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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
David Pleat has lived a life at the heart of football. From his debut as an England Schoolboy international in 1960 to his time as a scout for Tottenham Hotspur up to 2024, his is a story that touches every facet of the professional game. At Luton Town, he is perhaps best remembered for dancing on the pitch after a win over Manchester City secured the club's top-flight survival in 1983. However, his fifteen years at Kenilworth Road were about much more than that. In 1986, Pleat was given his shot at the big-time at Tottenham. But for a fabricated tabloid scandal, his sole season as manager, which featured a third-placed finish, an FA Cup final and a League Cup semi-final, might have been the start of a transformation at White Hart Lane. After spells at Leicester City and Sheffield Wednesday, Pleat twice returned to Tottenham. Here, he gives his frank assessment of his chairmen, Alan Sugar and Daniel Levy, and an insider's account of the rise and fall of managers from Glenn Hoddle to José Mourinho. However, Just One More Goal is not just an account of one man's lifelong obsession with football. It is the story of an evolving game, one that moved away from instinct and spontaneity towards something colder and more technical. David Pleat's memoir is the perfect answer to the question of how modern football became what it is today.
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It’s always the same thought: ‘Just one more goal.’ I’d like it written on my gravestone.
Joe Merimovich (1924–2011), twice manager of Israelvi
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To my wife, Maureen; the wind beneath my wings.
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50 per cent of all royalties from this book will go towards charities researching MND.
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Contents
Foreword by Alan Sugar
In this book, David tells the story of his life as a player, coach, manager, director of football and TV pundit. Born at the end of the Second World War, it charts his journey from playing for England Schoolboys and making his debut for his home town club, Nottingham Forest, to giving his expert views in the ITV commentary box. He talks frankly about the low points of his life as well as the highlights, including leading Spurs out at Wembley in the 1987 FA Cup final. David’s broad knowledge, experience and understanding of the game rightly gives him the title ‘Mr Football’.
Alan Sugar 2024xiv
Foreword by Howard Wilkinson
I first became aware of David in the early 1960s, when he was a young, emerging star at Nottingham Forest. However, it was only in the 1990s that I really got to know, appreciate and understand him as a friend and colleague via the board of the League Managers’ Association.
His knowledge of the game, the clubs, the players, the coaches and the managers goes beyond encyclopaedic. His love affair with football is still obsessive and when he speaks it is with an authority based on experiences at all levels of the game.
His book is interesting, informative and very difficult to put down. It offers some surprising insights and answers every question bar one about his life: ‘Did he ever go to bed?’
My colleagues and my family will confirm that one of my favourites sayings is: ‘If you are not afraid to think it, you should not be afraid to say it.’ In this book, David has said it and more. He has opinions and he has the capacity to discuss them. This book demonstrates his global knowledge, his insight, empathy and, above all, his burning desire to create a better game.
Enjoy!
Howard Wilkinson OBE 2024
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Introduction
Monday 19 April 2021 was quite a day for football. The news broke that a dozen clubs, including Tottenham Hotspur, the club that employed me, had joined a breakaway European Super League. Later that day, Tottenham announced they had sacked José Mourinho, one of the most celebrated managers of the modern era. The plans for a Super League, with no relegation, just games that could be financially exploited, would dissolve within days of their announcement, but the message was clear: football, more than ever, was about big business.
The football world that I entered in 1956, when I first played for Nottingham under-11s, was utterly different. I did not know it then, but when I began my journey, I was entering what would become a wonderful new world. The game that had existed more or less unchanged from the end of the First World War was about to undergo convulsions that would leave it utterly transformed.
In 1956, crowds were high. Division One was the pinnacle and was, roughly speaking, a level playing field. The main thing that determined the wealth of a club was its attendances. The two lower divisions were split into north and south and competed on a regional basis. Third Division North attracted average gates of more than 10,000 and 800,000 people watched league football on a typical Saturday afternoon.
Players were numbered one to eleven and there were no substitutes. The senior team consisted of a manager, a trainer and a xviiiphysio. There was no sponsorship. Shirt advertising was more than two decades away. The season would climax with the FA Cup final, screened in black and white.
Players were tied to contracts and a maximum wage. Even the talents of Billy Wright, Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews were paid no more than £20 a week – about £500 in today’s terms. There were no safety standards and the FA was all powerful. Football was affordable. Fathers took their sons to games. Saturday was football day to which they brought rattles, rosettes and scarves. Hooliganism was unknown and supporters mingled. The games they watched were played on patchy pitches, often heavy with mud. There were no agents and nobody thought football was a place to entertain business clients.
The clubs themselves were controlled by local businessmen made good. They allowed no transparency into their activities and the Football League was a closed shop. There were no academies, but schoolboy football was well organised with internationals that attracted huge crowds.
The ground, however, was beginning to move. As champions, Chelsea had been invited to join a new competition: the European Cup, where teams that had won their league would compete in a continental knockout competition. The FA, which had just come to terms with two thrashings handed out to the national team by a wonderfully talented Hungary, advised Chelsea to withdraw. The following season, Manchester United accepted the invitation. The World Cup, which the FA had ignored before the war, was now becoming the great showpiece for the global game. Two years before, in 1954, Switzerland had staged the first World Cup whose format would be recognisable today; a group stage followed by a knockout. In the final, the brilliant Hungarians were beaten dramatically by West Germany. What became known in Germany as the Miracle xixof Bern turned football into a source of pride for a nation that was emerging from the ruins of war and the shame of Nazism.
Four years later, the Brazil of Pelé and Garrincha would dazzle their way to the trophy. In that same year, 1958, Everton became the first club to install undersoil heating. Jimmy Hill, the chief executive of the PFA, successfully campaigned to have the maximum wage abolished. Johnny Haynes would become the first £100-a-week footballer.
Two years later, in 1963, George Eastham took Newcastle United to court to have the retain-and-transfer system, by which clubs could hold on to a player’s registration even when his contract had expired, declared illegal. Manchester United would start opening corporate boxes in 1965.
