Spurs history

End Of An Era

/ Alan / 10 Comments

Earlier this week I received formal notification that Tottenham Hotspur PLC is proposing to de-list its shares and become a private company again. As a shareholder, I’ve been kept fully informed even though the postage on the thick wad of legalese cost twice as much as the value of my holding. I have one share, literally a share holder, so that’s very sweet of them, although as a responsible shareholder I feel disappointed and concerned that the board have wasted this expense on schmucks like me for whom it makes no difference. Add up the postage, labour and paper, it’s enough to pay Manu’s wages for at least 12 hours.

Frankly I have no idea what it means for the club’s finances. Daniel Levy says the listing “restricts our ability to secure funding for its future development.” That is, the new ground is easier to fund this way and if that means we are a step closer to the NDP, I’m delighted. Levy is a master of his world, finance, and has always looked after the club in this respect. Even with our low capacity we made an operating profit of £32m, a rise of 42%, boosted by the Champions League pot of gold.

Management Today(what do you mean, you don’t read it daily?) takes a more cynical view, wondering

spurs blog 57

Buy Al's Share, Buy! Buy!

if the furore over the Olympic Stadium has lead Spurs to prefer life without the added scrutiny of external shareholders. Then there’s Redknapp’s forthcoming court case which is scheduled for January, the same time as the de-listing. Pure coincidence, but the assuredly bad publicity can now have no affect on the share price. It doesn’t mention suspicions that the ‘I’ in ENIC means they have half an eye on a future sale.

What I do know is that this is the end of an era. Nowadays it’s commonplace for football clubs to be listed companies but Spurs were the first and it wasn’t that long ago. In 1983 an ambitious businessman called Irving Scholar was determined to make his mark as our new chairman. Before then, the club had for many years been run as a private company by the Wale family but by applying the same business principles that had made him a wealthy man, Scholar aimed to drag football finances into the twentieth century even though it was almost over. In the process, Spurs would become the richest team in the land.

As well as going public and raising money on the Stock Exchange, Scholar took over two clothing and sportswear companies, including Hummel, fondly remembered for providing Alan Ball’s revolutionary white boots. The ground was empty save for one or two days a month, so use it for alternatives at no extra fixed cost. The space under the Park Lane became a factory. The income was to be ploughed back into the club, a secure stream unaffected by the uncertainties of league position.

Scholar shrewdly assessed the zeitgeist. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs (not easy for me to do but anyway..), we were in the midst of Thatcher’s property-owning democracy where the public could buy pieces of the de-nationalised industries, make some easy money and feel part of things. To borrow from contemporary politics, we were all in this together, except that times were good.

On top of that, Spurs fans were offered the unique chance to be a part of the club. Long excluded, unlike like any other fans we could now have our say and influence the future. It proved popular. I don’t have any statistics to back this up but I reckon the number one Christmas present for Spurs fans that year was a share certificate.  There’s no doubt that the share offer caught the prevailing mood.

spurs new stadium

I've helped buy that

I was given a hundred shares by my then girlfriend. It was worth about £160 but to me it was a priceless token, sealing my attachment to her and to the club. These were the only shares I have ever owned and I kept an eye on their progress, all the while thinking that like the family heirloom on the Antiques Roadshow, I will be delighted to be told it’s worth a fortune but I would never sell. Many fans of different clubs have their certificate framed on display, proving it means something.

At one point they were valued at over £500 but soon they plummeted, as did the relationship. By the time I was kicked out and the shares sold to get rid of a painful reminder of happier days, they raised less than £100. Spurs’ romance with the new ways faded just as brutally. We sold our finest players Waddle and Gascoigne to stave off financial ruin and the businesses failed. Maxwell was a telephone call away from taking over the club so perhaps we should be grateful for Alan Sugar sorting out the mess Scholar left behind. Actually, perhaps not, but again, that’s a story for another time.

