Shirts, Shorts and Spurs. Roy Reyland
Keith had brought, essentially, the first International stars to the First Division. The team was never going to be the same again.
Looking back at Spurs at the time, prior to those boys arriving, we already had Steve Perryman, Steve Archibald, Glenn Hoddle and Tony Galvin. This was becoming some team. As an onlooker, it was interesting to see the two Argentineans fitting into London life and the fast pace of what was then the First Division. Ossie settled in more quickly than Ricky. He was more confident and he adapted to the game quicker. Then Ricky… well, Ricky just evolved. He would come into his own. Ossie picked the game up by the scruff of the neck and just played, but Ricky added another dimension. I used to watch them train whenever I could, and I have to admit I’ve never seen skill like it, the Argentines fitting in well with the English stars we had, like Glenn Hoddle.
Hoddle was a magnificent player, and a great man. I lived near Glenn in Harlow, and I used to have a drink with him occasionally, as I used to play for his uncle Dave’s Sunday team. Glenn and Chrissie Waddle used to watch us play sometimes, and Glenn even managed the side for a while! It was quite the role reversal, them watching one of the ground staff play.
Being able to watch the Spurs matches for free was of course a major perk of being on the ground staff. Instead of standing up behind the Park Lane end with my brother-in-law Roger, I sat with the rest of the staff in a little pen next to the tunnel, with benches specially reserved for us to enjoy the game. Ask anyone who’s ever sat on the bench and they will tell you, it is a pretty crap view. It’s just a mess of legs, running around. But you get used to it, and today watching football from any other angle seems alien. If I go and watch a game at the Lane now and I sit upstairs, it doesn’t look very quick at all. You see all this space that you don’t appreciate from the touchline, because at grass-roots level everything looks so fast.
And with Ardiles, Villa and Hoddle we became a very quick team, the fast Argentines setting an impossible pacemaker for the rest of the league. Together they made the most exciting midfield in the country, although the rest of the team needed a little while to bed in. We only finished in mid-table in the 1978/88 season, and made just the last eight of the FA Cup. But the team began to grow, and in May 1980 Spurs signed Steve Archibald from Aberdeen and later Garth Crooks from Stoke City. Like the Argentines they were both quick, and perfect accessories to the sublime skills of Glenn Hoddle. And by 1980 we had a formidable defence, too. We had an old-fashioned bruiser of a player, Paul Miller, at centre half, and he and Graham Roberts, who was called up to the first team in 1980, were like rocks. They would bash people for free, given the chance. Graham came from non-league football, and he later captained the team and even played for England. You don’t hear many stories like that any more – a player climbing that ladder to such dizzying heights.
I spent that season high up a ladder, too. I think I must have painted nearly every surface of that stadium. All the crash barriers were painted silver, while in the old enclosure we had blue panelling, and I really enjoyed painting them. I used to concrete the steps, too, as they broke away under the force of 40,000 fans trampling over them week in and week out. And I decorated everywhere, from the toilets to the boardroom. My boss then, Micky Stockwell, was a great character and a fabulous man. He was a dead ringer for Sid James. Micky, the maintenance foreman, knew every stopcock, every nail or screw in that entire stadium. We had a painter called Freddy Gold, who was also a great character. When I first started, we sat in this tiny room before work and I used to see him with a massive wad of money, and I’d think, ‘He must be rich!’ That is, until much later I noticed that he used to wrap his banknotes round an old toilet roll!
Then there was Bill Fox; he was a painter too, and another likely lad. Everyone had a bit of banter, and everyone mucked in – they were great times. I worked with ‘fishy’ Bill, although I can’t print why we called him that, and Harry Crossley, a man who with his wife used to put up the young players at their home. Harry looked after Graeme Souness, when he ran back to Scotland homesick, but later returned. Harry always kept in touch with Graeme, and they are still really very close. There were probably five or six of us on the ground staff, and, although the work was tough, the thing was that I didn’t care what I did, so long as it was for Spurs. You see, when you join the team, it becomes personal.
In those days, we also used to do the pitch as well. Bill Nicholson was a consultant in that era, and, although Keith Burkinshaw was now manager, Bill had a big say in the pitch. I remember seeding the six-yard box myself, by hand, using a six-inch plank of wood. You’d seed the length of the plank, move it, and start again. It was painstaking. But the thing with Bill was that he never asked you to do anything or told you what to do: he was out there with you, so I spent one happy summer’s day with Bill Nicholson, hand-seeding the pitch. It is a fond memory.
‘Bill Nick’ was ‘the man’ when I started at Spurs. I had only been at the club a few weeks before I met Bill properly and, when he came over, I felt very nervous and excited. Bill grasped my hand with his, and said, ‘Welcome to the club, son. This is a great club, a family club, and you’ll get looked after here.’ I had quite an affinity for Bill.
Over the years we would grow closer, and in the mid-Eighties I remember taking my two dogs into the ground on my day off to pick something up. I took them in to meet Bill, and he made such a fuss of them. Bill and his wife, Darkie, used to send me a Christmas card, but from that year on, it was always ‘To Roy and family and dogs’. Bill was a lovely, lovely man. He was fantastic to work with and a fascinating man-manager. If you ever talk to people like Steve Perryman, and many of the staff who worked with him, they will say he was authoritative, but he never ranted or raved. His motivational skills were second to none. You’d be painting a panel and he’d make it his business to come and talk to you, and it made us love him.
But back to the late Seventies, when I was really finding my feet at the club. Still a young man in my early twenties, I would enjoy messing around with the apprentices and the other young lads on the staff. The groundsman, Colin White, who started at the same time as me, was a very funny man and a typical Southampton lad with an endearing south coast accent. We struck up a great relationship, and were like two toe rags at Spurs. If there was something to get up to, we’d be in the thick of it, and along with Andy Church, the training groundskeeper, we were like the three amigos. Myself, Colin and Andy would become famous for our pranks with the youth players, and this would really make our name around the club.
Once, Colin and I were over in the car park, kicking lumps of polystyrene into skips. We were just passing the time really, having a bit of fun. We saw Tony Parks, Ian Culverhouse and their gang of apprentices strolling over, and we hatched a plan. The liquid used to whiten the lines was like a chalk white paint, so we got a real heavy, stippled brick and dipped it in the pot, and I swear you wouldn’t tell the difference between that rock-hard brick and the innocent lumps of polystyrene!
Well, Tony being Tony, came over all cocky and said, ‘I’ll show you why I’m going to be a pro and you two will just be ground staff forever!’ (He was very cocky in those days.) And with that, he took an almighty kick at the ‘brick’ and it didn’t move an inch. The language was unbelievable! Talk about turning the air blue. We all ran for it, when suddenly, Tony threw a shovel, and it flew over our heads and stuck straight in the wall, and the handle snapped off! If it had hit either of us in the neck, we’d have been killed instantly. But, oh, how we laughed!
We used to get up to all sorts of mischief in those days. When builders were pulling down the old stand, we would nick their dumper trucks and race them up and down the East Stand concourse, where today you buy your hotdogs and beers. The old East Stand used to have metal pillars but you could walk the whole length, and we would have terrific races between ground staff and players in those dumpsters. We could have killed ourselves, but it was great fun. Competition was fierce between staff and apprentices, and there was an old pool table in the West Stand where we held epic matches. It was the shabbiest old table you could imagine, with a huge rip on the surface, a hell of a roll, and no tips on the cues.
One day Colin and I were playing Mark Falco and Micky Hazard, who were trainees at the time, and it was a tense finale. Falco was on the black, to win, and missed the winning shot, leaving the black ball waiting agonisingly over the pocket. Now, these games weren’t just competitive