WHEN ARSENAL PLAYED AWAY TO Manchester City in the Premiership recently a minute’s silence for Brian Clough was observed immaculately, as it was at grounds up and down the country. At Old Trafford last Sunday before Manchester United’s game with Arsenal there was no minute’s silence for Bill Nicholson. Outside Tottenham Hotspur, his passing hasn’t been adequately observed. A public minute’s silence for every death, especially those of elderly men by natural causes, creates a danger of undervaluing those special, awful times when collective mourning is genuine, such as for the Hillsborough disaster. But if there was a silence for Clough, then one for Bill Nicholson wouldn’t have been inappropriate.

His is a name I associate with my childhood as he was the manager of my Dad’s beloved Spurs when I was first taken to matches in the early Seventies. Although I’d made my choice when offered an Arsenal shirt by my Mum, aged 5, in 1971, I wasn’t allowed to travel unaccompanied to Highbury until I was 13. That meant if I wanted to go to any game at all it had to be with my Dad, or brother, and that would often mean White Hart Lane.

Growing up in Loughton, Essex, puts you almost equidistant from Upton Park, White Hart Lane and Highbury and kids were divided between the three, with a consensus that Orient were your second team as they were the nearest of the lot. One glory hunter supported Liverpool but must have wished he’d never let on given the stick he got.

“You don’t even know where it is.”

“Yeah I do.”

“Where is it then?” etc, etc My best mate Danny McCarthy was a lone QPR fan but in 1978 announced he was changing to become a lone Moan U fan. He endured 13 years of stick before emigrating to Australia the season before the Premiership started. How’s that for timing.

Throughout my school years and beyond I was indoctrinated that Arsenal were boring and that West Ham and Spurs played better football. Immeasurably better. Intricate, skilful and imaginative football that was an end in itself.They were known throughout the game for being entertaining in a way that Arsenal never had been. This, of course, was folklore as 12-year-olds don’t know what they are talking about but it was ingrained in the area as fact, and the testimony of eye witnesses tells you there was truth in it.

One such witness is Dave Mackay, a Spurs legend who played under Bill Nicholson for a decade before signing for Brian Clough at Derby County. In his recently published autobiography, The Real Mackay, he talks about the conversations with these two great managers before signing for them. Clough sounded him out in 1969, before approaching Nicholson about a transfer, by saying:

“I’m building a team at Derby County that will be in the first division within two years and champions within five and I want you to lead it. Interested?” Derby were eighteenth in the old second division at the time. They won the first division three years later. Bill Nicholson also wanted to win but had said to Mackay in 1958: “I cannot promise you cups and trophies, only time will tell, but I can promise you that we will always play exciting, entertaining and rewarding football”.

Three years later, time told. Spurs won the Double, the first team to do so in the 20th century. They lost to Benfica, the eventual winners, in the 1962 European Cup semi-finals, after which Eusebio said Mackay was the best all-round player in the world. They successfully defended the FA Cup and, in 1963, the first European trophy ever to pass through UK customs, the Cup Winners’ Cup, was in their hands.

All of this famously achieved with a brand of exciting, quick-passing possession football that Nicholson as a player had learnt from Arthur Rowe, Spurs’ first championship-winning manager, in 1950-51. Mackay was a legendarily tough leader but Nicholson had him curb his aggression and play football: “Dave, I don’t expect to see you going in on tackles like that, risking injury to yourself and others” he said to him after a cup replay in 1960 when Spurs beat Crewe 13-2.

Mackay was hard but always hurt by any implication that he was unfair. In December 1963 Spurs, the holders, drew Manchester United in the Cup Winners’ Cup. The first leg was won 2-0 at White Hart Lane and in the return as Mackay tells it in his book: “United tore into us”.

After only eight minutes: “Noel Cantwell broke my leg. I don’t think ‘Cant’ (as I preferred to call him after that night) was anywhere near the ball”. United won and a distraught Mackay was left plotting hideous revenge on Cantwell from a hospital bed. The foreword to Mackay’s book is by Sir Alex Ferguson. In his glowing tribute he says: “Dave was never dirty or cynical. He would never do anything that might sully the reputation of the sport he loved. He never set out to hurt another player.”

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