It was then that the true nature of the new era became clear. Thatcher’s meritocracy was nothing of the sort. Power and wealth became concentrated in the hands of the few and the gap between rich and poor widened. As with society, so it was with football. The advent of the Premiership and the Champions League meant that the top clubs and Sky TV held sway. Rocketing admission prices transformed the fan experience with many alienated for good, never to come back, and others priced out of the game they loved. Kick-off times were at the whim of television. PLC not F.C. Far from being part of things, football fans had never been more helpless.

Now we’re all experts on football finance. We have to be because it’s all over the back pages and otherwise we can’t keep up with events at our clubs. Never mind 4-4-2 or 4-3-3, it’s the income to salaries gearing that holds the key to success. False 9 or false accounts? Ask some of the clubs that have gone down the tube. Despite the sterling efforts of fans’ organisations and protest groups, the legacy of football shareholding is that many of us feel more distant from the game, our game, than at any point in living memory.

I’m still in play, mind, thanks to the gift a few years ago from my daughter of a single Spurs share. It came in a fancy tin box (safety deposit, just in case?) with some blurb about the club. Now that’s a juicy business to be in – buy the share for next to nothing, add cheap packaging and charge £19.99. Football fans are nothing if not loyal and gullible.

So what to do about the de-listing? I don’t know where the certificate is but I recently found my last dividend cheque, £0.04, proudly un-cashed. The PLC tell me my share is worth 33p and I have until 11th January to decide. I could sell, and use the results of my foray into the murky world of high  finance to buy, say, a 6th of a cup of instant tea or coffee on matchday, or two gulps of water. I expect that I won’t be bothered, however, and will keep it as a souvenir of the days when the club couldn’t be bothered about me either.

Glorious – Gazza In His Own Words. Read the Review, Win the Book!!

/ Alan / Leave a comment

Last summer I heard rumours that Paul Gascoigne was dead. Unlike the rest of the rubbish that circulates the ether, sadly this had the ring of truth. He had been looking more pale and drawn than ever and the stories more bizarre, if that were possible.

Gazza stopped being daft as a brush years ago but the nation kept on laughing. One of the finest footballers of his generation, he’d become a figure of ridicule, easy meat and easy laughs from comedians getting fat on the proceeds of panel shows. In football, mental health problems are taboo. He’d sunk so low that he was denied even his illness. On the contrary, his suffering was exploited by reporters after a story and chairman offering him work.

Mercifully, he’s survived. It’s impossible to know if the empathy from Spurs fans played the tiniest part in keeping him going, but I can’t ever recall such a wave of goodwill towards an ex-Spur. He’s hidden away in Bournemouth, out of rehab but still being supported well, slow progress but steady.

The book is a lavishly illustrated conversation with Paul about his entire career, just turn on the recorder and out streams an engaging, flowing account of his life from the man himself. After a while, close your eyes and you can imagine him in the room, chatting over a cup of tea. This plus the hundreds of colour photos make it a pleasant, welcoming read that tells you about the man’s football career without stretching the reader too far.

The therapy that has played a part of Gascoigne’s rehabilitation enables to him to reflect on what’s gone wrong in an honest, self-aware manner without becoming maudlin or self-indulgent, as is the fate of many other celebrities who have been through the same process.There’s no evaluation, either from an outside voice or from Gascoigne, and nothing about his mental health or his career, if you can call it that, since retirement. This is purely and simply about football. The reader is left to provide the context and whilst many familiar episodes are covered, like the dentist’s chair, escaping the boredom of international tournaments and high jinks at Rangers, there is a refreshing lack of spin or image. This isn’t Gazza – daft as brush, Gazza – the alcoholic or even Gazza – the idiot. It’s just Gazza. He acknowledges in a matter of fact way that he should not have done certain things but what comes over is the total lack of malice in anything that he did. He never had an agenda, a grudge or sought to exact revenge. Most of the time he got into trouble because just the opposite, he never had a plan or thought anything through, but you sense this is why, despite all the things he has got up to, no one in football seems to have a bad word to say about him.