On 30 July 1966, England became world champions. Interest in the game reached new heights. Football’s elite became glamorous targets for sponsors and advertisers. George Best was referred to as ‘the Fifth Beatle’.
In 1968, he would spearhead Manchester United’s drive to become the first English club to win the European Cup. The sense of triumph a decade after a brilliant young United team had been wiped out in the Munich air disaster was intense.
There was a slide. The ’80s proved to be English football’s dark decade. The sport was scarred by hooliganism. It was a time of Heysel, Hillsborough and the Bradford Fire. By 1985/86, some 374,000 people went to watch league football on a Saturday afternoon. Back in 1949/50, it had been more than a million.
There were some consequences, nearly all of which benefited the bigger clubs. Pitches and safety standards improved. Home teams no longer had to share their gates with the visiting clubs. In 1991, five leading clubs formulated plans for a breakaway Premier League that would not share its income with the rest of the football family. Its xxlaunch a year later was embraced by the television companies who had previously underpaid for the rights to screen football. Gordon Taylor, a winger with Bolton and Birmingham and now the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, negotiated strongly for his members’ rights to a share of the bonanza provided by specialised football channels.
Football became the in-game. The middle classes, who had been turned away by hooliganism and dreadful facilities, returned. Ticket prices soared. A little-known Belgian footballer, Jean-Marc Bosman, won a court case that gave players across Europe the freedom to move at the end of their contracts without a transfer fee. The Premier League was brilliantly marketed and triggered a wave of stadium building not seen since before the First World War. One by one, the great arenas – Highbury, Maine Road, the Baseball Ground, Roker Park – were abandoned.
Middle Eastern airlines began to pay huge sums for the naming rights to the stadiums that replaced them. Of the Big Five that set up the Premier League, only one, Tottenham, is now in English ownership. In 1991, they were all owned and administered by people who claimed to be fans of the clubs they ran.
Has football lost its charm? I think so, but it still remains a beautiful game, a ballet of skill, speed and athletic movement. The job of a league manager is still precious. It is something that consumes your life. To be able to control a team and affect its results is a job that attracts addicts, of which I was always one. I have been privileged to challenge some of the game’s most brilliant minds, including Clough, Wilkinson, Atkinson, Kendall, Ferguson and Wenger. Every manager has a story.
This is mine.
Chapter 1
‘A Fire on Them’
It was a moment I will never forget. We were watching the 1954 World Cup final on a grainy, black-and-white screen.
Hungary, the overwhelming favourites, were two up inside the first ten minutes. West Germany came back remorselessly and in the eighty-fourth minute, Helmut Rahn hit the winner for the Germans.
As the ball struck the net, my dear mum sprang from her chair and squealed: ‘A fire on them.’ Her outburst was followed by some words in Yiddish.
I was stunned. Mum knew nothing about football, but I learned to understand that her partisanship was born out of hate for a country that had slaughtered and tortured millions of the Jewish faith. A slaughter that had ended only nine years previously. A slaughter that had caught up distant relatives and family contacts. A slaughter they never spoke about.
I was only nine. I had been born on 15 January 1945, arriving in a wicked winter of heavy snow, a week before the liberation of Auschwitz. It was the first occasion I had seen Mum make such an emotional outburst. I had seen her only as someone who worked day after day, consciously caring to ensure we had enough pennies, clothes and food.
It was then I realised I was slightly different to my other friends at school. They had joined the Life Boys – the junior section of the 2Boys Brigade, underpinned by Christian values. They had gone on church visits and recited the Lord’s Prayer at assembly.
Dad explained I would have to concede certain activities that had a Christian connection. I did not quite understand, but he gently explained that Jewish people might accept there was a Jesus, but they did not believe he was the son of God.
At grammar school, I waited outside assembly with five other Jewish boys while the hymns were sung and the prayers were recited by 700 others. Then, we would come in to hear the headmaster read out the morning notices. Despite this, I never felt I did not belong. I felt different but not apart.
A few months earlier, Dad had promised that on Christmas Day, he would take me to watch a football match. I had enjoyed kicking a balloon around our narrow hallway and scuffing my shoes as we thrashed a Frido ball around the street with my pals.
This, however, was the real thing. Christmas morning dawned bright as we began our four-mile walk to the City Ground, Nottingham. There were no buses but many walkers, because few people in 1953 owned a car.
Nottingham Forest were playing Leeds United in the Second Division. My excitement was intense; I was smitten by the crowd, the smells, the colour, the players… Leeds in their blue-and-yellow quarters, Forest in their Garibaldi red.
The visitors had a colossus of a centre-forward who became my hero as the years moved on. John Charles was to be known as the Gentle Giant. He scored two that day, but Forest, who were to become my team, hit five!
Not only did they win and inspire my love for, and then my addiction to, the game of football, but they went to Elland Road the next day and won again, 2–0.
I have searched vainly for that Christmas programme among the thousands I have collected. However, some names still ring in my 3memory. O’Brien, Kerfoot, Overfield for Leeds. Capel, Colindridge, Ardron, Gager, and Walker for Forest, but John Charles was special.
Was it that day that I decided I would be a professional footballer if I were good enough? Who knows. I certainly never thought that nine years on in February 1962, I would be making my debut in the First Division at the City Ground in a 2–1 win over Cardiff City, becoming, at seventeen years and thirty-three days, Nottingham Forest’s youngest debutant. I certainly never imagined, never dreamed I would become the youngest player to score on his debut in the history of the Football League.
Although my parents impressed upon me the importance of education, my thoughts would inevitably turn to football. I kept a scrapbook on the Forest games I watched. I knew the players. My pals and I would arrive one-and-a-half hours before kick-off to feel the anticipation and to make sure we were one of the first through the gates at 1.30 p.m., to be certain of getting to the front of the terrace.
