One of the delights of listening to David Pleat talk football is that there is no telling where any given storyline might travel through the memories he has filed away from a lifetime in the game.
The time he went to cast an eye over Son Heung-min playing for Hamburg pivots to a signed shirt from Harry Kane before settling on Clive Allen’s 49-goal season for Tottenham.
‘Just a brilliant finisher,’ says Pleat, 79. ‘Clive liked to feel the net. At the end of a session on a Friday he would finish right and left-foot volleys into a little five-a-side goal, bang, bang, bang.
‘We had wonderful suppliers for him. Glenn Hoddle in a lovely loose position where he didn’t have to worry about what was behind him. Ossie Ardiles was the link man. Paul Allen was the ferret. Steve Hodge was underrated, he worked the left side, out to wide and back inside, whereas Chris Waddle was a very orthodox winger, chalk on his boots and very dangerous on the right.
‘We were unbalanced but Hoddle was free to take up any position he wanted. He really enjoyed it and went on to play for Monaco in the same position. And he gives all the credit evidently to Arsene Wenger because of the nutrition but that’s when he was at his best, in our five-man midfield.’
These crisp little conversational triangles with disguised angles echo the way he liked his teams to play football and traces of humour make for a fascinating 90 minutes in his company. His knowledge is vast, his mind is still sharp.
Pleat, immersed in professional football for 62 years since his debut as a nippy winger for Nottingham Forest, now skips through time with swift and certain recall, reviving great characters such as John Lyall, the former West Ham manager.
‘I always liked John, a really nice man although he did nick Frank McAvennie off me,’ he says. ‘I’ll always remember McAvennie, black shirt, white tie, red socks.
‘I had him down from St Mirren in the Bedford Arms in Woburn. I shouldn’t have let him get away that night. Too many people in the room, that was one problem. Our chairman slapped him on the head and said, “Welcome to Luton, Macca” and that annoyed him.
‘He wanted a basic wage of £400 a week. We couldn’t pay it. I told him with bonuses he could be making £450 a week but £400 a week was his statement.
‘This went on until about half past 10 and then he got away and when the secretary went to pick him up the following morning he’d gone. John met him at 2am at Toddington and signed him.’
Many of his favourite tales are self-deprecatory, like the closing chapter of his first managerial job at Nuneaton Borough. His goalkeeper missed a big game against Ron Atkinson’s Kettering to have a vasectomy and his replacement conceded four. Atkinson reckons it was 4-0. Pleat is sure it was 4-1. Either way, Pleat was out of work the next day.
‘The best sacking though came at Leicester,’ he goes on. ‘We had no money. We lost Russell Osman, Gary McAllister and Mike Newell, and never replaced them properly. The chairman Terry Shipman would say, “You’ve got us loads of pounds but no points”.
‘Then one day he rang me up and said, “We’ve had a board meeting and it’s bad news. The board — not me — they’ve decided you’ve got to go”. I said, “It’s OK Mr Chairman, you’ve been good to me”. And he said, “It’s worse than that. They want me out as well”.’
The passion burns through. Love for the game, you might call it. Despite all the punishing blows it can dispense. All the sackings and the public criticism that goes with the territory.
Tottenham have let him go three times since his appointment as manager in 1986. Most recently this summer when released from a role as recruitment consultant, another victim of technical director Johan Lange’s crusade towards a data-driven future.
‘Scouts don’t get thanked,’ says Pleat. ‘There was a great Welsh scout at Luton called Cyril Beech, a full back at Swansea in the years of Terry Medwin and John Charles.
‘Cyril would write a long letter to me every two weeks. I could hardly decipher his handwriting but in that letter would be about six names, players he thought were good enough for us. We signed nearly every one.
‘I’m sure we never thanked him as we should. You’ll always need the eyes and ears of the scouts. There are things you don’t see on the data.’
His second Spurs exit marked the end of his tenure as the club’s first director of football, having been appointed by Lord Sugar in 1998 at a time when very few on these shores saw any value in the role.
‘Sugar was a visionary,’ says Pleat. ‘One, Sky dishes. Two, directors of football, because now they’ve all got them. Three, prune juice.
‘He told the Premier League chairmen the new TV money coming in would be like prune juice. He said they’d p*** it up the wall. And they did. He wanted them to cap salaries at 60 per cent and invest the rest in new academies and training centres.
‘He could be brusque — I can picture him walking around the boardroom table munching on his celery and grapes with the chief executive and secretary looking up at him — but he did have a bit of humour.’
Another Sugarism stuck with Pleat. ‘He said, “Just remember, when anyone comes and asks the price of a player you tell them lobster. Just say lobster”. I said, “What do you mean, lobster?” He said, “Price of the Day”. That’s what Sugar said, “Tell them lobster”. It’s what they’ve done with Marc Guehi at Crystal Palace.’
Pleat’s first Spurs exit, however, remains by some distance the most painful and the hardest to discuss. Forced out of the manager’s job after the lurid headlines in a tabloid newspaper, a story based upon the claims of a sex worker which he has always fiercely refuted.
He calls it a ‘salacious farrago of inventions’ and ‘a complete fabrication’ as he returns to the subject for the first time in his autobiography Just One More Goal. ‘I had to address it,’ says Pleat. ‘It’s been an important element of my life. It’s not something I’m pleased about, and I find it difficult to talk about, absolutely.’