In fact, he comes over as boyish, getting into the same scrapes as a man as he did as a lad. His mind wandering onto other things, football mostly when he should have been studying, losing Kevin’s Keegan’s boot as an apprentice then forgetting his own boots before a crucial game in Euro ‘96. Same response – he can’t tell anyone so it’s a farcical attempt to cover it up, in the case of England playing the entire first half in Sheringham’s spare boots, which were the wrong size.

He confirms what Spurs fans already know, that he played the best football of his career whilst at White Hart Lane. So it’s a little disappointing that the space given over to Spurs is much less than that devoted to England or Rangers. I guess the publishers understand the market. Also, many anecdotes will have a familiar ring for anyone who has read Hunter Davies’ excellent book on Gazza.

The section on Spurs focuses on his remarkable contribution to the 1991 cup run. At the time it seemed to me that he single-handedly inspired the team to Wembley. In reality, the famous victories in the semi-final against Arsenal and the final were founded upon excellent teamwork, and Gascoigne praises the unsung Paul Stewart in particular for “covering the space for me” as Gazza was knackered, either because he was playing in pain through injury or because he prepares for a vital cup-tie by playing 15 sets of squash with John Moncur the night before as he can’t sleep. But the inspiration and glory are rightfully his. A hat-trick against Oxford, a scintillating winner away to Portsmouth, another versus Notts County, all tricky ties, plus the free-kick that will ensure his legendary status for as long as anyone talks about Tottenham Hotspur. Typically he doesn’t dwell on it – cue anecdotes involving nurses, hospitals and testicles – but the effort he made to play through injuries and then to sweat blood to get fit after surgery is nothing short of heroic. He did that for the good of playing football. He did that for us.

In any walk of life, the very greatest tread a fine line between the bold and the reckless. To be original and different, the individual has to think and do something that is fresh and new. What is to our heroes an act of bravery, to us mere mortals seems like the height of foolishness. Gascoigne treads that fine line throughout his career and this book helps you walk with him. The character traits that made him infuriating and a magnet for trouble are the very same that enabled him also to attempt the most outrageous feats on the pitch, and because he was so, so wonderful, he succeeded where most would fail.

Gazza’s an entertaining companion and this is a engaging read in time for the Christmas market. It’s not a confessional, but if there is a message from a fallen hero to the young players of today, it’s not about the dangers of the booze, the sycophants or the lack of support of family and friends, it’s that players should love and cherish the game. If that’s Gazza’s legacy, then this book is a success, for it is above all else about a man who just wants to play football. Rather than the grey, bewildered figure of fun blinking uncomprehending in the spotlight, running on empty, please remember him as he should be remembered, the breath-taking talent of the one of greatest Tottenham players there has ever been.

A couple of my other pieces on Gazza here, about his career, and here, about mental health, Chris Evans and Danny Baker

Glorious – My World, Football and Me by Paul Gascoigne   Published by  Simon and Schuster

WIN A COPY

My copy actually, read once, one careful owner, and the biryani stains will come out with a bit of soap and water.

To win answer this question:

To persuade Gazza to sign for Spurs and not Fergie, Irving Scholar sealed the deal with a few extra items that don’t normally feature in transfer negotiations. Name any of them.

If you need a nudge in the right direction, one item Gazza would be delighted to receive these days and would put to good use in his leisure time (and before you start, he’s off the booze)

E-mail your answer to: alan@tottenhamonmymind.com

Closing date: Tuesday 1st November, 8pm, all correct entries into a hat, first one out wins

And while you’re here, 1 family, 3 generations of Spurs fans are taking part on Saturday in a Family Hike in aid of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering.

You can sponsor us here: Just Giving – Family Hike for BAAF

Just a quid would be great.

Spurs And The Riots – What Next?

