Shirts, Shorts and Spurs. Roy Reyland
my dad at such an early age.
I was playing for Ware and Hertford, good semi-professional teams, and my dad missed all that. I remember he saw me play once in my early years, when I got picked to play for the league against the Maccabi League for Jewish boys. But Dad passed away just before I was 18, and, although I don’t drink, I often regret that I never got the chance to have a beer with my old man. And one of my biggest regrets is that I never went to Spurs with my dad.
Nevertheless, I still kept playing football, and I went back and played in the Edmonton Sunday league, for Park Royal, and then the best team in the league, called Crown. But the loss of my dad had left a huge hole in my life, and I was fortunate that my brother-in-law Roger spent so much time with me, and always took me to the games. Although I missed my dad awfully, I really threw myself into supporting Spurs. And it was a fine time to be supporting the boys in white. In 1972, we played in the first ever UEFA Cup football tournament and progressed to the final where we met Wolverhampton Wanderers in a two-legged contest. We were victorious, winning the tie 3–2 on aggregate, after a 2–1 victory away from home, in which Martin Chivers scored a remarkable late winner from 25 yards. Then we drew 1–1 in the second leg at White Hart Lane, eventually winning the competition and becoming European champions. It was a remarkable time to be a Spurs fan living in Tottenham.
Football became my life, and Spurs my everything, as I tried to distract myself from the loss of my father. But times were hard for a single-parent family in the 1970s, and I realised I had to quickly become a man. I started work as a window cleaner, but I was desperate to find a job that would excite me as much as football, that might give me the same buzz as Spurs and Subbuteo. It was then that my mum got a job as a cleaner for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, and one night she came home with the news that there was a job available at White Hart Lane, on the ground staff. I thought, ‘Why not?’
I signed for Tottenham Hotspur as a 22-year-old in 1978, only not as a left-winger as originally intended, but as a member of the ground staff. Which was lucky, because, if they had given me a medical, I would have failed, having picked up a knee injury playing amateur football. And in a brief glimpse into the fantastic treatment I was to receive from the club, Mike Varney, the physio, said he’d take a look at my knee, which was causing me much trouble. I hadn’t been at the club long, so I was startled at the personal treatment I was receiving.
They told me I’d need a small operation and that the official Spurs surgeon, a talented man called Pat England, would perform it. It all sounded straightforward but, after the operation in the nearby Queen Anne Hospital, I woke up to discover that I had a plaster cast from groin to toe, which was devastating and very frightening.
‘When Mr England operated,’ the doctor told me, ‘it turned out you’d torn your anterior ligament.’ This was a disaster! He went on, ‘We’ve taken some ligament out of your knee, we’ve tightened up the ligaments and we’ve pinned them.’
I said, ‘Hang on, I need to get a grip of what is happening here. How long before I can play again?’
I’ll never forget his exact words: ‘Let’s make sure you can walk again, first.’
Now, when Mr England came back, I tearfully recounted what the doctor had told me. ‘Roy, you will walk and you will play again, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Nine months, and you’ll be playing again.’
To a bystander, you’d think the Spurs surgeon was talking to a centre forward with his career on the line! But that’s how they made me feel. The club completely rehabilitated me, as if I was a player. I used to go to treatment in the morning and do my ground-staff duty in the afternoon. Nine months and one day after the op, I was invited to play in a staff game, and once again I was kicking a ball, wearing lily-white and blue. I was back where I belonged, on the pitch, playing for Tottenham… in some capacity. You see, when you’ve got Tottenham Hotspur in your blood, it never leaves you. I suppose that’s why they sing on the terraces, ‘I’m Tottenham Till I Die.’ I knew then that I’d be at the club for as long as I could.
Mick Stockwell, the man who interviewed me for the position, was in charge of telling me all about life at the club. When I asked him, ‘What does the job consist of?’ he just smiled and said, ‘Everything’. He went on, ‘One day you’ll be a plumber, another day an electrician, a glazer, a groundsman, anything and everything.’
And he was right. For four years, I did just about every job in that stadium.
After every Saturday game, we used to come in on the Monday and sweep the stadium. We used to sweep every row, and then sweep the terracing, then everything else. Can you believe it took us three days to sweep the entire White Hart Lane stadium, and there were ten of us at it? You swept all the stands, seats, the concourses, underneath the enclosure and the car parks. And if there was a midweek game, they’d employ part-timers to come in and get it all crashed out in time for Saturday. Sweeping White Hart Lane was like painting the Forth Bridge – as soon as it was finished, it needed doing again!
We used to do all the cleaning too, including the toilets, the offices and the dressing rooms. I swear I’ve done more sweeping at White Hart Lane than Ledley King! But as an introduction to working at Spurs, it was invaluable. I got to know my way round that ground like it was the back of my hand. I’ve fixed the plumbing in the toilets, replaced light bulbs in the boardrooms, and, rather touchingly, it was one of my jobs to paint those big blue doors on the Worcester Avenue end of the stadium. The very same doors I’d spent my childhood pelting with footballs.
One of the worst jobs I ever did at the Lane was replacing the windows at the Worcester Avenue end. We had to take away the glass and replace it with Perspex, because local kids kept putting them through with their footballs. I’ve never been so cold, because it was midwinter, and the second you took the glass out, the biting cold wind howled through. But you know, doing the shitty jobs was all made worthwhile because you were doing it for Tottenham Hotspur. You got out what you put in, and Tottenham was one of the most exciting clubs to be with during this period in our history.
We’d just been promoted after a brief sojourn in Division 2, where we’d been relegated for the first time since 1950. From the very start of the 1976/77 season, Spurs had been in trouble, and Keith Burkinshaw, in his maiden season as manager at White Hart Lane, struggled to bring home the results. Martin Chivers had left to play in Switzerland, and John Duncan – Spurs’ top scorer for the previous two seasons – spent the season on the treatment table, leaving our forward line as effective as that proverbial chocolate teapot. The defence wasn’t much better, and, despite the signing of John Gorman, injuries rocked the team, with even the reliable goalkeeper Pat Jennings being ruled out.
If we were to fail to impress the White Hart Lane faithful in the league, worse was to come in the cup. We crashed out to Second Division Cardiff City in the FA Cup and, worse, to Third Division Wrexham in the League Cup. Spurs finished rock bottom in the First Division, and were promptly relegated, much to the dismay of the fans, many of whom took it for granted that Tottenham Hotspur would forever be a First Division outfit. But the board kept their faith in Burkinshaw, who did everything he could to send Spurs straight back to where they belonged.
As Spurs fans spent the summer of 1978 watching the World Cup, held in Argentina, they contemplated life back in the First Division. Like them, I had watched Ossie Ardiles win the World Cup on television that summer, with no idea that he would be coming to play for Spurs. I was bursting with excitement when rumour suggested that Ossie and Ricky Villa would come to Spurs. Ricky was a bit-part player in that World Cup, and Keith Burkinshaw had tried initially to sign just him, but somehow we compromised and a deal was struck that included Ossie too. It turned out to be a dream partnership, and a bargain to boot. I had just started at Tottenham myself, and I remember when they first turned up to training, these two foreign