The City Ground had a pen by the corner flag where the kids could watch. Right in the front of the pen, there would be a tall guy, wearing a bus-conductor’s uniform, who acted as a cheerleader, constantly whirring his rattle. We also watched Notts County at Meadow Lane, just after the days when Jackie Sewell and Tommy Lawton led their attack.
My teachers at Brooksby Lane Primary School saw me play at under-11 level and recommended me for a trial with Nottingham Boys. I did enough to be selected and made my first foray into representative football. We would play on a sloping pitch cordoned off by a perimeter rope, where supporters from the Bulwell area of Nottingham would be standing two and three deep on those Saturday mornings. Reports of schoolboy games received plenty of column inches. Nottingham had two Saturday-night sports papers, the Evening Post and the Evening News Football Pink. We would buy both to compare the reports of our games and, of course, see all the 4senior league results around the country. I was scoring goals as a centre-forward.
Two of my lifelong friends were also in that Nottingham Boys team. Alan Birchenall would join Sheffield United and score both goals in the Sheffield derby at Hillsborough in only his second game for the club. Alan would play for Chelsea and Leicester and in 1979 I would sign him for Luton. Micky Somers, an outside left, small and clever, would go to Chelsea and then Torquay but would be barred from top-level football by a lack of pace.
Alan’s father, who had taken the family to Nottingham from the East End of London, was a bus driver and his mother always came to the games, but my dad would be away working. Every Saturday morning, he would be lugging a case full of hosiery seconds, bought from a friend at the Nottingham Lace Market, to Loughborough Market by bus.
Sundays could not have been more different. Dad took me into town by bus from where we walked to a school where they staged Hebrew classes. There, I learned the words and the history of the Jewish race in preparation for my bar mitzvah. On my thirteenth birthday, I would celebrate becoming a man by reading a portion of the law from the Jewish bible, the Torah, in the synagogue.
Dad would then go to the market square in front of Nottingham’s town hall, the Council House, and enjoy the debating and speeches from the political, the religious, the outrageous and the eccentric who congregated in the centre of Nottingham to form something akin to a mini-Hyde Park Corner. Three hours later, he would collect me and hope I had learned something. I never admitted I enjoyed the fifteen-minute morning break, in which we crashed a tennis ball around the playground, more than the lessons.
It was important to Dad that we retained a connection to our roots. Both my parents’ families had arrived as immigrants, forced out by the pogroms in Poland and Latvia, which were both then 5part of the Russian Empire. Dad’s family was from Riga, Mum’s from Warsaw. Dad was born in England in 1910, Mum in October 1911.
My father, Joe, grew up in London among a large family, loved the theatre and sport and learned the art of tailoring. During the early part of the Second World War, he doubled as a firefighter and worked in the St John Ambulance. He had a trial for Clapton Orient, as Leyton Orient were then called, and learned boxing skills at the Oxford and St George’s Boys Club, situated off the Commercial Road.
In October 1999, I was Tottenham’s director of football and decided to skip the first leg of their UEFA Cup tie against Kaiserslautern. The Oxford and St George’s was holding a reunion. My father had never driven and by now was a little shaky on his feet so I decided to take him to the club. His joy at seeing his old Jewish friends from his youth is hard to describe. Since leaving the East End for Nottingham during the war, he had not seen any of his mates with whom he used to box, play football and act in theatrical productions. My father was revered by all his old friends and I was treated to plenty of stories about his youth, especially the stories about the left-footed striker he had been.
In the hall-of-fame display of his life, Joe Plotz was shown to be a regular winner of boxing competitions as well as a young man with a passion for drama. Joe Plotz came alive that evening. It had been antisemitism and the need to be accepted that had caused Dad to change his name. Perhaps he chose the name ‘Pleat’ from his tailoring background. Dad spoke that evening. He still possessed a strong voice and a clear diction. He had always reminded my sister and I of the need to speak ‘the Queen’s English’ correctly.
Mum’s father came to England alone, leaving his wife and four children behind in Warsaw. They joined him three years later, but his wife died soon after the birth of my mother. Growing up, Mum 6was a voracious reader and I once saw a certificate from her school that said simply: ‘You have won first place.’ However, she had to leave school early but learned German, shorthand and typing and worked as a legal secretary at Gray’s Inn. She enjoyed rambling, the theatre and left-leaning politics, although she was never a Zionist. She had no time for the ultra-religious fanatics on the fringes of Israeli politics. She had a sharp mind but fell ill with tuberculosis in her early twenties and survived with just one healthy lung. A heart attack claimed her father, too. It was not easy.
Mum and Dad had mutual interests, met and married. Dad worked for Simpsons of Piccadilly as a foreman and tailor’s cutter, but, during the war, Simpsons relocated to Nottingham. My parents moved with the work and to a city where they had distant relatives. They settled into a tiny flat and had two children: Susan, born in 1943, and me, born eighteen months later.
Like many Jewish people, they had been aware of the tide of antisemitism before the war, highlighted by the rise of Oswald Mosley. Dad had demonstrated against the Blackshirts in Cable Street as they tried to march through the Jewish East End in October 1936. Nottingham was quieter, but occasionally, I picked up stories of conflicts on the factory floor.
One evening, soon after we had watched Nottingham Forest play Leeds, Dad returned from work with my first pair of football boots from Loughborough Market. They were Arthur Rowe One-Piece boots, with proper wooden studs, hard toe caps and a strip of leather across the front. The fact they did not fit perfectly did not matter. I was thrilled and they even covered the tops of my ankles. They were the boots of my under-11 years.
Very soon, I had progressed to the more lightweight boots the German company, Adidas, was aggressively marketing around the world. Passing my 11-plus took me to Mundella Grammar School and continued selection for Nottingham Boys under-13s and 7under-14s. I was playing a year younger than my age group. Indeed, I got a place in the school under-15s as a thirteen-year-old scholar. I did my best not to let the football interfere with my studies but eventually finished my education with just four O-levels. ‘Could do better’ was the constant theme of my school reports.