/ Alan / 8 Comments

The disturbances on the night of August 6th following a vigil for local man Mark Duggan, allegedly shot by police three days earlier, became the spark that ignited the most widespread and sustained civil disobedience in Britain since the early 80s. Yet Tottenham remains the area that has suffered the most. As well as the damage to property that resulted in the subsequent demolition of several buildings, up to 200 people were made homeless. Urgent calls for donations of food, clothing and nappies were reminiscent of disaster appeals. A leisure centre provided emergency shelter for families in need.

The burnt-out Carpetright store heavily featured on the news is a few hundred yards from the ground but the club remained unscathed apart from some damage to the ticket office. Tottenham High Road, the main route to the ground by car and public transport, remained closed for several days, causing the postponement of the season’s opening fixture against Everton.

Tottenham is an area of considerable social deprivation. Tottenham Hotspur, regularly in the world’s top 15 in terms of annual income, falls within a ward that is amongst the 5% most deprived in England, while in Tottenham as a whole 80.3% of children live in low-income homes. It is natural therefore that both local residents and politicians should look to the club, the largest local private employer, as a major partner as the rebuilding begins.

Victoria Hart lives on the High Road and spent a long Saturday night comforting a frightened and bewildered 6 year old as the troubles raged outside her window. Not a fan, she is nevertheless convinced that the club has an essential contribution to make in restoring the health and well-being of this fractured community.

“We all feel very damaged by the riots and the destruction around us. We want to retain a pride in Tottenham but it’s difficult when the press perception seems to be of a locality where a riot was ‘just bound’ to happen. I hope the football club, being one of the really identifiable places on the High Road, can help us to rebuild. And I really mean more emotionally than financially.”

Early signs were positive. Spurs Chairman Daniel Levy swiftly promised support now and in the future:

“The Club is committed to supporting its community with help with both the physical clean-up of our area and the longer term rebuilding of community spirit. It is more critical than ever that community, business and political leaders…now work closely together to support the regeneration of this area and we shall certainly look to play our part in that.”

The fans responded too. Many travelled to Tottenham on their spare Saturday to labour alongside local people as the clean-up continued, whilst an internet appeal of behalf of 89 year old barber Aaron Biber raised over £35,000 as word spread amongst the messageboards and twitterati. The refurbished shop was reopened by Peter Crouch, looking decidedly edgy despite the carefully choreographed photo opportunity as Biber approached from behind with clippers in hand.

Otherwise it was left to Benoit Assou Ekotto to respond on behalf of the players. This comes as little surprise to Spurs fans. Derided by Hansen and Dixon from the comfort of the MOTD sofa, the full-back is fast attaining cult status for both his dashing if occasionally risky performances and his grounded attitude. Travelling London by public transport, he’s made a conscious effort to be close to the city and its people, eschewing the trappings of celebrity in order to ‘live a normal life’. Aware of his own impoverished upbringing, he understands that football is part of something much bigger. It is he rather than the British players who talks earnestly to local people a few days after the disturbances.

The club has developed an increasing awareness of the community over the past few years. In 2007 they invested £4.5m in a Foundation that boasts a proud record of achievement: 470 hours of sporting and education sessions for children a week, support for the unemployed, a chance for the homeless and adults with learning disabilities to play football plus the highest rate of charitable giving in the Premier League.

Yet the local impact is questionable. Mark Perryman, author, co-founder of Philosophy Football and West Stand season ticket holder, trenchantly dismisses the club’s performance in the 25 years he’s lived locally:

“The club makes the name of the borough known worldwide but otherwise I don’t see what it gives the area. Away from the ground itself the club’s presence physically is almost non-existent and it’s painfully obvious how disconnected the club is. It’s just not a significant institution in the community in which I live.”

The club’s investment in ‘Football in the Community’ schemes is generous and laudable, but the question is, which community? The popular coaching sessions and soccer schools reach out primarily to the relatively affluent suburban fan bases in Hertfordshire and Essex rather than the N17 estates and thus are designed to win fans rather than directly benefit the local community.

