It took Bill Nicholson less than three seasons to win the Double of league and FA Cup with Tottenham Hotspur, but he spent another 13 as Spurs manager plagued by the memory of receding glory.
‘The Double was fabulous,†he once reflected, ‘but there was also disappointment for me when we did not put our Double feat out of anybody’s reach by doing it for a second year in succession.â€
Nicholson became disillusioned with the growing greed and commercialism of modern football, but still remained part of the scene to remind White Hart Lane of an unforgettable period when Tottenham took the English game to new levels of skill and imagination.
Bill Nick was further proof that halfbacks, like Matt Busby and Bill Shankly, made good managers. His eight years as a Tottenham player were worthy rather than outstanding. Nicholson was a piston in Arthur Rowe’s ‘push-and-run†Spurs side that followed promotion to the old First Division in 1950 with the league championship in 1951.
His England career began and ended with a solitary appearance against Portugal in a friendly at Goodison Park in the spring of 1951. Nicholson scored one of the goals in a 5-2 win but was not asked back, Billy Wright being around at the time.
Yet Nicholson was learning the game of football inside out all the same. He had coached the Tottenham team for three years before taking over as manager from Jimmy Anderson on a Saturday in October 1958. Anderson had fallen out with Danny Blanchflower, who had signed for Tottenham from Aston Villa in 1954, and at the start of the 1958/59 season Spurs were only a point clear of the bottom three with nine points from 11 games.
Yet Anderson had done much to lay the foundations from which the 20th century’s first Double was to be achieved. Bobby Smith, Cliff Jones, Terry Dyson and Maurice Norman were already on the club’s books. Add to these Blanchflower and the wispy wizardry of Tommy Harmer and it is a wonder that even after Nicholson became manager the team continued to struggle. In that first season under Nicholson both Blanchflower and Harmer were dropped.
Not until the following March did Nicholson admit he needed Blanchflower. Tottenham had lost four matches in succession but once Blanchflower was handed back the captaincy the team never looked back. Within a week Spurs had routed Leicester City 6-0 but they still finished 18th out of 22.
As Easter approached, Nicholson signed Dave Mackay from Hearts. In hindsight that could be said to have been the moment when the seeds of the Double were sown.
For the people who watched it the football played by Tottenham at the start of the 1959/60 season produced sensations similar to those experienced by the crowds now held in thrall by Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal side. This was something new, football with skill, vision, wit and imagination that had never before been seen in the English game.
‘Make it simple, make it quick†had been Rowe’s motto. Nicholson’s Tottenham passed the ball and ran off it with equally good instincts but the style was more orthodox with fewer interchanges of position.
This Spurs team had wings, wing-halves, a stopper centre-half and a centre-forward. It was the quality of the players that made them special. Jones in full flight was awesome to behold, Blanchflower could open up a defence with the drop of a shoulder, Smith not only scored with head or foot but held the line and linked the play as well as any modern striker, and John White was a wraith with a rapier.
In some ways, Tottenham played better football for more of the time in the season before the Double than they did in winning it. Certainly their completion of the feat in the 1961 FA Cup final was one of their least impressive performances. Leicester City were threatening to dominate the game when an injury to Len Chalmers reduced them to 10 men.
Yet one indifferent afternoon could not dull the brilliance of Spurs’ achievement. With Jimmy Greaves added to the attack Tottenham retained the FA Cup the following season by beating Burnley, the nation’s other classicists at that time, in a match that satisfied the aesthetic senses more than most finals before or since.
Nicholson, never at ease with notebooks, microphones or TV cameras, grunted when the beauty of the game was put to him as he left the arena. ‘I didn’t like it,†he said, ‘not hard enough.â€
He himself remained true to the basics.
‘People rightly talk about the team’s skills,†he observed, ‘but they don’t seem to recall that the team succeeded because it was very fit and very well organised. That was almost disguised by the skill.â€
A month before the 1962 FA Cup final Tottenham had lost unluckily to Benfica in the semifinals of the European Cup. Spurs won the now-defunct European Cup-Winners’ Cup the following season but the peak had already been passed. More successes in the FA Cup, League Cup and Uefa Cup followed and more big signings — Martin Peters, Terry Venables, Ralph Coates, Martin Chivers — were made, but the character and chemistry of the Double team were never recreated.
Nicholson, always a fair man, began to lose his earlier rapport with the players. Greaves, with his drinking problems, was a shadow of what he had been. After Spurs had lost an FA Cup fourth-round replay 1-0 at Crystal Palace early in 1970, Greaves never played for them again.
Four years later, plagued by a long-standing dispute with Chivers and a poor start to the season, angered by what he considered were unreasonable demands from players he wanted to sign, wounded by the fans’ rioting in Rotterdam the previous spring and with results going from bad to worse, Nicholson called it a day. By then, his resignation was regarded as inevitable.
In any case the press had other things on its mind. Like the new and exciting manager of the champions, Leeds United: another Yorkshireman, Brian Clough, who was sacked a fortnight later. —