When the Spurs Go Marching Down
Tottenham are facing up to the threat of relegation, but what happened last time they went down? How did they go from the Uefa Cup final to Division Two in three years?
Tottenham Hotspur’s relegation in 1977 did not make the waves that Manchester United’s had three years earlier, but it was nonetheless a seismic event. They may only have won two league titles, but Spurs were one of the grandees of the English game, the first British team to win a European competition, a regular collector of silverware and a First Division side since 1950. Just three years earlier they had been the Uefa Cup final. So what went wrong?
Nothing ever just happens. There are always reasons, deeper forces, trends that come together. Perhaps some of the energy had started to drain from Tottenham even before the that 1974 Uefa Cup final, but that serves as a useful starting point. After a 2-2 draw in the first leg, Spurs lost 2-0 away to Feyenoord amid serious crowd trouble that left their manager Bill Nicholson in despair. He had played in the side that had won the league in 1950-51, had taken over as manager in 1958 and had led them to the Double in 1960-61. As he readily admitted, he lost a lot of his love for football that night in Rotterdam and he offered his resignation after Spurs began 1974-75 with four successive defeats.
The board accepted, so long as he would stay on until they had appointed a successor. Nicholson favoured a partnership of John Giles working with Danny Blanchflower. The board, probably wisely, ignored the claims of what would surely have been a combustible duo, but unthinkably appointed the promising young Hull manager Terry Neill, with some directors apparently unaware that he had spent 11 years playing for Arsenal. After a miserable start, they won five of their final seven games, avoiding the drop two days after the scheduled close of the season by winning 4-2 against a Leeds side preparing for the European Cup final.
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Many of the players were sceptical of Neill and his Arsenal connections, seeing him as too young and his assistant Wilf Dixon, who had been assistant to Harry Catterick at Everton in the previous decade, as old-fashioned. But Neill too was disillusioned, upset to discover that Nicholson had been given only a £5000 pay-off by an ungrateful board. A promising young side Spurs came ninth in 1975-76, the improvement enough to persuade Arsenal to appoint him to succeed Bertie Mee that summer, which tended to confirm in Spurs minds what they had felt about Neill all along; he was just never right for the job.
Tottenham turned to Keith Burkinshaw, who had been part of Neill’s backroom staff. He had gone on holiday at the end of the season and only learned that Neill had gone when he picked up a days-old newspaper in the hotel in Spain. Fearing he might not have a job, he applied for the manager’s role and discovered many of the players had already suggested to the board that they should appoint him. It’s fair to say the media was less impressed. “Spurs Give It to Mr Who?” read the headline in the Daily Mirror.
With Mike England, Martin Peters, Alan Gilzean and Martin Chivers all having left, John Duncan missing the majority of the season after back surgery, and Pat Jennings struggling with a groin problem, the squad was inexperienced. Willie Young left for Arsenal before the end of the season, and Alfie Conn went to Celtic. Burkinshaw had never been a manager before. They started poorly, taking one point from their first three games. There was a classic win at Old Trafford, coming for 2-0 down, but after a 1-0 win over Leeds, they got stuck in a run of poor form as they won just one of their following 10 matches, a run that included a League Cup defeat to Third Division Wrexham and an 8-2 humbling at Derby. Then, over the course of four weeks in November, they lost to the other three sides in the bottom four: West Ham, Bristol City and Sunderland. By the spring, a six-way battle against the drop had developed and when Spurs lost to Bristol City in the April, they were one of five teams level on points, two above the Robins.
Others, though, had games in hand. When Tottenham lost 5-0 to Manchester City in their penultimate game, they needed to beat Leicester and hope other results went their way to stay up on goal-difference; realistically, their best chance was West Ham losing their final two games. John Pratt and Jimmy Holmes scored as Spurs did beat Leicester 2-0, but with West Ham drawing 0-0 with Liverpool, their relegation was confirmed.
Tottenham kept faith with Burkinshaw, who led them to promotion the following season, behind Bolton and Southampton and ahead of Brighton only on goal-difference. He would go on to become the most successful post-Nicholson manager, winning two FA Cups and the Uefa Cup in 1984. He left a few days later following a dispute with the board – the comment he supposedly made that “There used to be a football club over there” was actually made by the journalist Ken Jones, but it aptly summed up his mood on his departure.
Football now, of course, is very different to the game of half a century ago. Major shock as it was then that Tottenham were relegated, it would be far greater in the modern age. But certain parallels can be seen, from the appointment of inappropriate managers to the unavailability of attacking and creative players to the slow dawning sense that there was about to be a reckoning for years of careless leadership.
As players return, Tottenham should still get out of it, but 1977 stands as a warning that relegation is possible for a club of their stature.