David Pleat can still remember the names, 64 years on.
He was a 15-year-old boy when Tottenham Hotspur came to the City Ground to play Pleat’s local team, Nottingham Forest.
It was 15 October, 1960. The Beatles were still in Hamburg. John F. Kennedy had not won the presidential election yet and Bill Nicholson’s Spurs were the best team in the country. They won 4-0 that afternoon, John White scoring the best of their goals. They went on to win the domestic double, the first English team to do so since 1897.
“That was the greatest team I saw, no question about that,” Pleat says with a smile. “To this day, I can tell you (the starting XI): (Bill) Brown, (Peter) Baker, (Ron) Henry, (Danny) Blanchflower, (Maurice) Norman, (Dave) Mackay, (Terry) Dyson, (John) White, (Bobby) Smith, Les Allen and Cliff Jones. I never forget that side. That was the side that I hold up. And, in my opinion, that side was probably the best side Tottenham have had all through the years, whatever anyone says about the differences between modern football and latterly.”
That afternoon, Tottenham took a place in Pleat’s heart. They would always be his favourite team, after the one he was playing for or coaching. And that memory, that linking of Tottenham with a certain approach to the game, inspired a lifetime’s work.
Pleat finally had his chance to manage Spurs in 1986. He went on to return to the club as director of football, caretaker manager in multiple spells and then, finally, as a scout. His association with the club ended this summer, 38 years after he first worked there. Pleat tells the story of his life in football in his autobiography Just One More Goal, which is out next week.
It makes Pleat a unique figure in Tottenham’s modern history.
He is one of the few people to work closely for Irving Scholar, Alan Sugar and for Daniel Levy — the three men who have chaired Tottenham over the last 40 years. He managed Ossie Ardiles, Chris Waddle and Glenn Hoddle, and even replaced Hoddle as caretaker manager in 2003. And his legacy at Spurs is still there. Of the current team, Son Heung-min, Ben Davies and James Maddison were all scouted by Pleat. Perhaps his proudest moment was unearthing Dele Alli from MK Dons and persuading the club to sign him, one of the club’s best transfers of the modern era.
But long before Pleat was a scout, caretaker manager or director of football, he was the manager of an exceptionally good Spurs team.
Pleat was at Luton Town for eight years, taking them from the Second Division and into the top half of the top flight. During that time he was mentioned as a potential England manager, and turned down offers to leave Luton for various other sides: Sunderland, Ipswich Town, Southampton and Queens Park Rangers. “I met all these people over a period of time who all wanted me to leave Luton and I didn’t,” he says. “I waited and waited.”
The right move came when he took a call from a friend of Irving Scholar asking if he might want to replace Peter Shreeves at Spurs. Pleat jumped at the chance, taking over after being an ITV pundit at the 1986 World Cup. “Tottenham still had a wonderful reputation for playing football in the right way,” he says. “As Blanchflower said, the game is about glory. People go to work five days a week, they come on a Saturday; they don’t want to be bored.
“They want excitement, they want something to talk about.”
Pleat was excited by the challenge of living up to the best traditions of the club. And he had far more established players at his disposal than he did at Kenilworth Road: Hoddle, Chris Waddle and Osvaldo Ardiles. “The players were already there,” Pleat says. “It was just a matter of fitting them in the right compartments.”
Spurs started slowly but an injury to Tony Galvin forced a re-think. Pleat decided to try an innovative five-man midfield behind a lone striker in Clive Allen. “Hoddle finally settled in the best position ever for him,” Pleat says. “There was always that in a two-man midfield — that Glenn didn’t do the same amount of work. Of course he didn’t, he was a talented player, he was a player people were in awe of.
“We put Glenn in the end as a second striker, a ‘loose striker’, he could do what he wanted to do. He didn’t have to defend.”
Out on the right was Waddle, so wide that he “got his boots white”. Paul Allen was “the ferret” in the middle, alongside Ardiles who was the “link man”. On the left was Steve Hodge, signed from Aston Villa halfway through that season. “He had wonderful energy, terrific work rate, never appreciated by the crowd,” Pleat says. “But he played left-sided, wide left, inside-left and left-half.”
After a 4-2 win at Oxford on 22 November, Tottenham “turned a corner and never looked back”. They went on a brilliant run in the league, eventually finishing third. They reached the semi-final of the League Cup and the final of the FA Cup, where they faced Coventry City. Spurs were favourites but lost 3-2 in one of the most memorable finals in history.