Susan, my sister, was the academic one, gaining a scholarship to Nottingham Girls High School and then a place at Oxford before embarking on a long career as a television scriptwriter. Between 1966 and 1974, Susan would write regularly for Coronation Street. She would go on to write scripts for A Family at War, Within These Walls, Juliet Bravo and Brookside – as well as the children’s TV series, Pipkins and Monty & Co. Her daughter, Becky Prestwich, has followed her mother into scriptwriting and has worked on Holby City and written plays for Radio 4.
During my school days, Mum was a rock, always trying to adjust the meals and her work to suit my football commitments. We were living on the new Clifton Estate, one of the biggest post-war housing projects in Europe that produced Viv Anderson, Jayne Torvill and Jermaine Jenas.
Each weekday, Mum would do the morning housework before rushing to catch the bus into town, whose stop was directly opposite our house – 13 Farnborough Road. Her arrival at the stop almost invariably coincided with the bus’s. She worked as a typist at an insurance firm, Lloyds and Scottish, where she was highly thought of and often brought work home with her. Supper had been prepared in the morning and was always on the table.
While living in Clifton, Mum and Dad had a third child, Marion, who grew up to be a kind person with a great sense of social responsibility and had a long career teaching under-privileged kids. She gave all her time to caring for my parents in their last years.
Things became hard for the family around my fourteenth year. Dad had to leave the factory floor with a case of TB that was bad 8enough for him to be put into hospital, where he was cured with streptomycin. We visited him occasionally, with the help of a lift from a schoolmaster or a neighbour. Dad recovered, but he would no longer work at Simpsons. He therefore retrained as an education welfare officer. Unfortunately, just before he left hospital, he had an altercation with a patient who had made snide remarks about ‘Yids’. Dad exploded and was blamed for the incident. We were glad to see him back home, but he had to miss my schoolboy games and the journeys to the markets at Loughborough were long gone.
Not long after taking me to see Leeds on Christmas Day, my father had treated me and four of my friends to go on a coach to watch Nottingham Forest play at Leicester. I would have been about ten. The five of us sat on the back seat and were joking along. One of the lads said he would be going to church tomorrow. He said: ‘I am Christian and we have two Roman candles and a ju-ju.’ Two of my friends were Catholic. Two men who were sitting in front of us turned round to look.
I felt a tinge of embarrassment. It was as though I had a secret shame that being Jewish made me different. It was only later, when I discovered the immense contribution the Jewish community had made to this country, that I found the subconscious racism easier to deal with.
When Nottingham Forest were drawn away to West Bromwich Albion in the FA Cup, I could not go with my friends to The Hawthorns and when I told them why, they did not quite understand. Saturday 25 January 1958 was also the day of my bar mitzvah, the day I would recite the Torah in the synagogue. In the Jewish faith, it would be considered the most important day of my life.
God, however, smiled on me. West Brom and Nottingham Forest drew 3–3. There would be a replay on the Tuesday afternoon. Mundella Grammar was only ten minutes across Trent Bridge from the City Ground and I left at lunchtime with some of my schoolmates 9to join a full house of 46,477. Forest were beaten 5–1 in a magnificent game by a fabulous West Brom team that would lose in the quarter-finals to a Manchester United side scraped together from the survivors of the Munich disaster that had destroyed the club less than a month before.
Playing as the youngest member of the City Boys under-15s and the County side, my star was rising. Ray Chaplin managed the Nottingham City side and was adept at giving half-time team talks as good as any professional I met. He would employ Shakespearean quotes to cajole his team into action.
In regional trials across the country, I was seeing off competition to gain a coveted place in the England Schoolboys team. The manager of England Schoolboys was Bill Roberts, a broad hunk of a man in his late fifties who hailed from Ellesmere Port, where he was a teacher and an English Schools coach and councillor. He was an austere, obese man, whom it would be hard to imagine as a football coach, though he told us both Stan Cullis and Joe Mercer had been his pupils. However, he was possessed of a magnetic personality and told us that he could watch a boy walk across a playground and tell, without him ever kicking a ball, whether he was right- or left-footed.
When news of my selection came through, all the players received a typed letter stating what was expected of each position. Mine was outside right. The letter told me to ‘try to get into the space behind the full-back and cross the ball quickly. Practise your shooting and sprinting. Look forward to seeing you at York for the first game against Ireland.’
England did not lose any of our five games that season. In April 1960, we overcame West Germany, 1–0, at Maine Road. Ten days later, England would be playing Scotland at Wembley.
It was with a mixture of panic and excitement, nerves, and pride that I received my letter of selection for the Scotland game. Apart 10from the victory over West Germany in Manchester, my father had seen all my England Schoolboy games and now I was agitated, worried that Dad would be unable to see me play at Wembley. Who will get him tickets? How will he travel to London? Where will he stay? I had been told the game was on television, so Mum would be able to watch it. She would never see me play in a live game.
Mr Chaplin, the Nottingham Schools manager, told Dad he would travel down to London with him and the secretary of the Nottingham Schools FA, another larger-than-life personality in the days when all schoolmasters seemed to be characters. I was happy with the arrangement, since both my father and Mr Chaplin shared a love of the theatre and could quote Shakespeare like a second language.
Our captain was Ron Harris, who would become a legendary player for Chelsea, and my immediate opponent at left-back was Bobby Moncur, who nine years later would captain Newcastle to the Fairs Cup. George Graham was Scotland’s No. 10. My partner was Barry Fry, a cocky Bedford boy destined for a long career in football. Then, his only thought was of collecting his signing-on fee from Manchester United.
Ernest Marples, then Minister for Transport in Harold Macmillan’s government, was the special guest, introduced to the two teams in front of 95,000 young spectators who had come by coach from every corner of England on their annual pilgrimage to Wembley.
