Bill Nicholson: Football's Perfectionist - new book

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from today's Observerhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/aug/14/bill-nicholson-footballs-perfectionist

Bill Nicholson: Football's Perfectionist by Brian Scovell

Bill Nicholson is remembered, in a new book by Brian Scovell, as a stern disciplinarian whose boldness created the team that won the Double and two European trophies
The morning after the FA Cup final in 1961, when Bill Nicholson had crowned his career at the age of 42 by leading Tottenham Hotspur to the first Double since Aston Villa's in 1897, reporters could not help but poke fun at the Yorkshireman's stern and uncompromising character. He was a man, wrote one, who "shaved in ice water", while another felt that Spurs' greatest ever manager laboured under the belief that "smiling takes up precious time".
Even the verdict of Nicholson himself on that most romantically cherished of English sides was suitably austere. "I have deep pleasure," he said, "in seeing hard work put into effect and being rewarded." The pleasure was so deep it was all but impossible to discern, and that is the dominant theme of Brian Scovell's fascinating and sympathetic biography which makes a plausible case for restoring his subject to the Valhalla of management alongside his infinitely more charismatic peers Bill Shankly, Sir Matt Busby and Jock Stein.
Next year marks the golden anniversary of that remarkable triumph – a feat of arduousness and rarity that cannot be devalued by its achievement in six of the past 17 Premier League seasons. And on Tuesday in Bern, when Tottenham take on Young Boys, the club will celebrate the ending of a 49-year exile from the European Cup, a competition generations of Spurs fans have been excluded from since Nicholson's Double winners' solitary campaign.
The story of Tottenham's run to the semi-final in 1962 is vibrantly chronicled by Scovell, and the tales of trips behind the Iron Curtain to play Poland's Gornik Zabrze and Czechoslovakia's Dukla Prague have a distinctly Len Deighton-ish air with their misty train platforms, journalists taken into custody and bug-ridden beds. But it is the accounts of the home legs – where the mystique of "those glory, glory nights" under the floodlights at White Hart Lane was minted – that sparkle the most. Most continental clubs had tracks running around the pitch but Tottenham's was enclosed by vast, tall stands and the volume the supporters created was intense and persistent. "The noise came from everywhere, from everyone," wrote the captain, Danny Blanchflower,. "A local vicar used to complain that the whole thing was like a substitute for religion and I suppose it was in a way."
Against the Polish champions, Spurs trailed 4-2 from the away leg but in front of their own cacophonous crowd and thousands locked out on Tottenham High Road, the dazzlingly skilful Wales winger Cliff Jones scored a hat-trick in an 8-1 rout. Their semi-final opponents, the holders Benfica, were so concerned about their players being fazed by the din that they would not allow them to warm up on the pitch. Tottenham's 2-1 victory was not enough to overturn their 3-1 defeat in the Stadium of Light. The outcome of that match seems to have been Nicholson's biggest regret. Indeed, his private suspicions about some of the refereeing decisions, which disallowed "goals" by Bobby Smith and Jimmy Greaves in an era when the nobbling of officials by shadowy club fixers was prevalent, persuaded him that Tottenham had been diddled out of the European Cup and their destiny. Not that he complained in public. That was not the Nicholson way.
Above everything, Nicholson admired honesty and industry. There was boldness, too – after all, audere est facere (to dare is to do) was the club's proud motto. His greatest success was perhaps his astonishing transfer coups that formed the backbone of the Double team: Dave Mackay, John White, Bill Brown and Les Allen. Putting them together with Jones and the headstrong intelligence and elegance of Blanchflower transformed the side, and the fruits of such attacking prowess were evident in the 115 goals they scored en route to the league title in 1961.
If the Double was an unrepeatable peak, the "decline" over the following 13 years, if you could call it that, included two European trophies, two FA Cups and two League Cups. The stoicism Nicholson had inhaled with his mother's milk in Scarborough, in a family of nine children, suited him well but by the early 70s he was not so much disillusioned by the game as disgusted by it. His jibes about the players' long hair at first sound like curmudgeonly jokes, but became so frequent that it suggests the man whose short-back-and-sides was unchanged since his days as a sergeant PT instructor during the war had a complex about it.
He resigned in the autumn of 1974, sickened by the salaries commanded by journeymen players and repelled by the hooliganism that had turned Tottenham's second-leg defeat by Feyenoord in the Uefa Cup final into the "Rotterdam Riot" that May. He was given a £10,000 payoff for 36 years of service as player, assistant coach and manager and signed on at the Haringey labour exchange the following week before his old friend Ron Greenwood gave him a sounding-board role at West Ham. But he did not complain – how could he? He had been as tight-fisted towards his players as the board were to him.
Those players profess to love and respect him but the majority of their anecdotes reveal a man of exacting standards, brutally miserly in wage negotiations and often ready with a blunt critique of their performance before thinking to offer praise. He comes across as the stock school disciplinarian character of whom the pupils belatedly realise he was only so tough because he cared so much. The genuine warmth understandably comes from the memories of his two daughters.
After leaving the club and then returning as a consultant and ultimately president from 1976 until his death in 2004, he had mellowed considerably and numerous supporters attest to his modesty and kindness. Introverted by disposition, Nicholson seemed to blossom in later life as an honoured representative of the club he adored, and he read the game so well he prophesied the coming of the Premier and Champions Leagues years before their establishment.
This is an old-fashioned biography and has, it must be said, a few editing flaws that need to be put right before the paperback edition if it is to pass muster with the "perfectionist" of the title. But with its unpretentious style and fund of good stories, it does justice to the architect of Tottenham's claim to greatness by outlining the standards he set and traditions he built that his 16 successors to date have so far failed to match.
Bill Nicholson: Football's Perfectionist
by Brian Scovell (John Blake, £19.99)