Pleat still sounds disappointed 37 years on, and is still able to analyse the game in great detail: pointing to the man-marking job Lloyd McGrath did on Hoddle, the aerial advantage Cyrille Regis had over Richard Gough, the struggle of Spurs left-back Mitchell Thomas to stop Dave Bennett from getting crosses in, and the failure of referee Neil Midgley to send Brian Kilcline off for a bad foul on Gary Mabbutt. “He was badly injured, that was a terrible turning point.”
The whole experience Pleat calls a “bad dream”.
It is a sign of how much football — and the manager’s job — has changed since then that Pleat’s weekend was overshadowed by a row about Spurs’ shirts. A mix-up meant that only half of the team had the name of sponsor Holsten on the front. An emergency board meeting was called at Tottenham the next morning to find out what happened, and Pleat had to attend a meeting with Holsten the day after to smooth relations with the brewing company that provided such a lucrative deal.
Spurs also pressed ahead with their plans for an open-top bus parade from White Hart Lane to Tottenham Town Hall, even though they had lost and despite torrential rain. “It p***ed with rain. People were getting soaked who came to watch us. There weren’t a lot of people, not crowds. Coventry were having a massive procession. And we were forlorn.”
Pleat resigned the following season but remains hugely proud of that innovative, nearly great Spurs team. Of course, the 1960-61 team is the pinnacle but Pleat ranks his side as “the third-best, in terms of attractive football”. He was also a huge admirer of Mauricio Pochettino’s Spurs team, who went one better than Pleat’s, finishing second in the league in 2016-17. “Pochettino got a very good side together,” he says, “and he was a pleasant man, a nice man.”
Ultimately, Pleat knows that any Tottenham manager — from Nicholson to Ange Postecoglou — has to meet expectations from the fans about trying to play a certain way. “We will never lose that. I think (Jose) Mourinho proved that. And even George (Graham) proved that.”
Because Pleat’s return to Tottenham was in part dominated by the question of who was the right sort of manager for Spurs.
In 1998, Alan Sugar wanted some more football expertise in the White Hart Lane boardroom. And he decided to bring back Pleat, 11 years after his departure, as the club’s first director of football. This was a new step for a big English club but Sugar had seen the model work in Italy and wanted to try it in England.
“Sugar and (then Ipswich chairman David Sheepshanks) wrote a letter to the League Managers’ Association saying why directors of football should be important to a club,” Pleat says. “They keep the strategy of the club, the philosophy of the club, regardless of who the manager is. They’re the buffer between the dressing room and the board. We had people on the board who were from commerce, stockbroking, lawyers, (Spurs board member) Igal Yawetz who was a brilliant architect. Most boards have no one with a football background.”
Pleat repeatedly calls Sugar a “visionary” for seeing this, and for appointing him to the job at Spurs.
A few months after Pleat arrived, Sugar told him he had a new idea. He was going to appoint former Arsenal manager Graham.
Pleat had known Graham for almost 40 years — they played against each other for England and Scotland schoolboys — but he sensed there would be an issue. “What Sugar didn’t realise is how George played,” Pleat says. “He thought George’s record was so good that people would forgive him if he gets the results. George had a reputation for being solid, well-organised, defensive-minded. With a clear definition of how he wanted to play.”
Graham’s approach to the game was not exactly in the best traditions of Nicholson and Blanchflower. He had an issue with David Ginola, whom he wanted to drop back into midfield to compete for second balls rather than staying out wide on the wing. Ginola used to come into Pleat’s office after training and discuss it with him. Pleat, who built his own Spurs team with Waddle as a wide winger, sympathised with Ginola. “I loved David Ginola, I loved him — as a man, everything about him.”
Eventually, Graham was sacked and replaced by Hoddle but the hope of a new Spurs team in the traditions of the club did not materialise. Pleat himself ended up having to replace his former player Hoddle as caretaker for most of the 2003-04 season.
Pleat left Spurs at the end of that season and was replaced by Frank Arnesen, starting the succession of directors of football (and managing directors of football and technical directors) that goes all the way through Damien Comolli, Franco Baldini, Fabio Paratici through to Johan Lange today.