Perryman also casts doubt on their claim as a major employer, pointing out that most of the jobs are on matchdays only and are not filled by local people. Also, some of the highest ticket prices in the country mean locals cannot afford to watch their team.

This problem is not confined to Spurs. Rather, it’s one of the consequences of the modern game as supporter demographics change in response to increased prices and the blurring of social boundaries. Perryman again:

“London clubs aren’t London clubs, they’re Home Counties clubs. Those who can afford season tickets don’t live in inner London. They are not in the community where those kids emerged from. Where I sit, they [fellow supporters] don’t seem to like Tottenham as a place. There may have been a connection a generation or so ago, not now.”

The meaning of all this is not lost on Victoria Hart: “I’d say a lot of people like me who live locally retained a kind of benign neutrality towards the club. It is a part of the local area and the local history and of course, carries the name of the place we call home but especially recently with the attempts to bid for the Olympic Stadium, we didn’t kid ourselves that they’d really rather be further out towards Essex where most of the fan base seem to live.”

This is the paradoxical nature of the Hotspur in Tottenham, an attachment to an area but distant and out of reach at the same time. “I see the fans coming and going past our homes and regard them fondly but I’ve never been to a Spurs match – too expensive!”

Her words hint at the most revealing measure of the club’s relationship to the community of which it has been an integral part for 129 years, the planning for a new ground. Precisely as he talks about increased community engagement, Levy is actively exploring a move away from Tottenham entirely. Economics overrides history or community responsibility when it comes to the option of the Olympic Park site in east London to replace the venerable but creaking White Hart Lane, which will be cheaper to build and generate greater income from non-football activity. Undeterred by opposition from a large and vocal section of the fans and a public aghast that Spurs propose to demolish the Olympic stadium built with taxpayers money and which will be the focus of world attention for two weeks next summer, Levy is keeping the option open for as long as possible. Even the decision to award West Ham the dubious honour did not stop him launching an expensive and ultimately successful judicial review. His sympathetic and compassionate support for the local community suddenly sounds decidedly hollow.

The alternative is a 56,250 capacity ground with an ‘end’ and stands close the pitch right next to White Hart Lane. Properly called the Northumberland Development Project, it includes housing, a hotel, supermarket and renovated listed buildings. Together with improved transport links it should reinvigorate the area as well as the finances of the football club. Supporters’ groups continue the campaign to stay in Tottenham but now the project takes on a significance greater than merely preserving the club’s heritage.

It’s an ill wind and although the area lost out on the latest round of government regeneration money, the recent problems have boosted the case for grants from the Regional Growth Fund, which could cut the costs Spurs will incur in upgrading public transport links and other improvements around the ground, costs they have long claimed should come from the public purse. It would not be factor if they moved to Stratford, of course.

I have asked the club for a comment regarding their response to the community in the wake of the riots but they have not replied. Levy would say that he must do the best for the club. His business acumen has left the club financially secure and has won grudging admiration from most fans, even those who wanted greater investment in the team over the last two years. His deadline-day brinkmanship has become legendary and I respect his refusal to pay over the odds. However, for every great deal – Lennon, Keane and a pound of flesh from a destitute Leeds comes to mind – there have been opportunities missed because of his refusal to compromise. He would do well to ensure that he doesn’t make the same mistake over what is effectively the future of the club.

His decision is further complicated by the increased number of stakeholders who are now part of the equation. As chairman he is duty bound to keep the PLC on a sound financial footing. However, the interests of shareholders seeking a profit may not not be the same as fans wanting success on the pitch. Also, to ascertain the intentions of his employer, ENIC, look no further than the name: it’s an Investment company looking for long term return, which may best be served by making the club ready for a sale.

In addition, there’s now a responsibility to the local community who desperately want the club to stay where it is, a powerful argument that cuts little or no ice on the balance sheet. Indeed, these aims are in direct conflict with those of investors. In my experience of working in the charitable sector, private companies are comfortable with activities like fund-raising and donations but less sure-footed when it comes to the openness and adherence to goals that are not easily measured that true engagement requires. He may have to adjust his approach.

