Two views on a Spurs great

Bill Nicholson made Spurs one of the most exciting clubs to watch with his drive for fast-flowing football, writes Dan Carrier

Double Bill: The Bill Nicholson Story
by Alan Mullery and Paul Trevillion
Mainstream Publishing, £15.99 order this book

SEPTEMBER, 1961: Jimmy Greaves was in town. The footballer had signed for AC Milan during the summer and was having difficulty settling in.
Spurs manager Bill Nicholson, a long-term Greaves admirer, was at the Café Royal in Piccadilly at a sports dinner. He needed to spend a penny and went to the gents, where he bumped into the footballer.
Former Spurs captain Alan Mullery, who with sports illustrator and lifelong Spurs fan Paul Trevillion, has penned a biography of the club’s greatest manager, takes up the story.
He writes: “Legend has it, and Bill confirmed it, that the deal that brought Greaves to Spurs was set in motion in the toilets. Jim and Bill both happened to answer the call of nature at the same time. Over a light-hearted chat, Jim let it be known to Bill that he wouldn’t mind a move to Spurs when he left AC Milan.”
Jimmy ended up playing just 12 games for the Italian side – and although he hit the net nine times, they accepted a bid from Spurs to bring him home.
Such anecdotes litter this lively biography of Nicholson, who died in 2004. He made Mullery his captain when he signed him from Fulham for the then British record fee of £72,000 and it has given Mullery an interesting inside track.
His co-author also knew Nicholson well. Paul Trevillion grew up in the shadow of White Hart Lane, and had access to the players as an illustrator for the club magazine and local papers.
His first encounter with Nicholson was when he bunked off school in 1947 to catch players as they left a training session.
Paul says: “I drew all the Tottenham players in those early days and I would ask them to sign the sketch. Bill Nicholson signed it and we became friends from then on.”
He isn’t a ghost writer: the pair have collaborated on the book and it means you get two versions of what made Nicholson a great footballer manager. The view from both the dressing room and the view from the stands.
Add to this a foreword by Nicholson’s right hand man, coach Eddie Baily, and this is as comprehensive a guide to Nicholson as you can hope to find.
Mullery makes it clear he could be ruthless. If their off-field life interfered with Saturday afternoons, you were out, that was made clear, had no qualms and no one was too big. Nicholson’s own football career embedded in him a set of values that he passed on to his teams. He played under Arthur Rowe at Spurs, the manager who invented ‘push-and-run’ football, and won the league championship with a theory that what you did off the ball was at least as important as what you did on it.
Nicholson was born in Scarborough in 1919, one of five brothers and four sisters. His father was a driver of a Hansom horse-drawn cab. He played football for a Young Liberals side in a local league where he was spotted by Spurs scouts.
After a trial, Nicholson was offered a job earning £2 a week as a ground staff boy, which meant he got to play little football. “He said he had painted every square inch of the Spurs ground, and when he wasn’t painting, he was working on the pitch,” writes Mullery.
Like many players of his time, his career was interrupted by the war.
Nicholson became a sergeant in the Durham Light Infantry and then became a fitness instructor. “Having been worked over by Bill at the Spurs training ground, I can imagine how hard Bill worked those soldiers,” says Mullery.
“He would have had the fittest troops in the army.”
Nicholson broke into the Spurs side in 1948 and won the second division championship with them in 1950, followed by their first division championship in 1951. Nicholson stopped playing in 1955, and immediately took on a coaching role.
He was appointed manager in 1958 after helping coach England in the 1958 Swedish World Cup and in his first game in charge set the tone for the rest of his Spurs career by overseeing a game in which Spurs scored 10 goals against Everton, while conceding four in reply. And this, according to Mullery, was the template for Nicholson’s Spurs.
“I found immediately what Bill’s world at Tottenham was all about,” writes Mullery. “Bill was obsessed by winning, and I mean totally obsessed. But that wasn’t all, he was obsessed about winning in style.”
It was this drive for perfection, says Muller, that made him one of the great managers in English club football.
Nicholson left in 1974: partly because he felt the game had changed for the worse, and partly because of a night when Spurs fans were involved in running fights with rival team’s supporters and police during a UEFA Cup away tie in Rotterdam.
But, as the club begins to make a resurgence in the league, this timely book shows how Bill Nicholson made Spurs one of the best-loved and most fashionable clubs in Britain.