But there was another big change during Pleat’s time at Spurs at the start of this century: the arrival of Levy as chairman, ending Sugar’s nine-year spell in charge. Pleat remembers Sugar taking him to meet Levy soon after ENIC had bought Sugar’s shares, in Levy’s office off Regent Street. “I want you to go and meet this man who’s going to take over Tottenham,” Sugar said. Sugar told Levy that Pleat would help him to “learn the ropes”.
Pleat has a rare perspective on Tottenham’s modern history given he worked so closely with their last three chairmen. So how do they compare?
“Scholar was self-confident, almost to the extent of arrogance, and wanted to run perhaps before he could walk,” Pleat says. “Alan Sugar was brusque, could be gruff, but he had humour at times. I have lovely memories of him walking around the boardroom table, munching his grapes, his cheese and his celery.”
And Levy? “Daniel is a quiet man. Businesslike. You don’t know what he’s thinking, which is very clever; he’s got a poker face, expressionless at times. He’s a very clever man. But he’s made a lot of changes.”
Pleat’s modern legacy at Spurs concerns his return to the club as a scout in 2010. He truly loves footballers and he lights up when discussing the players he watched and recommended to Spurs. He knows how common it is for people to burnish their own records in this regard — “Every book I read, all the scouts all saw Bale, all went to their manager and said ‘sign Bale, sign Bale” — but he gives an honest of account of the players he did watch.
Spurs signed Son from Bayer Leverkusen in 2015 but Pleat watched him before then at Hamburg, when he was available for just £12million ($15.8m). But Son was returning from injury, did not look fit enough, and was part of a poor Hamburg team.
Pleat watched Christian Eriksen at Ajax and thought at that point he was “erratic, maybe a one-in-three player”, before he found more consistency. But he saw Jan Vertonghen at Ajax, too, and immediately saw what a “leader” he was. He watched Ben Davies at Swansea City, another link to the current team.
Pleat is best known for finding Dele at MK Dons, watching him from the age of 16 in League One. He still remembers the games — Stevenage, Bristol City, Coventry City — and taking Baldini to watch him. Pleat then persuaded the club to pay £5m to sign him. When Dele was established in the Spurs first team, Pleat proudly handed a slightly non-plussed Dele a folder of all the reports he had written on him.
When Tottenham were celebrating their last game at the old White Hart Lane, in May 2017, Levy made a speech in the boardroom thanking everyone for their work to get Spurs to that point. And Pleat, who was there with his grandson, was proud to hear Levy thank him especially for finding Dele, as well as for all his work for the club over the years.
Soon after finding Dele, Pleat found another brilliant 16-year-old playing for Coventry City’s Under-18s against QPR. “The boy (James) Maddison was so good it was like he had eyes in the back of his head,” Pleat smiles. He bumped into Harry Redknapp at half-time who said exactly the same thing. “I went into Tottenham the following morning and said, ‘There’s a boy at Coventry we should sign tomorrow.’ It was an open goal. A tortoise couldn’t have gone slower. They didn’t chase it.”
When Maddison signed for Spurs last year, Pleat joked with him that he was “£40million too late”.
Some players never end up at Spurs at all. Pleat says that he advised Tottenham to sign Jarrod Bowen for £8million from Hull City, Ivan Toney for a similar price, and Ollie Watkins when he was still a box-to-box midfielder at Exeter City. He warns big clubs not to think that the only players good enough for them cost £40m from foreign leagues, and points to the fact that in the 1980s Spurs signed Galvin from Goole Town, Graham Roberts from Weymouth and Mabbutt from Bristol Rovers.
Pleat still has a traditional view on the value of old-fashioned scouting in a fast-changing game. And even though he left Spurs this summer, he still loves the chase, hearing tips on who the best young players are, driving around to watch games, hoping to catch sight of the next big thing.
“The data people, they’re intelligent boys from university who’ve done wonderful dissertations,” Pleat says. “(But) they haven’t been in a dressing room and smelled the liniment. They don’t know that side of it. They’re more intelligent than most football people, and they’re very good at expressing themselves. They’re looking at lung-bursting runs, at intensity, at all sorts of things. But in the end, someone has to go with their eyes and ears.”
Nicholson worked as a scout at Spurs long after he stopped managing, finding some of the players Pleat would go on to manage. Pleat used to see him at Kenilworth Road and asked him why he came all the way to Luton to watch games, staying longer than any of the other scouts who were there.
Nicholson told him: “You’ll be surprised what you learn.”
(Top photo: Pleat upon his appointment at Tottenham in 1986; S&G/PA Images via Getty Images)