One outcome could please everyone, however: the riots as leverage for assistance to make the NDP a profitable option again. Some characterise Levy as a ruthless negotiator but it is a cold hard fact that the disturbances have suddenly shifted the financial impasse. In late August, London mayor Boris Johnson made available a large sum, at least £8m, to cover these infrastructure costs on condition that Spurs dropped the review. Even MP David Lammy thought agreement had been reached but the following day Spurs tuned up in court and went ahead as if nothing had happened.

The deadline for another offer came and went this week. ENIC say the City Hall deadline is unreasonable, and “the correct level” of public money is “critical … to create a community with hope and prospects … We cannot be expected to do this single-handedly.” Levy clearly believes the offer will not go away just because the deadline has passed. However, there may come a time when local politicians find better ways of spending their £8m windfall.

Another stakeholder has recently entered the fray. Spurs Future is a loose collective of fans who has have submitted detailed proposals to the club regarding a ‘community share’. Basically, this allows for up to £50m of investment from fans and other sources who purchase shares or bonds for the purpose of financing ventures of a community purpose. A return on the investment is possible and it encourages greater participation and involvement. I understand talks have taken place with the club but it’s at an early stage. £50m could come in handy for ENIC but they may baulk at ceding any influence over the running of the club to supporters. There’s also the question of how fans see the idea of giving this prodigious sum to a company owned by Joe Lewis, a man worth £2.8bn and 6th on the world football richlist.

Talking with residents, the club is part of their lives and has the potential to be the focus for their determination to rebuild relationships as well as bricks and mortar. The stadium project, important though it may be, is not in itself enough. “I have no great faith in the idea that stadia can regenerate an area,” says Mark Perryman, concerned about the future of his community and his club. “Spurs has to develop a relationship with those estates where the kids live,” says Mark Perryman. “They must develop dialogue not summer schools.”

I leave the last word with Victoria Hart. “I hope it helps the club and the community work together to make Tottenham a better place. That would help and it would help emotionally as we residents feel a little abandoned at the moment. We always needed the club but we need it a whole lot more now.”

Martin Cloake On Danny Blanchflower, Spurs’ Geezers and the Current State of Play

/ Alan / 1 Comment

Dead easy, this interviewing malarkey. Turn on the recorder, sit back, arrange the gems in some semblance of order and there you have it. At least you do when you speak to someone with the infectious enthusiasm of Martin Cloake. A leading authority on Spurs in print, many books written alongside co-author Adam Powley, his ardent passion for the club as journalist and fan remains undiminished.

His latest venture is an E-book called ‘Danny Blanchflower’, the first in a series of SportsSpurs Blanchflower Shots, extended essays that permit the analytical depth of a book but are accessible and readable for those of us without the time or cash to invest in the longer form on a regular basis. It’s new, it’s exciting and Martin is an evangelist for the medium

“What we have is a set of ideas about the growth of e-readers. This series of Spurs E-books which we hope will be part of something bigger, is tapping into people. Longer than an article, shorter than a book.”

Powley and Cloake have spotted a gap in the market. Given the amount about the club on Amazon, Kindle has been slow to catch up. “If you look at the Kindle store, put Tottenham Hotspur in, there’s not a lot of stuff there. It’s a market that people are using. We may be arrogant enough to think we are good enough but we have written books that people buy. We’ve had very good feedback, so we thought let’s put it out there and see how it goes.”

“Blanchflower is the first one, one on Hoddle which has just been completed. We’ll see how they sell and at the moment we’re looking at individual player profiles but depending on how this goes we may expand into other areas. What we don’t want to do is do something that we could do with a publisher. Horses for courses.”

