Nearly 60 years ago an evening at the ballet in Moscow watching Rudolf Nureyev dance had a profound effect on how Tottenham prepared for their greatest season.
The year was 1959 and Bill Nicholson, the Tottenham manager, never a man averse to trying something new, decided a trip behind the Iron Curtain, to Moscow, would be good for the team that he was building into one of the most successful in Football League history.
Cliff Jones, the Wales international winger who is arguably the best left-sided attacker Spurs have ever had, was on that trip, a wide-eyed 24-year-old who had recently moved to London from Swansea. He still remembers it as vividly as any excursion he ever went on with club or country.
‘Bill took us on the pre-season tour and I’m telling you something Communism was rife, people were like queuing to go into the mausoleum to see Lenin and Stalin lying in state; they were very patriotic people … It was just unbelievable and we had three games against club sides and they were all battles.’
Jones describes the trip as ‘a great bonding experience because we all really came together as a team, but it was such a difficult tour.’
Not least of Jones’s personal difficulties was bonding with the no-nonsense Scotland player Dave Mackay. ‘I roomed with Dave, a very unfortunate experience,’ Jones says. ‘For a start, he was so untidy, our room was a complete khazi, and I couldn’t understand a word he said.’
When Jones asked if he could have an interpreter, Nicholson presumed he meant a Russian one. ‘No a Scottish one,’ Jones told him, ‘I don’t know what Mackay’s saying. Nay ou, ay ouze. Dear me.’
At the other end of the cultural spectrum from sharing a room with Dave Mackay was a night out at the Bolshoi Ballet, an experience Jones believes significantly influenced the way the great Spurs team of the 1960s played.
When Nicholson told Jones that was where they were going Jones thought he was joking. ‘No,’ Nicholson repeated emphatically, ‘we’re going to the Bolshoi Ballet.’
‘So we went there,’ Jones says, ‘and a young Nureyev was dancing. Can you believe that. It was an amazing experience. These ballet dancers, they were so fit and powerful. And of course Bill Nicholson was so taken with this he wanted to find out how they were so fit. And a lot of it was down to weight training.’
As a result, when Nicholson returned to London he sought out Bill Watson, who had been an Olympic weightlifter. Watson taught that everything came from the stomach, this was the core of a person’s fitness and reactions.
‘Watson got quite a lot of work after helping us,’ Jones says, ‘because our fitness definitely went up a gear. Bill’s whole approach to football was that you will play the way you train. He said that if you train with method and if you train with effort you’ll play exactly the same way, you’ll take that out on the field. And it just worked for us.’
A year later Spurs embarked on perhaps their finest endeavour, the 1960-61 Double-winning season.
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback Publishing