Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows: A fifty year love affair with football
    Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows: A fifty year love affair with football
    Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows: A fifty year love affair with football
    Ebook166 pages2 hours

    Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows: A fifty year love affair with football

    By Paul Buck

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows follows one man’s journey as a lifelong football fan and Spurs supporter. The book details the author’s experiences attending hundreds of matches during the course of fifty years and his often strong opinions regarding the top teams and all things football.
    In this fascinating book, Paul Buck takes a light-hearted look at the great sides and players and expresses his view on the demise of the FA Cup, England’s constant failure at major tournaments and the changing face and concerns of the modern game, all from the perspective of a dedicated and loyal fan. Paul also recalls his Sunday morning playing career and comments on youth football today, drawing from his time coaching at that level.
    Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows pays tribute to football fans of all ages, from any club, who have ever stood on a terrace, sat in the seats or simply pulled up an armchair to enjoy a match on TV. This book is for you.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherApex Publishing Limited
    Release dateOct 26, 2016
    ISBN9781911476238
    Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows: A fifty year love affair with football
    Author

    Paul Buck

    Paul Buck has been writing and publishing since the late Sixties; key titles include Violations, Lust, Walking into Myself… His work is characterized by its sabotaging of the various forms in order to explore their overlaps and differences. Through the Seventies he also edited the seminal magazine Curtains, with its focus on threading French writing from Bataille, Blanchot, Jabès, Faye, Noël, Ronat, Collobert and a score of others into a weave with English and American writers and artists. While editing and translating are still a daily activity – in partnership with Catherine Petit, the Vauxhall&Company series of books at Cabinet Gallery is their responsibility – he also continues to cover new ground: Spread Wide, a fiction generated from his letters with Kathy Acker; Performance, a biography of the Cammell/Roeg film; Lisbon, a cultural view of a city; A Public Intimacy, strip-searching scrapbooks to expose autobiography; Disappearing Curtains, an exhibition catalogue that collides with a ‘journal’; Library, a suitable case for treatment, a collection of essays. In recent times he helped Laure Prouvost to write her film Deep See Blue Surrounding You, around which her Venice Biennale pavilion, representing France, was based. Further ventures through textual issues around transgression, perversity, and intimacy to appear include: Indiscretions (& Nakedness), a set of prose narratives; Street of Dreams, further essays, and Without You, a fiction that voyages through film essay.

    Read more from Paul Buck

    Related to Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows

    Related ebooks

    Soccer For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Enjoy the Highs, Survive the Lows - Paul Buck

      2016

      Heroes

      My eyes have seen the glory

      We all have our heroes. My heroes have always kicked a football.

      In this chapter I will look back at the heroes in Tottenham shirts who I have been privileged to have seen and, at the end, try to pick my personal favourite eleven. With dozens of personal heroes to choose from, this could be the chapter that takes the longest to write!

      With a history as great as Tottenham’s there are so many names to choose from so I have decided to omit any player that was before my time and I did not see. A lot of these would walk into most best-ever teams of supporters older than me, but these legends are out.

      Pre-War legends Vivian Woodward and Jimmy Dimmock.

      Alf Ramsey and Bill Nicholson from the fifties.

      The 1961 Double winners including Danny Blanchflower, Bobby Smith, Cliff Jones, Terry Dyson, John White and Dave Mackay.

      I did not see any of them play live so, although I have them in my mind from newsreels and in my heart, they are not included. I have also decided to omit the greatest goalscorer ever in Jimmy Greaves. Although I did see him play live, it was at the very end of his Tottenham career and I did not see him play many times, so most of my memories come again from TV footage.

      My first choice of heroes come as a group. The late sixties, early seventies side had some awesome players in it. Pat Jennings, Cyril Knowles, Martin Chivers, Alan Gilzean, Alan Mullery, Martin Peters, Mike England, Joe Kinnear. Most teams will never have eight players as good as this. We had them all at once!

      Pat Jennings in goal is quite simply the best I have ever seen at White Hart Lane. People used to say that he had hands like shovels and his sheer size meant it was going to take something special to beat him. His trademark used to be to pluck a cross out of the air with one hand. This wasn’t to be flash, as Pat was a quiet gentle giant, it was just natural to him following a childhood of Gaelic football in Ireland. In this era of keepers, not many catch crosses at all and choose to punch everything. Not Pat!

      I remember a save he made at home to Newcastle in the seventies which compares to any I have ever seen anywhere. Tommy Craig hit a shot that was travelling like a rocket at our goal. Pat appeared from nowhere to tip the ball over the bar with one hand. I do not recall seeing this on TV since, but it is forever in my memory. Pat made almost 700 appearances for Tottenham. If it were not for those nine seasons down the road, he would surely have passed the thousand mark for us!

      Manager Keith Burkinshaw has gone on record saying his selling Pat was his biggest mistake. He is right! It took five years to replace him properly. Pat also made a record number of appearances for Northern Ireland, 119 in total. Many years ago now, I met Pat outside a newsagents in Hertfordshire, where we both lived. His hands WERE as big as shovels!

      The defence around this time consisted of the likes of Mike England, Joe Kinnear and Phil Beal. All great players, but my hero was left back Cyril Knowles.

      Cyril was a wing back before we had wing backs. His current equivalent would be Ashley Cole or Patrice Evra, forever looking to get forward to support the attack. Tottenham played with so much flair, Cyril was always on the front foot. He was a strong tackler, a great crosser of the ball and struck as sweet a free kick as anybody I have seen since.