He devotes a chapter to it, entitled ‘Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down’, which was a note that came with flowers from Elton John at the time, and explains how a series of clues fell into place, leading him to suspect former Luton chairman David Evans had set him up as revenge for walking out of the club for
Tottenham. Evans, who died in 2008, had threatened ‘you’ll pay for this’ after Pleat confirmed his intention to leave. As a Conservative MP for a decade from June 1987, Evans had power and influence.
‘Like a detective, the pieces of this ugly jigsaw now fell into place before me,’ Pleat writes. ‘I could see Evans now, turning towards me on my driveway on the day he had failed to prevent me joining Tottenham, shouting, “You’ll pay for this”. I paid and my family paid a terrible, grievous price.
‘There were times I felt unable to leave the house. I felt swallowed up by the shame of the accusations.’
Pleat’s final game as Spurs boss was a north London derby, won 2-1 by Arsenal whose supporters revelled in his discomfort. A month earlier, Spurs had been second. This defeat left them in seventh and chairman Irving Scholar suggested he should resign.
‘I had no other alternative at the time,’ Pleat reflects. ‘The headlines were so strong I couldn’t resist them. It was too much to handle. Scholar was quite supportive at first but we’d fallen out over one or two things and in the end, he turned the other way and I think it’s because they’d spoken to Terry Venables and it semi-suited them.
‘So it was difficult. What do you do? I didn’t have a solicitor at the time. No one to turn to. This was before Elton John and one or two others had won big damages. If you go to court, there’s an outside chance of losing.’
Tottenham finished third in his only full season, Allen scored 49 goals and they lost to Coventry in a thrilling FA Cup final.
‘People ask me if we would have gone on to be a better team with time,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure. Hoddle was disappearing to Monaco. Ossie was 35.’ People also wonder if Pleat might have gone on to manage England without the scandal. ‘I never thought about it,’ he replies. Although one thing is for sure, the inexorable rise came to a halt.
It started at Luton, where he had been initially tasked with odd-jobs like taking lottery tickets and spot-the-ball coupons to schools and factories, before taking over as reserve coach and then replacing Harry Haslam as first-team boss.
This, Pleat identifies as his happiest time. Learning his craft and building his team. Winning promotion to the top flight as champions, avoiding an instant relegation with that final-day win at Manchester City when he came skipping on to the pitch in celebration, hugging his captain Brian Horton.
Luton became established. They were ninth in his final season and Pleat had a reputation for spotting talent such as Ricky Hill, Brian Stein and Mal Donaghy and reviving careers of those like Mick Harford and Steve Foster.
‘Every year things got a little bit better,’ he says. ‘The board tolerated me, the crowd started enjoying how we were playing. I made good signings. David Moss for £100,000, a very good left winger who got 24 goals one season. Hill for nothing. Stein I saw playing for Edgware Town one night.
‘David Preece from Walsall, Peter Nicholas from Crystal Palace, Foster from Villa reserves, Harford from Birmingham reserves, all four were successful and that’s hard to do. Get three out of every five wrong in recruitment and eventually you’ll lose your job. I must have been lucky.’
Nine of Luton’s League Cup winning team of 1988 were signed by Pleat, who was an emotional observer from the TV gantry at Wembley, where he was on co-commentary with Brian Moore. By then, he had been in and out of Tottenham and was managing in the second tier at Leicester.
There followed a return to Luton and relegation at the outset of the Premier League, and two years at Sheffield Wednesday which was his last permanent managerial role, although he stepped in as Tottenham’s caretaker on three occasions while director of football.
Pleat hardly fails to reel off players he missed. They include Stuart Pearce and Kevin Phillips but his sharp eye for talent endured, and his belief that unpolished gems still exist in football’s depths remains strong.
Spurs chairman Daniel Levy trusted him to evaluate a player and employed him for 14 years as a recruitment consultant. Pleat was the force behind signing Dele Alli from Milton Keynes Dons and played a significant role in others, including Son, Jan Vertonghen and Christian Eriksen.
Although he has become increasingly frustrated by football’s appetite to bring in players from abroad. ‘I’ve always thought the academies should be producing players for the senior team,’ says Pleat. ‘That’s the idea of a youth policy. Now it’s not happening.’
Perhaps Pleat is thinking back to his own flying start, a Nottingham Forest debut at 17 years and 33 days making him the club’s youngest player after caps for England Schoolboys. At 23 he was a fully qualified coach and at 26 player-manager of Nuneaton.
‘I’ve been blessed to survive,’ he says. ‘Many people I know haven’t had long careers in the game so I’m very grateful.
‘But I don’t like to hear people saying the game’s better now than ever. Is it? I’d like to think the game was as good then as it is now. And the great players from then would still be great players today.
‘They’d be fitter and playing on beautiful grass pitches with a lovely ball and lightweight boots, the modern player has so many advantages, but don’t you think Tony Currie, Alan Hudson and Paul Gascoigne wouldn’t be good players today? Of course they would. We’ve turned the game into rocket science and they’re selling you something on every corner. There used to be a greater camaraderie inside football.
‘The game is still a beautiful game. A ballet, a wonderful athletic game at the best level, but I have to say it has lost its charm.’
Just One More Goal by David Pleat, published by Biteback, £20.
