As captain of Tottenham and Northern Ireland he proved himself to be an exceptional leader – arguably the best ever.
‘There we are, typical Blanchflower.’ This, says Cliff Jones, is how Bill Nicholson, the Tottenham Hotspur manager, reacted to Danny Blanchflower’s refusal to appear on the massively popular TV show This Is Your Life in 1961.
The episode became an instant cause celebre – and it is not hard to imagine the sound of splintering furniture in the Spurs PR office if such a thing happened today.
The Northern Irishman, with no concept of positive image promotion, snubbed the show’s presenter, Eamonn Andrews, live on air. ‘We were all up there at Shepherd’s Bush studios,’ Jones, a brilliant winger for Spurs from 1958-68, recalls. ‘People had come from everywhere – Canada, Ireland, of course… Then on came the announcer and said, “Well, I’m sorry, for the first time in the history of This Is Your Life our subject has refused to appear.” Bill was not impressed.
‘But that was it. Danny was a special character, great intelligence and a brilliant player, too. We all sparked off him.’
The This Is Your Life incident came towards the end of Blanchflower’s defining season as captain of a great Spurs side – and, as Jones suggests, their greatness was as much a tribute to Blanchflower as anyone. Not only was he an original thinker but regarded professional football as good an arena as any in which to apply innovative ideas.
Spurs launched their glory years with a record run of eleven First Division victories at the start of the 1960-61 season, laying the foundation for winning the title by eight points. They then went on to win the FA Cup, completing a double not achieved since 1897.
What most impressed Jones about Blanchflower was the way ‘he would make changes out on the field during a game. These days the captain wears the armband and that’s it. He’ll make no changes.
‘But Danny, he would do it. He might switch a player – move somebody forward or bring somebody back.’
But it was not just at club level that the very singular Blanchflower made his mark. His outstanding leadership of Northern Ireland, especially at the 1958 World Cup finals, was arguably a greater achievement than what he accomplished at White Hart Lane.
Of the British Isles teams who played in those finals, Northern Ireland, whose record of being the least populous country to reach the finals would survive until Trinidad and Tobago did it in 2006, were the most impressive.
Their success in reaching the last eight, against tough opposition all the way, owed much to their adapting better than the others to the way the game was being played beyond the British Isles. And this was mainly down to Blanchflower, who, just as he did at Tottenham, took over managing the side once the players were on the field.
Peter McParland, a stellar member of Northern Ireland’s 1958 World Cup team, says that while his club Aston Villa were still largely faithful to the traditional WM formation, even though Hungary had so spectacularly picked it to pieces against England at Wembley five years earlier, Northern Ireland were trying new things.
‘We had four or five players who could play in midfield,’ McParland says, ‘and Danny would set it all up, crowding the middle of the park when necessary, but also getting players forward at the right time.’
It is impossible to say whether English football would have prospered if it had followed Blanchflower’s crede: that the game was not about battering and/or boring opponents to death but playing, as Hungary and the South Americans did, with style and a flourish and being tactically inventive.
It did not happen because English clubs failed to connect the Irishman’s presence with the success of the teams in which he played and dominated with his personality. Or, if they did make the connection, they ignored it out of an inbred distrust of what they saw as too much swank and not enough graft.
After he retired as a player Blanchflower turned to being a manager, but soon despaired of setting English football on a new course. In frustration he switched to making a living as a shrewd media observer.
Northern Ireland’s heroics had started in the qualifying competition for the 1958 finals when they eliminated Italy. This was, quite simply, an extraordinary result.
The Italians had been world champions in 1934 and 1938 and had reached the finals of every World Cup they had entered. A draw against the Irish would have seen them through. The fact that the match was being played in Belfast was not expected to be nearly enough of an advantage for Blanchflower’s team to survive.
What undermined Italy’s effort was that the tie, instead of being wrapped up in 90 minutes on the afternoon of Wednesday 4 December 1957, mutated into a six-week saga. This was after the Belfast-bound match referee, Istvan Zsolt of Hungary, became stranded in fog in London.
Although the match went ahead in Zsolt’s absence, it was downgraded to a friendly when the Italians refused to give official recognition to a substitue ref. It ended 2-2, which would have been enough for Italy to go through.
The long delay would play right into Northern Ireland’s hands, partly because it must have rattled Italy that the so-called friendly was such an ugly affair. Having to come back to Belfast in mid January could not have been an enticing prospect.
Not only did ‘both teams kick lumps out of one another’, as McParland puts it, in that first fixture, serious crowd trouble at the end incensed the visitors. One Italian newspaper described the Belfast troublemakers as ‘barbarians of a primitive epoch’ and the debate about what should happen next reached government level in both countries.
On top of this the extended pause before the rearranged fixture ideally suited the artful Blanchflower.
He had marked the visitors’ vulnerabilities in the friendly and insisted the Northern Ireland team gather three days before the rescheduled match. During this unusually long time to prepare, Blanchflower drummed into the players tactics that involved disregarding the formations that English club teams regarded as sacrosanct. They would ambush the Italians with swift breaks from midfield.
In this way Northern Ireland controlled the game demonstrating that the virtues of the traditional British way could be successfully allied to new ideas. Italy even accepted that their 2-1 defeat was down to the Irish being the better team.
Blanchflower’s leadership and McParland’s goals – he scored five of the team’s tally of six – were the foundations of Northern Ireland’s feat of reaching the quarter-finals of the 1958 world finals. That they reached the knockout stage at all surpassed most expectations after they were drawn in a group with holders West Germany and Argentina, the 1957 South American champions, who flopped badly to finish in last place.
The one time Blanchflower lost of control of his team was during an incident that was pure pantomime but went virtually unnoticed. If it had happened in a World Cup today newspapers everywhere would have carried the story. McParland describes the shenanigans in Northern Ireland’s ranks in their opening match, a 1-0 win over Czechoslovakia:
‘Czechoslovakia bombed us for about ten, 15 minutes, but it didn’t help that our little left half, Bertie Peacock of Celtic, got on to Harry Gregg, our goalkeeper, for not coming off his line to take a ball that had come across the goalmouth.
‘Bertie was the next-door neighbour to Harry where he was born in Ireland but this did not stop Harry from taking offence and running after Bertie.
‘Meanwhile their outside right’s got the ball. I’d come across to stop him from getting a cross in, holding him out on the wing, but behind me Harry’s still running after Bertie to give him a punch and Alfie McMichael, our left back, is shouting, “Get back in the goal, Harry.” Luckily they did not score. If they had they might have destroyed our World Cup.’
After retiring as a player and manager, Blanchflower became a perceptive commentator on football and life in general. Sadly he died as a result of Alzheimer’s disease in 1993 aged 67.
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback Publishing.