Martin is at pains to stress that he is neither neglecting nor in competition with existing publishing methods. During our discussion he repeatedly emphasises his admiration for Dave Bowler’s book about Blanchflower and for those of us who see the name Cloake or Powley as the kitemark of quality when it comes to Spurs’ writing, the news that they have an excellent relationship with their publishers Vision and Mainstream means there’s probably more of the good stuff to come.

The e-book is something different. “What we can do with the e-books is to get something into the public domain relatively quickly. We are doing a lot of the marketing ourselves anyway. We have the technical expertise to put this up. It’s a much more complicated process than you would imagine”

He’s researched this carefully, noting that whilst there’s some evidence that on desktops people read long-form journalism, on mobile devices they won’t sit and read the 50,000 words in a book. My mind wanders to a blogger’s comment on twitter recently about how he rejected an idea for a post because it would have absorbed 1500 words, whereas readers stop after 300.  Which if true means two thirds of anything I’ve written has been a waste of time, including this piece, but Martin’s energy pulls me back from the brink.

“To justify charging, it can’t be a blog post so we’ve gone for about 10 -12,000 words, shorter than a book, longer than an article. We’re still having a debate,” he muses. “Maybe we shouldn’t be obsessed by the length at all. It’s as long as it should be.”

It certainly works for me in terms of price, length and quality of content. It covers both Blanchflower’s career and the character of the man himself, as well as making pertinent links with contemporary football plus an evaluation of his lasting contribution to the game. £2 on my iphone, read on the train, thanks very much. Perfect. This is precisely the author’s intention.

“We will make sure there is plenty of information and some original comment as well. We’re conscious that a lot of content on the web is recycled, it’s easy to stitch stuff together and put it out there. That’s not the way we want to work. Without sounding high-falluting, we seem to have built up a reputation as people who do things that are high quality. It’s hard to build up a reputation and the quality of the content is what we hope is the thing that sells the books. Quick and quality reads that people can hang on to.”

For the first book in the series, Blanchflower was the natural choice because of his  influence not only on Spurs but also on Martin as a fan. “I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with Danny Blanchflower. I never saw him play – my first game was 1978, 1-0 against Bolton, Don McAllister diving header” We pause momentarily to consider the frankly frightening prospect that this journeyman defender could have been a formative influence on the young impressionable schoolboy, even at this, his finest moment in a white shirt. Less diving, more toppling earthwards, but who am I to say because we are both sufficiently obsessive to remember it.

Moving on swiftly. “I was aware of Spurs since the early 70s when I lived in Haringey. When I started looking at the history of the club, the Double and Blanchflower comes up fairly quickly. He’s a fascinating figure for me. Working as journalist, it became not just the player but the man himself. His journalism was very good. He was very much of a different generation. If we ever got the chance to sit down together we may not have seen eye to eye but I think he is a fascinating character for football as well as Spurs. You’d be hard pushed  to find a more significant figure. Just look at what he was about, what he did and represented.”

“I genuinely do believe that the team was part of something which completely changed the way British football operated. It finished the process started by Arthur Rowe’s push and run team in the early 50s. It changed English football for the better, taking it out of its insularity. Blanchflower was a real thinker and was attracted to us because the club was about changing the way English football was played. He’s a man ahead of his time.”

This boyish passion plus the ability to situate Blanchflower in a broader context makes the e-book compulsive reading. Forget the idea that this is a mere potted biography. It says more about its subject and the English game than a hundred best-selling autobiographies of modern players.

“Football can be self-important and we all slip into it, but Blanchflower wasn’t trying to be important, just a professional getting on with this job who thought about things.” Martin warms to his theme of the bigger picture. “I have 2 young boys. There’s a danger that being clever is seen as wrong, at school we took the pee out of swots. but Danny showed that ordinary people can be very intelligent, that it’s right to search out knowledge to improve things, to be good at something and think about how it was done. There’s a danger that people see intelligence as being elitist, a bit posh, so wrong and dangerous.”

Influential figure that he was, Blanchflower was met with considerable suspicion by chairmen and officialdom in general, threatened by his combination of prestige and intellect. He was overlooked for jobs in the game, including perhaps at Tottenham. Any antipathy was not helped by his public platform in journalism: Martin rates him highly in that respect too.

