The King of White Hart Lane by Mike Donovan

Author:Mike Donovan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Behind the Scenes

ALAN GILZEAN was featured in The Glory Game, the ground-breaking, behind-the-scenes story of Tottenham Hotspur’s UEFA Cup-winning season.

Author Hunter Davies, a journalist allowed access all areas, including the normally sacrosanct dressing rooms throughout the 1971/72 campaign, tells how he wrote what he saw, heard and sensed in a groundbreaking book considered one of the game’s classic tomes.

Davies attempted to give his readers a few insightful clues as to what Gilzean was all about away from the public arena. But of course the Scot was just one of many who came under the Davies spotlight.

It was, overall, a fly-on-the-wall glimpse of a year at a top football club – warts and all – and a few of its subjects, not for effect but to reflect the reality, like the hours of boredom. Charlie Watts was once asked what it was like to be a drummer in the Rolling Stones as the band celebrated its 25th anniversary and he replied, ‘20 years of hanging about.’

Gilzean and his team-mates must have felt similar feelings when on the road with little to occupy their time, judging from Davies’s observations.

The tedium factor could, it seemed, permeate training with Davies writing about Gillie being caught yawning by Bill Nicholson during exercises on the first day of pre-season.

The hot-under-the-collar verbal exchanges were reported, particularly the one with Chivers after the Nantes game. As were the moans, thinly veiled as jokes, by Bill Nick, sporting his never-changed short back and sides, about the in-vogue-amongst-the-young long-hair styles sported by his players, although Gilzean must have escaped the manager’s barbed comments given his lack of follicles.

The banter was touched upon with Gilzean quick to join in, reflecting the sense of humour his brother Eric told me he had had as a child growing up in Coupar Angus. Before the first game of the season against Wolves at Molineux, Cyril Knowles’s brother Peter, who had once played for the old-gold-shirted hosts and was now a Jehovah’s Witness, came into the dressing room, and Davies wrote:

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