Like Mauricio Pochettino, Bill Nicholson, Spurs’ manager from 1958-74, was a freethinker at a time when new ideas were viewed with far greater suspicion than they are today...
Cliff Jones, who played on the left wing for Tottenham during the club’s great successes in the early 1960s under Bill Nicholson, has the fondest memories of that most singular of managers who was the first to take Spurs to the semis of Europe’s top club competition in 1962.
Details of a trip to Russia remain particularly vivid. There were Jones’s own impressions of an expedition that at the time was a bold venture for a football team behind the Iron Curtain – and then there was an unlikely outing that demonstrated Nicholson’s capacity for doing the unexpected.
‘Bill took us on tour to Russia in 1959,’ Jones says, ‘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.’
Tottenham were in commanding form when they reached the semi-finals of the European Cup in 1962. Benfica, the defending champions, awaited them in the last four.
Two towering contests followed. Benfica won the first leg in Lisbon 3-1 in front of 86,000. Jimmy Greaves and Bobby Smith had goals ruled out for offside. Unconfirmable reports have it that Smith’s was disallowed despite two defenders being posted on the line.
Benfica went 4-1 up on aggregate in the second leg at White Hart Lane, where 64,448 spectators jammed the stands. Spurs then hit back with two goals, the second a Danny Blanchflower penalty, but in a desperate finish in which the post twice saved Benfica and Dave Mackay’s header landed on the crossbar the visitors held out.
Blanchflower observed later of the European Cup that it was hard to imagine ‘a more potent or popular soccer competition’ and described playing in it as ‘the greatest emotional experience of my career’.
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback Publishing and now out in paperback.