Blanchflower wasn’t averse to using the press for his own ends. There’s nothing new under the sun and Spurs are juggling with these issues at the moment, except it’s the manager rather than a player who is arguably using the media to influence club policy. Martin felt it was less sophisticated in Blanchflower’s day.

“He would never admit he was using the press but used a nudge and a wink as leverage to get what he wanted. He wasn’t afraid of speaking his mind.”

Inevitably when two Spurs fans get together, the discussion turns to Redknapp. Martin’s sense of dynamics of the club’s history once more enables some context for Harry’s proclamations, which I for one have criticised over the last few months, August in particular.

“The press loved Venables – he always had a quote. He defined his position regarding the chairman, and you can’t blame him for that.” Redknapp is doing the same, in other words. Martin goes on, “Redknapp is unfairly criticised sometimes. His relationship with the media protects us sometimes.”

Compare the reaction to a few bad results this season at, say, the Emirates or Everton with the silence that greeted our run of one win in 13-odd games last season. However, as Martin shrewdly concludes, “As the great philosopher Ronan Keating once said, ‘you say it best when you say nothing at all’. It would be fascinating to sit down in a few years time with the present regime, it would be a great interview but I can’t see it happening”.

So how would it turn out if you did a ‘Boys From White Hart Lane’ with the current team? Martin can’t resist the idea but envisages problems that encapsulate the different status of the modern players and their relationship with outsiders.

“ You just wouldn’t be able to do it. You wouldn’t get access to players. They [the BFWHL squad] didn’t earn a lot. We tried to make sure everybody was looked after. These guys don’t need the money and they don’t need to talk to anybody. With the best will in the world they are on a different level. I’d love to sit down with Gareth Bale, watch that guy, you can’t take your eyes off him during a game. He seems fully grounded. Top of my list for BFWHL 2011! Benny is a hugely underrated full back and a fascinating character who understands where he comes from, that football is part of something much bigger. The squad seems to be full of likeable individuals. Luka has blotted his copybook but there are no whinging, unpleasant, offensive characters as in other teams. Van der Vaart seems like a good guy. Gomes, I’d like to sit down with him. No shortage of candidates and if they read your blog and they want to write it, give them my name and address, I would love to do it! I’d really love to get the real story, the inside story.”

Much as I like the idea of Bale or Gomes coming across TOMM and being inspired to unburden themselves, it’s unlikely, but if it does, Martin, you’ll be the first to know. Co-authors, OK?

What’s next? As you would by now expect, there’s no shortage of ideas. “Spurs have a rich history of players and personalities. Read these [i.e the ebooks] and find out a bit about the person, what they were like as a player and what they meant, but also look at the wider influences. I’d like to create a space for a debate, possibly a website for the books, forums maybe. Interactivity – the days when journalists or experts handing down wisdom from on high have gone. It’s about having that conversation with the audience who often know more about particular areas than you do. There’s also the opportunity to stretch the remit to include other teams and their players, other sports too, and perhaps other writers.”

Next up, Glenn Hoddle. “Ask any Spurs fan who was the greatest ever, he’s there but he had a lot more criticism than people care to remember. Spurs fans and football in general used to moan about him because he didn’t tackle back.” Like I say, nothing changes. One of my earliest memories at Spurs was hearing fans pile into Martin Chivers.

“He’s accused of being aloof, but just ask the other players about him. They are a bunch of geezers but they are amazed that there could ever be any animosity. Why would there be? They say he was brilliant and we were there to make sure that he could do the things he did. Good guy, we got on with him.”

I look forward to it.

 

Danny Blanchflower by Martin Cloake, edited by Adam Crowley, is available on Kindle from Amazon, £2.99

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Danny-Blanchflower-Sports-Shots-ebook/dp/B005G6TFEK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317823559&sr=8-1