The game is a haze now. I scored and made a couple. It was the day the great Tom Finney played his last game for Preston and in one headline the press proclaimed they had seen his successor. Even my golden moment is a vague memory. A run, in possession from the right, escaping three defenders and seeing my shot slide in off the far post. All a blur, so nerve-tingling and emotional that it was gone in a flash. The score was 5–3 to England.
Back at school, they presented me with a small plaque at an 11assembly in front of 600 pupils who clapped as, embarrassed, I accepted the gesture. The Nottingham papers were propelling me towards a future professional career, surmising which club I might sign for.
Three of that England Schoolboys side went to Manchester United. Ray Bloomfield went to Arsenal, although he played most of his career in the United States. Two north-east boys, Billy Atkinson and Denis Thwaites, signed for Birmingham City. In June 2015, Denis and his wife, Elaine, were shot dead in a terrorist attack on the beaches of Sousse in Tunisia.
I knew I would stay and join my boyhood team, despite a temptation to sign for Tottenham. A friend of my father who wrote reports for the Sunday People was a big Tottenham fan and was friendly with the club’s hierarchy. He implored Bill Nicholson to sign me.
Mum and Dad were bemused by the array of scouts who came knocking at our council-house door. I recall a Mr Chitty from Chelsea and gentlemen from Wolverhampton Wanderers and Manchester City. A car was mentioned, although neither Mum nor Dad ever drove. The only bribe from a scout that was gratefully accepted was a tray of two-dozen fresh eggs, which were brought twice to our home.
Frank Hill, the Notts County manager, came to Clifton and knocked on our back door. I felt embarrassed speaking to him for twenty minutes without once asking him in for a cup of tea or giving him the impression I would sign, even though had I done so I would almost be guaranteed first-team football, within a couple of seasons. But I had decided. I would sign for Nottingham Forest and stay at home with my family and my mum’s cooking.
Chapter 2
‘Bricks and Mortar’
It was a two-mile walk and Mum had told me to dress smartly. The winding Farnborough Road led on to a village called Ruddington where you walked over a hump-backed bridge. The first house on the left, an imposing off-white building, belonged to Mr Walker.
Billy Walker was the manager of Nottingham Forest, a position he had held since before the Second World War. In later years, players would recall his parsimony with the club’s money and his selfish traits. His team would not allow him to manage the players’ pool for the 1959 FA Cup final for fear he would take a cut of it. He was clearly a wealthy man.
Walker was a formidable presence in English football. He was and remains Aston Villa’s greatest goalscorer, who as an inside forward had played more than 500 games for the club. As a player, Walker had won the FA Cup in 1920. Fifteen years later, as manager of Sheffield Wednesday, he won the trophy again.
He had come to the City Ground in 1939, a year Nottingham Forest escaped relegation to the Third Division South on goal average. By the time we met, Forest were a First Division club. He was a tall, hawkish gentleman.
He sat me down and told me that he had not seen much of me – I was only fourteen – but had heard some very good reports. In the conversation one thing stood out. ‘Son, if you do well, bricks and mortar.’ To tell a fourteen-year-old boy you had not met before to invest in property was a strange conversational gambit. 13
Not long afterwards, Billy Walker would lead Nottingham Forest out in the FA Cup final against Luton Town. It was a dramatic occasion. Having scored twice in the opening quarter of an hour, Nottingham Forest clung on for a 2–1 victory. A dozen minutes before half-time, Roy Dwight, Elton John’s cousin, who had scored Forest’s opening goal, was carried off with a broken leg. There were no substitutes in 1959, but Forest, who were reduced to nine men when the right-back, Bill Whare, collapsed with cramp, held out magnificently against a strong Luton side.
I would remain at school, take my O-levels and play representative football for Nottinghamshire under-18s and the England youth team first as an amateur and then as a professional. The England team was managed by Billy Wright, who had just retired as captain of Wolverhampton Wanderers, where he had led them to three league titles. For England, he had won 105 caps and in the summer of 1958, shortly after captaining them in the World Cup in Sweden, he married Joy Beverley, a member of the pop group The Beverley Sisters. On the field and off it, Billy was a star.
He was a lovely man with a warm personality, but even then, I thought he was unlikely to be a top manager, a theory he proved in a short spell in charge of Arsenal.
There is no logical reason why someone who is supremely gifted as a footballer should automatically make a good manager. Glenn Hoddle, who was wonderful with the ball at his feet, found it difficult to build up personal relationships with the men he coached – players who were often in awe of him. Chris Waddle, his teammate at Tottenham, disliked club politics and dealing with the boardroom at Burnley.
Billy Wright was far too nice, far too kind for management. On one trip with England to Flensburg in West Germany, I got drunk with two others and fell down the stairs in the hotel foyer. Instead of threatening us or bawling us out, he said: ‘Come on, get yourselves to bed.’ 14
Not only was Wright the manager; he also carried the sponge. He was also carrying a bit of a paunch and when in a game against Scotland in Elgin, he walked off after giving one of his players some treatment, a wag in the crowd shouted: ‘Guinness is good for you.’ The Scottish crowd roared.
In 1964, shortly after I joined Luton, Billy came to present me with a new car. I had won a competition, run by the Ford Motor Company, to select the best post-war team from Britain and Ireland. I can still recall my half-back line: Blanchflower (Ireland), Charles (Wales) and Mackay (Scotland). The prize was a new Ford Cortina, which I had to hand back because I could not then drive. Ford gave me £500 for it, which had been more than my signing-on fee for Luton.
There would also be games for the school, for Nottingham Forest’s B-team and then the A-team, which played in the Midland Intermediate League. In one game, in the Derbyshire town of Clay Cross, I came across a very good goalkeeper called Bob Wilson. He was four years older than me. Bob would go to Loughborough College and find fame as part of Arsenal’s Double-winning team of 1971. In my early days as manager of Luton, he worked with me as a goalkeeping coach and I would not come across anyone better in that position. Bob had the ability to coach both potential and senior goalkeepers in a manner that was clear and understandable. Unlike many fine players, Bob knew how to teach.
