Читать книгу Shirts, Shorts and Spurs - Roy Reyland - Страница 16
ОглавлениеThe alarm bells were ringing at Wembley Stadium. If you’ve ever been in the dressing room before an FA Cup Final at the Twin Towers, you’ll know that shrill electric alarm that alerts the players that kick-off is just minutes away. The noise of the 98,000 singing fans filtered into the dressing room as the large blue door swung open, and the Tottenham Hotspur players lined up to step on to the pitch for their eighth appearance in the most famous of finals. But something was wrong.
‘Where’s your Holsten?’ Clive Allen asked Glenn Hoddle, in an exchange that would become famous on the ‘after-dinner’ circuit for decades to come.
‘Don’t you think we should wait till after the game?’ Glenn replied, oblivious to the fact that his shirt, like half of the team’s, didn’t have the name of our beer sponsor printed on it. The scandal would become one of the most talked about, and controversial, moments in the history of our lily-white shirt – and all on Johnny Wallis’s last day.
I watched from the stands as the team trotted out on to the pitch, and stripped off their warm-up jackets to prepare for kick-off. I could tell instantly something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Typically, Johnny had been his usual guarded self when it came to the first-team kit, and had personally sent the shirts off to have the words ‘FA Cup Final, 1987’ embroidered below the cockerel. What he somehow missed, after 30 years of looking after those shirts, was that only half of them carried the name of the beer brand that had paid us hundreds of thousands of pounds to be seen on the players’ chests during the biggest televised game of football of the year.
I tried to get down to the pitch from my place in the stands and tell someone, but I think they already knew. And, if I got there, what would I do? We played the game in those shirts and we were beaten by Coventry in a tough game. The score remained 2–2 until full-time and went into extra time, and then, six minutes in, the unfortunate Gary Mabbutt scored an own goal after Lloyd McGrath centred the ball. It took an evil deflection off Gary’s knee and over his own keeper, Ray Clemence. To that day, it was the only FA Cup Final in history that Spurs lost, and I think Glenn actually needed a beer by the end of the game. But remarkably, the shirt disaster got so much press it became possibly the best advertising that Spurs and Holsten ever had. They were debating it on television, in the newspapers… and a rival beer brand even mentioned it in an advertising campaign. It was the stunt that refreshed parts that other marketing ideas couldn’t.
But for Johnny, I was heartbroken. It’s every kit man’s nightmare to make a mistake – and especially at a cup final, worse luck. It’s the kind of thing you dread, and, for it to happen to Johnny on his last day, after three decades of absolute dedication to detail and an obsessive attention to perfection, it was the worst last day of a career you could possibly imagine.
We’d also been knocked out of the Football League Cup in the semi-finals, and had finished third in the league, and so, having spent most of the season challenging for a unique domestic Treble, we had ended up desperately empty-handed.
I officially took over as kit manager during the weeks following that ill-fated final. On the Monday morning, we were devastated, not only because of the mishap with the shirts, but also about the result. No one would ask Johnny any questions, out of respect. It was just a terrible accident, but a few weeks later I summoned the courage to ask him, not just out of curiosity, but also out of a genuine fear of repeating the same mistake.
‘We had some shirts made up for the youth team,’ Johnny sighed, ‘and because these lads are not 18 years old, it’s illegal for them to advertise an alcoholic brand.’ He explained that somehow the blank shirts had found their way into the bag on the way to the embroiderers, and by the time they arrived at Wembley it was just too late to do anything about it. ‘It’s just one of those things,’ he said to me, touching me on the shoulder. ‘Hopefully, it’ll never happen to you.’
I was now in the hot seat myself and preparing for my first games as first-team kit manager, terrified of anything of the same magnitude ever going wrong. I’d been in charge only once before, when Johnny was taken ill back in 1984. We were playing Everton away, and, on the Friday morning before the game, the manager said to me, ‘Go home and get your kit, you’re going to Goodison.’ We stayed at a hotel on Merseyside, and the night before the game Graham Roberts knocked on my door and told me he needed some kit to go for a run. Without having any training kit handy, I gave him the reserve goalkeeper shirt, a horrendous yellow number that thankfully we rarely used. ‘There you go, mate,’ I said cheerily.
When we got to the ground the next morning, I was a bag of nerves. Tottenham’s most famous players were asking for spare studs, bigger shorts, smaller shorts, and I had a real sweat on. Then all of a sudden Ray Clemence came over and said, ‘Where’s the yellow jersey, Roy?’
Suddenly, a streak of fear ran down my spine. Roberts had sweated in it the night before and it was still wet and smelly. I explained what had happened, and Clem threw on the green one and had some choice words for me.
