remembered, in a new book by Brian Scovell, as a stern
disciplinarian whose boldness created the team that won the Double and
two European trophies
Bill
Nicholson is remembered, in a new book by Brian Scovell, as a stern
disciplinarian whose boldness created the team that won the Double and
two European trophies
Bill Nicholson, a modest man, was manager of the
stylish Spurs team that won the Double in 1961. Photograph: Peter
Robinson/Empics Sports
The morning after the FA Cup final in 1961, when Bill Nicholson had crowned his career at the age of 42 by leading Tottenham Hotspur
to the first Double since Aston Villa's in 1897, reporters could not
help but poke fun at the Yorkshireman's stern and uncompromising
character. He was a man, wrote one, who "shaved in ice water", while
another felt that Spurs' greatest ever manager laboured under the belief
that "smiling takes up precious time".Even the verdict of
Nicholson himself on that most romantically cherished of English sides
was suitably austere. "I have deep pleasure," he said, "in seeing hard
work put into effect and being rewarded." The pleasure was so deep it
was all but impossible to discern, and that is the dominant theme of
Brian Scovell's fascinating and sympathetic biography which makes a
plausible case for restoring his subject to the Valhalla of management
alongside his infinitely more charismatic peers Bill Shankly, Sir Matt
Busby and Jock Stein.Next year marks the golden anniversary of
that remarkable triumph – a feat of arduousness and rarity that cannot
be devalued by its achievement in six of the past 17 Premier League
seasons. And on Tuesday in Bern, when Tottenham take on Young Boys, the
club will celebrate the ending of a 49-year exile from the European Cup,
a competition generations of Spurs fans have been excluded from since
Nicholson's Double winners' solitary campaign.The story of
Tottenham's run to the semi-final in 1962 is vibrantly chronicled by
Scovell, and the tales of trips behind the Iron Curtain to play Poland's
Gornik Zabrze and Czechoslovakia's Dukla Prague have a distinctly Len
Deighton-ish air with their misty train platforms, journalists taken
into custody and bug-ridden beds. But it is the accounts of the home
legs – where the mystique of "those glory, glory nights" under the
floodlights at White Hart Lane was minted – that sparkle the most. Most
continental clubs had tracks running around the pitch but Tottenham's
was enclosed by vast, tall stands and the volume the supporters created
was intense and persistent. "The noise came from everywhere, from
everyone," wrote the captain, Danny Blanchflower,. "A local vicar used
to complain that the whole thing was like a substitute for religion and I
suppose it was in a way."Against the Polish champions, Spurs
trailed 4-2 from the away leg but in front of their own cacophonous
crowd and thousands locked out on Tottenham High Road, the dazzlingly
skilful Wales winger Cliff Jones scored a hat-trick in an 8-1 rout.
Their semi-final opponents, the holders Benfica, were so concerned about
their players being fazed by the din that they would not allow them to
warm up on the pitch. Tottenham's 2-1 victory was not enough to overturn
their 3-1 defeat in the Stadium of Light. The outcome of that match
seems to have been Nicholson's biggest regret. Indeed, his private
suspicions about some of the refereeing decisions, which disallowed
"goals" by Bobby Smith and Jimmy Greaves in an era when the nobbling of
officials by shadowy club fixers was prevalent, persuaded him that
Tottenham had been diddled out of the European Cup and their destiny.
Not that he complained in public. That was not the Nicholson way.Above everything, Nicholson admired honesty and industry. There was boldness, too – after all, audere est facere (to
dare is to do) was the club's proud motto. His greatest success was
perhaps his astonishing transfer coups that formed the backbone of the
Double team: Dave Mackay, John White, Bill Brown and Les Allen. Putting
them together with Jones and the headstrong intelligence and elegance of
Blanchflower transformed the side, and the fruits of such attacking
prowess were evident in the 115 goals they scored en route to the league
title in 1961.If the Double was an unrepeatable peak, the
"decline" over the following 13 years, if you could call it that,
included two European trophies, two FA Cups and two League Cups. The
stoicism Nicholson had inhaled with his mother's milk in Scarborough, in
a family of nine children, suited him well but by the early 70s he was
not so much disillusioned by the game as disgusted by it. His jibes
about the players' long hair at first sound like curmudgeonly jokes, but
became so frequent that it suggests the man whose short-back-and-sides
was unchanged since his days as a sergeant PT instructor during the war
had a complex about it.He resigned in the autumn of 1974,
sickened by the salaries commanded by journeymen players and repelled by
the hooliganism that had turned Tottenham's second-leg defeat by
Feyenoord in the Uefa Cup final into the "Rotterdam Riot" that May. He
was given a £10,000 payoff for 36 years of service as player, assistant
coach and manager and signed on at the Haringey labour exchange the
following week before his old friend Ron Greenwood gave him a
sounding-board role at West Ham. But he did not complain – how could he?
He had been as tight-fisted towards his players as the board were to
him.Those players profess to love and respect him but the
majority of their anecdotes reveal a man of exacting standards, brutally
miserly in wage negotiations and often ready with a blunt critique of
their performance before thinking to offer praise. He comes across as
the stock school disciplinarian character of whom the pupils belatedly
realise he was only so tough because he cared so much. The genuine
warmth understandably comes from the memories of his two daughters.After
leaving the club and then returning as a consultant and ultimately
president from 1976 until his death in 2004, he had mellowed
considerably and numerous supporters attest to his modesty and kindness.
Introverted by disposition, Nicholson seemed to blossom in later life
as an honoured representative of the club he adored, and he read the
game so well he prophesied the coming of the Premier and Champions
Leagues years before their establishment.This is an old-fashioned
biography and has, it must be said, a few editing flaws that need to be
put right before the paperback edition if it is to pass muster with the
"perfectionist" of the title. But with its unpretentious style and fund
of good stories, it does justice to the architect of Tottenham's claim
to greatness by outlining the standards he set and traditions he built
that his 16 successors to date have so far failed to match.Bill Nicholson: Football's Perfectionist by Brian Scovell (John Blake, £19.99)
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