Читать книгу Shirts, Shorts and Spurs - Roy Reyland - Страница 9

Visitors to the Spurs kit room would always ask about the bullet holes in the walls. ‘You can blame Gazza and his air rifle for those,’ I used to tell them. Gazza had opened fire on his friend Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’, and I’d had to take cover before he came crashing through the stadium roof while hunting pigeons, all on the day before a big match. They were unbelievable times. When I first became kit man at the historic Tottenham Hotspur Football Club over three decades ago, I naively believed it would be a piece of cake: throw out 12 shirts, 12 shorts and a few towels, then go home. How wrong I was, because, with Gazza around, absolutely anything could happen.

I remember the time he walked into the dressing room wearing nothing but a pair of pants. ‘Gazza,’ I told him, ‘it’s ten minutes until kick-off, put your kit on!’

But he just smiled and told me, in his great Geordie accent, that he’d given it away to a disabled girl during the warm-up. This was typical Gazza – spontaneous, generous and lovely in every way. So I gave him another shirt, pointed at my watch and told him to hurry up. But he was still standing there, looking sheepish.

‘No, Roysie, I’ve given her the lot,’ he confessed. And so he had: shinpads, match shorts, shirts, socks, boots… everything.

I flew round that dressing room like a man possessed, hunting spare socks and shorts, desperate for our star player to make it on to the field in time. But the big problem was Gazza’s boots.

‘I only had one pair,’ he said, and explained that he’d just signed a contract with Brooks, a boot manufacturer of the time. Knowing that he couldn’t take his boots back from a little girl in a wheelchair, I grabbed a tin of black paint and quickly coloured in a pair of size-9 Puma boots for him. With three minutes left till kick-off, I was desperately trying to paint on a Brooks logo, using Tippex. Gazza made it, but only just.

In 30 years I’d done it all at White Hart Lane: I’d lovingly seeded the turf, and watched young talent blossom into professional footballers. I replaced smashed windows and repaired damaged egos, acting as an unofficial agony aunt to generations of Spurs legends. I dealt with tragedy, loss and even relegation. I celebrated two League Cup victories, worked half-a-dozen Wembley finals and won three FA Cups. I handed shirts to Glenn Hoddle, Ricky Villa, Ossie Ardiles, Teddy Sheringham, Jürgen Klinsmann and David Ginola. And I sat on the bench next to 17 managers – from Keith Burkinshaw to George Graham and Martin Jol.

From cup final shirts with missing Holsten logos to missing centre-backs – even the case of a suspected poisoned lasagne – it all went on at Tottenham Hotspur, and, more often than not, I was right in the thick of it. And during all this madness it was my kit room that became a sanctuary for the modern-day heroes of Tottenham Hotspur, as a constellation of soccer stars would drop in to air their dirty laundry, while I laundered theirs.

I travelled the country and the world to every game at home and away, man and boy; I watched every minute of every match, becoming both a loyal member of staff, dedicated Spurs fan and an unlikely talisman to the team.

As you can see, the kit man’s job was so much more than throwing out 12 shirts on a Saturday afternoon – players and managers came and went, matches were won and lost, and for 29 glorious seasons I was in charge of those famous lily-white shirts, and a whole lot more. Now, for the first time, I reveal what went on behind those dressing-room doors, and I’ve included the mud, the sweat and the tears. This is my story.