I thought, ‘Oh fuck, now I’m in trouble,’ but, just before kick-off, Clem confessed that he saw Robbo running past his hotel window in the yellow shirt the night before, and they had both conspired to wind me up. Typical – it was ‘wind up the new boy’ time, but I was glad in a way that I had been broken in before my first official game in charge, which was in the 1988/89 season.
My responsibilities at home were also about to increase, as, shortly after getting the job, my first daughter, Vikki, was born. Everything was happening at once: my wife, new daughter and I moved from Edmonton to Cheshunt, where I bought my first house, near the new Spurs training ground. We bought a puppy as well, a beautiful bearded collie called Oliver. In the space of six months, I had gone from being reserve kit man to full-time kit manager, and I had a wife and daughter, a house and a dog.
Of course, the new job put a lot of pressure on my young family, with my working schedule changing from being at home all the time to always being away with the team as we concentrated on the First Division season of 1988/89. I would get home after a long shift of lifting piles of white shirts to find piles of dirty nappies, and my being away was certainly an added pressure on my wife, who had a newborn baby and no driving licence.
Everything was exhilarating but at the same time overwhelming. I used to look back at Johnny, who would take it all in his stride. Nothing ever fazed him, and, in my obsession to be as great as him, I was forever working. The quantity of kit increased, while the number of players and staff tripled. We had more and more teams, and by the early 1990s I started looking after all the kits, from the U8s up to the first team. The youth team set up at Tottenham had become big business, with the club keen to nurture young talent in the area, and keep up with the youth scheme at neighbouring clubs like Arsenal.
The result was Tottenham teams going all the way down to seven-year-old boys, managed by ex-players like Jimmy Neighbour. It was a forward-thinking move for the club, but the intensity of the work increased for me. Just the U10 team had thousands of pieces of kit – 20 pairs of socks, 20 shorts, 20 shirts – and the kids’ teams would have endless numbers of substitutes. From the U18s up, they had as much training kit as the first team, with coats, jackets and all sorts. Monday mornings now made White Hart Lane look like a Chinese laundry, and I was struggling to keep up.
I didn’t even get a pay rise. To be honest, I wasn’t fussed about the money, it was all about the honour of working with the first team, who at the time were formidable. We’d signed Bobby Mimms, Paul Walsh and Terry Fenwick to strengthen a side clearly missing Glenn Hoddle, who, like Johnny Wallis, had left Spurs after that Coventry Cup Final.
They did give me a raise later that year, once I’d proved I could do the job, but I certainly didn’t ask for one. Johnny had helped me order the kits for pre-season 1988/89, and for a few weeks before the season he helped me settle in. The staff used to come back from the summer break a week earlier than the players, and sort out the deliveries. Then, on 1 July 1988, I took over, and it was nerve-wracking. The apprentices came back on the 3rd or 4th, so it wasn’t much of a summer holiday, even in those days – just three weeks, and it wasn’t enough for Johnny, who was now quite unwell.
For his services to his country and to football, my cantankerous predecessor Johnny Wallis was rewarded in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, making him Johnny Wallis MBE. This recognition, I feel, was thoroughly warranted and deserved.
For the first 12 or so games that I was in charge, I used to hide in my kit room on match days. There was a big door, and I would stand behind it and only speak when I was spoken to. I took a real back seat, because I was as new to them as they were to me. I changed studs if they needed it, but I deliberately kept my head down.
I always used to like listening to manager David Pleat’s team talks, but always from the safety of my kit room. David had his own way of expressing himself, and his knowledge of football was encyclopaedic: any footballer, any division, he could tell you how much they weighed, if they kicked with a left or right foot and what they had for breakfast.
But as the months and years wore on, I began to feel part of the team. I can’t explain why, but, when they were getting a bollocking, I felt it too. Defeats used to hurt when I was a supporter, but now I was part of the team, and in the dressing room, it was personal. Occasionally, you’d get big rows, with managers biting at players or players shouting at each other. As anyone who’s ever played in any kind of competitive team will tell you – from Sunday league to Premiership – at half-time and you’re 2–0 down, it’s going to kick off. The dressing room filled with arguments, players fought at half-time then came back in at full-time celebrating and hugging each other like it had never happened.
Seasons came and went and so did the shirts, with the kit manufacturers changing from Hummel to Umbro to Adidas, with many other smaller brands in between, but, as ever, that blue cockerel remained proud, stitched in right above the heart. Players came, scored, threw their dirty socks on the floor and left. The shorts got longer, as did the haircuts, and Spurs were once again the formidable force they were when I was a youngster.
David Pleat had departed in October 1987, but good news was to follow as Terry Venables was hired. Terry had just guided Barcelona to the Spanish League title and European Cup Final. He arrived to make Spurs the same kind of successful outfit, and promised big signings that would make Tottenham Hotspur a formidable force in English football. But we had no idea that one of Terry’s signings would change the club forever.