I was being paid £8 a week as a groundstaff boy with seven other ‘potentials’ amid all the excitement and anticipation that went with teenaged boys joining a First Division football club. I became great friends with Ian Storey-Moore, who had been discovered playing junior football in Scunthorpe and would be part of the Nottingham Forest side that in 1967 finished second in the league and reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup. 15
When I invited Ian home for tea, I realised he was someone with whom I could have a good conversation. A civilised boy. On Friday after training, we would go to a coffee bar called El Toreador to talk football. Later in the day, we would go the newly built People’s College to take a beginner’s course in journalism. Ian’s father had insisted on it should he not succeed in football.
Ian was slightly different to the others. He was intelligent, had a dry wit and an interest in world affairs when the conversations of most players at Nottingham Forest did not stretch much beyond horse racing and women. Ian was certainly interested in horse racing – he became a bookmaker after a brilliant career was curtailed by injury at Manchester United. However, he also managed Burton Albion and was appointed Aston Villa’s chief scout under Martin O’Neill, who had once cleaned Ian’s boots at Nottingham Forest.
By way of refreshments, Forest offered their players nothing more than a cup of tea. If we wanted food after training, we had to make our own arrangements and would go a cafe on Pavilion Road at the top of Trent Bridge, where on a Friday, after the team sheets had been pinned up in the dressing room for the following day, we would get together and do the football pools while discussing tactics.
It was also a gossip group that would discuss other members of the club and praise or criticise them accordingly. It was there that I realised how cliques could form. In subsequent years, I realised how important it was to break these groups up. At Tottenham, who had a far more cosmopolitan array of players than Forest, the same players would always eat together. Others would gather in a different area of the dining room. This would particularly be true of the foreign players. Over time, the club took steps to ensure the whole squad was integrated on a single long table at lunch. 16
After winning the FA Cup, Forest did not start the season well and avoided relegation by a point. After twenty-one years as manager, Billy Walker was replaced by Andy Beattie in the summer of 1960.
As my reputation grew, I was contacted to ask if I would take part in trials for the Maccabiah Games. The Maccabiah Games were popularly known as ‘The Jewish Olympics’ and had first taken place in 1932, when what is now Israel was the British Mandate of Palestine. They were open to all Jewish athletes and by 1961 to all citizens of Israel regardless of faith. They would be centred around the Ramat Gan Stadium in Tel Aviv.
The trials were held at Hall Lane in Hendon. I was sixteen and would be going to Israel with a team of Jewish amateur footballers. There was no question I had the ability to be selected for the Great Britain team; my father was keen for me to go and the opportunity to see Israel was fascinating. The year before I had been on my first foreign holiday to Spain’s Costa Brava.
After the trials, Andy Beattie came over to me and said, rather sneeringly: ‘Your people have been on the phone again.’ I did not at first realise the significance of the remark, but I soon realised who he was talking about.
When the Nottingham Evening Post ran the headline ‘Pleat Selected for Maccabiah’, it understandably led to bemusement in the dressing room. I was asked: ‘Do you have to be Jewish to go?’ or ‘Are you Jewish?’ I was even asked: ‘What do you have to do to become a Jew?’
The tournament itself was intriguing and helped me mature. I was mixing with men who were invariably older than I was, good footballers who had gone into business or the professions. When I was growing up, this was the kind of vision my parents had for me: an amateur footballer who would become an accountant or a doctor. Quite a few of my teammates at the Maccabiah could have 17played football professionally, but that would have been viewed as no job for a nice Jewish boy.
I remember a guy called Barry Carr, a strong wing-half who was in the furniture business in Manchester. We were captained by Saville Shela, a handsome, tanned, London taxi driver and amateur boxer in his mid-twenties who had an eye for the women. In the final against Israel, in Haifa, he scored both goals in the 2–1 win that would give Britain its only football gold medal at a Maccabiah Games.
There were a thousand competitors from twenty-seven countries and I was impressed by the football teams from Brazil and South Africa and by Rafer Johnson in particular. Johnson was black, had been part of a Jewish fraternity at university and had won gold for the United States in the decathlon in the Rome Olympics. In 1968, in Los Angeles, he would apprehend Sirhan Sirhan, the man who had just assassinated Robert Kennedy. He did not compete in Tel Aviv but gave demonstrations of his sport and appeared at the opening ceremony.
We stayed in Netanya, north of the Israeli capital. We visited a kibbutz and a factory and sat in a cafe in Tel Aviv’s main drag, Dizengoff Street, and watched the girls go by. The ’60s had not properly begun; there was still a post-war drabness about much of England. Thirteen years after its creation in 1948, Israel seemed relaxed and at ease with itself. One thing that struck me was how much colour there was in the way people dressed, how much they talked and how opinionated their conversation was. From the Maccabiah, I brought back an LP with the Israeli national anthem ‘Hatikvah’, a song about hope that has always resonated with me.
I was never much good at bringing presents home. When my mother learned I was going to the Netherlands with the England youth team, she asked me to bring her some Edam. As I brought this big round cheese back, Ron Harris, tougher, more working-class, said rather sarcastically: ‘What have you got there, Pleaty? You 18know you can buy cheese in England?’ I felt slightly embarrassed. Ron was more than aware of my background; he had grown up near Stamford Hill, one of London’s poorer Jewish communities.
Andy Beattie was a severe, austere man from the north-east of Scotland. He was deeply religious and had been involved in the Moral Rearmament Movement, which believed Christian values could solve social problems. He had managed Scotland in the 1954 World Cup and was close to Bill Shankly, who had played alongside him at Preston and been Beattie’s assistant manager at Huddersfield. Beattie’s most celebrated achievement was bringing Denis Law to Leeds Road, but he had resigned after Huddersfield’s relegation and spent eighteen months as a sub-postmaster. For him, Nottingham Forest represented a return to frontline management.
