When I went to live in London from the provincial town where I’d grown up, a major incentive was to go and watch the great Tottenham Hotspur play. It was 1963 and I was nineteen.
This was the soccer team which had won the league and cup
double in 1961, following up with the FA Cup the following year and the
European Cup Winners Cup in 1963.
Their great players included Dave Mackay, Bobby Smith and,
by the time I saw them, the legendary Jimmy Greaves. And they played so stylishly.
I was reminded of all this by a post on Facebook from my
friend Chris McKay in Sydney, a Spurs supporter, who quotes the very articulate
Spurs captain of that era, Danny Blanchflower, who wrote:
The great fallacy is that
the game is first and last about winning. It's nothing of the kind. The game is
about glory. It's about doing things in style, with a flourish, about going out
and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.
Autre temps, autre moeurs.
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