      Cyril racked up close to 600 games in Tottenham colours, but failed to break through with England playing only four games for his country. His style probably went against him at international level as Alf Ramsey didn’t tend to play with wingers at this time, so would never have wanted his full back flying down the wing! Wrong time Cyril!

      Cyril became immortalised when a record was released in the early seventies. The Cockrell Chorus released ‘Nice One Cyril’ in honour of him, and the rapport between player and crowd became even stronger as the song was belted out every match. After retiring through injury, Cyril went into management and brought Torquay and Hartlepool to White Hart Lane for cup ties. Cyril was received like a god.

      Sadly, Cyril passed away following a brain tumour in the early nineties. The club held a moving memorial match in his honour in 1991. The attendance was less than 13,000. I was disgusted with Tottenham fans that day for not filling the ground. Shame on you! Cyril deserved one last full house at the Lane.

      So when Cyril moved forward who was in front of him? Alan Mullery, my next hero.

      Mullers was half man, half tank and would run through a brick wall for the team. Never scared of anybody and full of confidence, he ruled the midfield. For a few seasons there was nobody better in English football, doing what he did. Win the ball, pass the ball! Simple stuff really, but you need the desire to do it. Mullers, as a pundit on Sky Sports in recent years, still has more passion than most current players. He played over 400 games for the club scoring around forty times. I was there for his most important goal. The UEFA Cup Final against Wolves and Mullery had been brought back from a loan spell to help him recover from injury. I can still see the diving header which rocketed into the net to win the Cup! At the end of the game, he lifted the cup in front of the Shelf side, it was the last thing he did in a Tottenham shirt. What a way to go! Mullery played 35 times for England and moved into management with several clubs after hanging up his boots.

      My next three heroes, still from the same line up remember, scored almost 500 Tottenham goals between them.

      Martin Chivers was everybody’s hero not just mine. Big Chiv was idolised at the Lane and he deserved to be.

      202 goals in 402 matches. Stunning!

      Following in the footsteps of Bobby Smith, Chiv was a man mountain, but another gentle giant. Recently, I read his autobiography and he says how annoyed Bill Nick used to get with him for not putting himself about a bit more. Chiv proved that he didn’t need to. Injuries limited his international appearances to twenty-four, but at club level he was dynamite.

      One European night at the Lane against Red Star Belgrade, he came over to take one of his trademark long throws. People talk about Rory Delap these days, but Chivers was doing it nearly forty years ago. Anyway, as he stepped back to throw the ball, he was right in front of me and I patted him on the back. I still recall the smell of Ralgex, or the like, that came from him. Imagine my delight, as a ten-year-old, when watching the highlights on TV that night, there I was patting Big Chiv on the back on TV! At school the next day, I was the hero as my mates had seen that moment also.

      Alongside Chivers in attack was Alan Gilzean. Gilly was unique at the time as his heading style was more of a flick than the thrusting header most players adopted. The flicking header Gilly used would send the ball into different directions to normal and give keepers less chance of stopping them. Gilly scored 173 goals in just under 500 games for the club. Another terrific record!

      Sadly, Gilly struggled with a drink problem and, since giving up the game, had become a recluse. Some rumours claimed he was sleeping rough and little was heard of him in over thirty years until the club brought him back into some kind of ambassador role.

      The third wheel up front was Martin Peters. Martin had already had his finest hour before joining Tottenham having scored in the 1966 World Cup Final. He spent six years at Tottenham averaging one goal every three games over nearly 300 games. Peters took a little while to settle, but when he found his stride, he was majestic, a real class act! He could play up front, off Chivers, or drop into midfield and dictate the pace of a game. Spurs made a mistake letting him leave for pastures new in 1975. His presence was severely missed and Tottenham struggled to replace him properly until a youngster called Hoddle turned up on the scene. More of him soon!

      The mid-seventies were a strange and barren time for Tottenham. Billy Nick had stood down after nearly two decades, and the most stunning time in our history, and been replaced by Terry Neill. Coming as an ex Arsenal player, Neill was never completely accepted by the fans,and left after eighteen months, ironically,for Arsenal. Putting an Arsenal man at the helm was always going to be controversial and in fairness to him, the team was struggling as well, which made the job almost impossible. When Neill left the club, we had a real problem. Legends had been replaced with untried kids or third rate players and the club was in a mess, eventually being relegated in 1977.

      Heroes were thin on the ground but, with his early steps taken under the management of Billy Nick, a new leader rose. One who would become the club’s leading appearance maker, lift trophies as captain and spend over twenty years in the first team.

      Stevie Perryman started as a Mullery-type midfielder covering every blade of grass throughout every game. He evolved into a full back and sweeper showing he had a fantastic football brain. On one European night he smashed the ball twice into the AC Milan net to turn the tie in our favour. Why he didn’t score more goals was always a mystery to me, as he was always turning up in the opponent’s box. The season before we went down, with three games to go we were in a terrible position. A do or die match against Chelsea was an absolute must-win match as they were in the same boat as us. Stevie bulldozed his way into their area to score that day and send Chelsea down instead of us.

      Once Tottenham had re-emerged as a force in the eighties, Stevie lifted the FA Cup two years running. He would have lifted the UEFA Cup too, but was suspended from the final. I remember the cruel deflection as he raced back to defend against Real Madrid, which put us out a year later, but all my memories of Stevie are of an absolute warrior who could play a bit too! You do not play almost a thousand games for Tottenham without being a quality

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1