On 17 February 1962, he gave me my debut. At seventeen years and thirty-three days, I would become the youngest footballer to play for Nottingham Forest. As a Nottingham boy, there was plenty of pride accompanied by telegrams from the Nottingham Schools FA and my school, Mundella Grammar.
The club was in the relegation zone, third from bottom, two points behind our opponents, Cardiff City. The 2–1 win lifted us two places in the table. Cardiff would be relegated, alongside Fulham and Chelsea.
I scored the second goal, though it was meant as a cross rather than a shot. It curled past the bemused Dilwyn John in the Cardiff goal, who was only six months older than me. The Nottingham Forest centre-forward, Len Julians, who was closest to the ball as it struck the net, graciously told everyone, including the officials, that he had not got a touch.
The local press heaped praise on me and Dick Le Flem, from Guernsey, nicknamed ‘Flip’, who had played wide-left against Cardiff. The local paper stated: ‘The Forest wing positions should be reserved for years.’ By 1964, both of us had left the City Ground. Had 19Flip been in love with the game, he could have had a stellar career. After giving Jimmy Armfield the runaround in one game against Blackpool, Armfield said: ‘Flip looked like he was playing on skates.’ I liked Flip a lot; he was swapped for Alan Hinton from Wolves, a fine winger and a great crosser of the ball. Flip’s time at Molineux was hampered by illness and he retired at the age of twenty-five.
Amid dressing-room unrest, Beattie left in the summer of 1963 to take charge of Plymouth. His replacement, Johnny Carey, could not have been more different. He was a Dubliner who had captained Manchester United to the FA Cup in 1948 and to the league title four years later. He was a tall, balding, genial man, seldom without his pipe. His half-time team-talk invariably consisted of just a few words as he sucked on his pipe: ‘Fizz it about.’ It was a phrase the players would repeat whenever Johnny Carey’s name cropped up. ‘Fizz it about.’
Some of Forest’s senior players were very kind to me, especially Johnny Quigley, a Glaswegian midfielder whom I had seen score the winner at Hillsborough in the FA Cup semi-final against Aston Villa. Others treated a newcomer to the dressing room with a certain disdain. Bob McKinlay was a rather aloof centre-half who had joined Nottingham Forest in 1949 and would play more than 600 games for the club before becoming a prison officer.
On the surface, Bob was pleasant enough, but he had a marked reluctance to encourage young footballers. He was very critical of young talent. I was a young player trying to make his way in a struggling team, which is always harder than coming into a winning side. The older professionals would fear for their future and their judgements would be self-protective. Bob McKinlay might have felt that Forest needed experience rather than young, unproven talent. I thought he did not want me to succeed, that he disliked me. Or perhaps I imagined it. McKinlay was something of a loner in the dressing room. He may have been like that to everyone. 20
After a season in which they had finished thirteenth, Nottingham Forest took me on a post-season tour to West Germany, where I played against Hertha Berlin. In a hotel room, Ian and I watched grainy pictures from Wembley as West Ham overcame Preston in the 1964 FA Cup final.
It did not really hit me that I was a Jewish teenager staying in what nineteen years previously had been the capital of the Third Reich. I was too obsessed by football and the Holocaust was a subject that, after the initial shock of what had happened in the concentration camps, had been largely and perhaps deliberately forgotten. Certainly, my parents never spoke about it. The documentaries, the books and the eyewitness testimonies would only really start coming out in the 1970s, perhaps because some in the Jewish community felt that memories of the momentous crime were being allowed to fade away.
I was full of anticipation for the start of the new season. However, the previous year, in the Midland Intermediate League, I had played for Nottingham Forest’s under-21s against Wolves. They had a half-back line of Goodwin, Woodfield and Knighton, which to me sounded like a firm of solicitors. All would have good careers in the game and Ken Knighton would manage Sunderland. I had got to the byline and, as I pulled the ball back, I felt a whack in my coccyx area. It was an injury that put me back a full two months. That injury might have cost me a shade of pace, which was one of my qualities, though I still had the ability to cut in from the right and shoot with my left foot. From that day on, I would always suffer from back trouble and this particular injury would force me to end my playing career at the age of twenty-eight.
All my career I have been fascinated by what a professional footballer requires to succeed. I possessed a good temperament. I did not become carried away by the headlines sparked by my debut goal against Cardiff, but I lacked the confidence and possibly the drive 21to make a mark. On its own, pure ability is never enough. You must have self-belief and a strong mentality to fall back on when things do not go well. Having a mentor, someone at a club who believes in you, can also be vitally important.
In a practice match, before I made my debut, I went past Forest’s Scottish defender, Joe McDonald, on the outside. McDonald, who was nearly twice my age, shouted: ‘If you do that again, son, I’ll break your fucking leg.’ Perhaps I should have had more courage in league games. I soon realised that old pros can be ruthless when it comes to protecting their status at a club and cannot stand to be humiliated or belittled – however inadvertently – by a younger footballer. It exposed their vulnerability.
The full-backs I came across were tough men like Graham Williams at West Bromwich Albion, Alex Elder at Burnley and Colin Green at Birmingham. Williams was a hard, barrel-chested Welsh full-back who attempted to scare me to death. They were all experienced and ferociously competitive. If I did not go past them early on in a game, or if the defender matched me for pace, I would start to lose belief and be less likely to express myself or want the ball.
Underpinning everything is desire. When, in my more reflective moments, I look back over my playing career, I ask myself whether I had the desire to overcome dropping down the leagues and the injury. Was I a ‘self-doubter’? Self-doubt is a condition that is common in football. Nottingham Forest had a young reserve-team player called Billy Younger, who was terrific in practice matches but could not cope with the pressure to reproduce that form in front of a crowd.
