Sporting Life
December 2010
As Spurs enjoy their first season among Europe's elite in almost 50 years, the club have marked the legendary side that first got them there with a stunning book recounting the Glory, Glory Days of the 1960/1 Double-winners.
Next year, of course, sees the 50th anniversary of an achievement still considered by many the finest by an English club and this hefty volume does full justice to it.
Put together by the same team who created the opulent Tottenham Hotspur Opus (a 30kg, 800-page behemoth released in 2008 and costing anywhere between £4,000 and £10,000 depending on whose signatures it contained) this tells the story of the 1960/1 season in fantastic detail with detailed player profiles, newspaper cuttings, a month-by-month rundown on the league and cup campaigns and countless documents from the THFC archives.
And it's here that the book truly comes into its own. With its unique access to official club documentation, the book is able to tell the story of that extraordinary season with a depth and level of detail unavailable anywhere else.
Bill Nicholson's detailed squad list, for instance, containing everything from players' home addresses to their previous clubs, current weight and insurance value highlights the lengths the Spurs manager went to to keep on top of everything at the club, as does the fact that he would make weekly rounds of White Hart Lane noting anything that needed attention right down to the very last lightbulb.
The book also contains fascinating first-hand accounts from the likes of Cliff Jones while perhaps best of all are a series of photographs from French magazine Miroir Sprint, who sent their chief correspondent and a photographer to cover Spurs' Christmas Eve match against West Ham. The photos show everything from fans queueing to get into the Lane to the players relaxing afterwards with a game of snooker. Here Jones admits many a week's wages were won and lost.
As you'd expect from an official publication, this is an unashamedly partisan piece of work, arguing passionately that Tottenham's achievement that memorable season remains the Double despite frequent, and this is left in little doubt, inferior imitations in the decades that have followed.
But that's not really a criticism. This is a Spurs book, written by Spurs fans for Spurs fans. It's been lovingly compiled and coherently put together with the quality of writing a match for the wonderful pictures and reproductions alongside. The player profiles run intertwined with the month-by-month chapters charting the season and this structure keeps the book fresh - even though it is one unlikely to be sat and read from start to finish.
The writers also do a good job of concisely recapping the immediate build-up to and aftermath of the Double season to place it in historical context without detracting from the meat of the book, while there is also a fascinating piece by Julie Welch on her semi-autobiographical film charting the season, Those Glory, Glory Days, which remains compulsory viewing for all Spurs fans.
There are also moments of humour, such as Danny Blanchflower's observation as the players prepared for the FA Cup victory parade down Tottenham High Road: "There was a queue at The Royal Dance Hall, but that was for the bingo."
This book, smartly presented in a hard cloth-covered case, is quite simply the ideal gift for any Tottenham fan - whether one of a certain age looking back on fond memories or younger supporters keen to learn more about the club's greatest ever team and manager.