Later in my career, watching the Tottenham under-18 team, I saw Dean Marney, a young winger, look across to the bench for approval every time he crossed the ball. Marney would have a very good career with Hull and Burnley, where his character would eventually shine through. However, at Tottenham, he was constantly looking 22for approval from his coaches whenever he made a contribution. I termed him a ‘self-doubter’. I often use Dean as an example when talking to coaches. Self-belief and a ‘stick-your-chest-out attitude’ is key.
In that summer of 1964, Johnny Carey bought Chris Crowe from Wolves and Mike Kear from Newport. Both could play wide on the right. To me this seemed an indication that Carey did not see me as a first-team regular, and it knocked my confidence. Ian, a footballer with no self-doubt and who scored twice on his debut, was also emerging as a force at Forest on the wing.
If I had no mentor within the club, I had one outside the City Ground. Peter Taylor was born in Nottingham and although he had signed for Forest as a sixteen-year-old in 1944, his goalkeeping career had taken him to Coventry and Middlesbrough, where he had met Brian Clough. The first time I had laid eyes on Taylor was in November 1956 when Middlesbrough had come to the City Ground and won 4–0. Clough scored all four.
By 1962, Peter Taylor was back in Nottingham and managing Burton Albion. He lived with his wife, Lillian, at 3 Vernon Avenue in Wilford, which was a two-mile walk along the Trent from Nottingham’s two main football grounds. Peter would come to watch us play in what was known as the Thursday League, where a young Forest side would face teams such as the Police, the Fire Brigade and the 6th Battalion Royal Army Ordinance Corps, whose team contained three Sheffield United players doing their National Service. One was Ken Mallender, who was to spend seven years at Bramall Lane, another was Jack Nibloe, who was to die in a car crash at the age of twenty-five.
This was a tough grounding, pitching Forest’s under-18s, bright, young, elusive talents, against the ‘old sweats’, some of whom were still playing non-league football to a high standard. Because 23Thursday was half-day closing in Nottingham – the shops did not open in the afternoon – there was always a decent crowd to watch Forest’s future. After one of these games, I found myself talking to Peter Taylor and we got on very well. His talk was football laced with socialism, and it began a relationship that would last until his death in 1990.
I was never one for pubs, but sometimes I would walk a mile and a half to the Ferry Inn in Wilford, where on Sunday lunchtimes Peter would be holding court with three other football obsessives who would later become his scouts: Colin Revell, Bob Rayner and George Pyecroft.
One day, Johnny Carey called me into his office and, very pleasantly, said I could go to Luton Town if I wished. He had agreed a transfer fee. ‘You can stay and fight for your place,’ he said, ‘but I have to tell you that your opportunities will be limited.’
I had been signed by Billy Walker and backed by Andy Beattie, but now I was being cast aside by Johnny Carey. Youngsters in such a situation had little ammunition with which to fight their corner. I sat opposite him and listened.
As with all transfers, I was told I had to make an early decision and informed that if I did not join Luton, they would probably sign someone else. I tried to phone my parents, who were on holiday in Bognor, but could not get through to them at the bed and breakfast where they were staying. I rang Peter Taylor, who, without knowing any of the circumstances, told me I should go. He impressed on me the importance of playing first-team football in front of a crowd. Peter had always admired my ability but told me it was being wasted in the reserves.
I was nineteen. At that age, impetuosity strikes. It is hard to be patient when your career needs to be sustained by hope, and at Nottingham Forest, the opportunities were closing. It’s not a pleasant 24feeling to be not wanted, to see the dream deflated. How many times in the future would I be on the other side of the desk and have to deliver similar phrases to those uttered now by Johnny Carey?
Travelling down to Luton, I met their manager, Bill Harvey, whose conversation was backed by a fund of jokes. Every paragraph he spoke was interwoven with the phrase: ‘Listen to this one.’ Luton had been relegated from Division Two in Harvey’s first season as manager and had just finished eighteenth in Division Three. Their gates were a third of Nottingham Forest’s, but Harvey told me that Luton ‘could become a great club’.
They also told me Luton would be building a new stadium at Stockwood Park. More than half a century later, the dream put to me by the Luton secretary Bob Readhead has still not been realised. The club has still not moved from Kenilworth Road, its home since 1905.
My feet were sufficiently planted on the ground to dismiss that kind of talk, but what clinched it for me was that two of my friends from England’s youth teams, Ray Whittaker and John O’Rourke, were at Luton, having been released by Arsenal and Chelsea. We talked things through on the pitch-and-putt course at Wardown Park, where they persuaded me the potential was there.
When I finally got hold of my parents, they gave me their usual advice: they would support me in whatever I did. Luton paid Nottingham Forest £8,000 for me and I was given a signing-on fee of £400, which took a while to be paid and arrived in my wage packet, taxed.
The Forest players had urged me to take advantage of the move and improve my salary. Your negotiating position is always at its strongest when you sign your first contract. The maximum wage of £20 a week had been abolished in 1961. I had been so highly thought of at Nottingham Forest that I had been put on £20 a week before 25I had made my debut. By 1964, my wages had gone up by a quarter and Luton offered me the same money – £25 a week – that I was on at the City Ground.
There were all sorts of questions I should have asked Bill Harvey but did not. The one question I did ask was whether Luton could improve my salary. Harvey called my bluff. He said to me: ‘Look, son, the contracts are in that drawer. I can take them out and show you any one of them and you’ll find you are being paid the best rate. Twenty-five is the top wage.’ Bill Harvey knew I would not have the courage to ask him to open the drawer and hand me the first-team contracts. I would not call his bluff. Had I done so, it would have led to a difficult relationship.
The Luton team was full of old sweats. Footballers who could see the end of their careers and who were playing out time. Men like Dave Pacey, who had scored against Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup final five years before, Bob Morton, who had joined Luton in the last days of the Second World War, and Gordon Turner, a goalscorer who spent more time in his sports shop than he did on the training ground. The goalkeeper, Ron Baynham, good enough to have played three times for England in 1955, was another of those who gathered around the stove for a cup of tea and a smoke before training.
