Always Managing: My Autobiography (41 page)

One of the questions I am most frequently asked is whether dumping a bucket of water on my head cost David Bentley his career at Tottenham. The answer is no; but that doesn’t mean I was happy about it. The incident happened after our win at Manchester City to qualify for the Champions League, when I was giving an interview to Sky. I was talking, proudly, about the quality of my backroom staff – Joe Jordan, Kevin Bond and the rest – when Bentley invaded the screen with a crowd of jeering players and dumped a full, large container of water all over me. On camera, I had to laugh it off, but privately I was furious. I thought it was disrespectful, frankly, and totally out of keeping with our relationship.

However I may sound to the viewers at home, I am not one of those bosses who wants to be one of the boys. I am not an ogre, I’m not a schoolteacher, but I’m certainly not Dave Bassett at Wimbledon, either. Dave was as much a part of the Crazy Gang as the players sometimes, and they all thrived on it. I’m different. I didn’t mix socially with the team, I took an interest in them, but I would never think of myself as a mate. I thought Bentley and the other players – all the ones who couldn’t get in the team, incidentally – took a liberty. Would Bentley have dumped a bucket of water on Sir Alex, had he been a player at Manchester United? He wouldn’t have lasted long if he did.

It didn’t just make me look bad, it made the club look bad too – it undermined us when we had just taken a giant step to join the elite. The only good news was that we auctioned the ruined suit for a leukaemia charity on radio and fetched £2,000.

And no, David didn’t exactly thrive at Tottenham, but it was nothing to do with the events that night. Had he been performing he would have found no manager more forgiving than me.

Having said that, I’m not sure his Tottenham career ever recovered from that penalty miss, to be honest. From my perspective, it was a hard defeat to take, but I couldn’t feel too angry about losing in this way. All you ever hope is that your players rise to the occasion, and we did. Lennon was the best player on the field and ran Patrice Evra ragged. And unlike a lot of League Cup finalists, we didn’t let up, despite the defeat, and ended up coming eighth in the Premier League, missing out on European football to Fulham by two points.

What people also remember about that season, though, is a throwaway line I came out with on 18 January 2009 – inadvertently catapulting Sandra on to the back pages. We were playing Portsmouth – always a tense one for me – and the score was tied 1–1 when, with ten minutes to go, Bentley crossed and Darren Bent missed an absolute sitter at the far post. All strikers miss, but this was abusing the privilege. Asked about it afterwards, I couldn’t contain my disappointment. ‘David James had given up on it,’ I said. ‘He had turned his back and was getting ready to pick the ball out of the net. My missus could have scored that.’ As far as I was concerned, I was speaking honestly. I said what 30,000 people in White Hart Lane were thinking. What supporter hasn’t turned to a mate at one time in his life and said my missus/my mum/my nan/Sheila
down the local could have scored that? Well, I’m no different. I think about football, just as you do – and react to it, sometimes, the same way. The next thing I knew, Darren Bent’s agent was on the telephone to Daniel Levy, saying his client was very unhappy and wanted a transfer. All because of a little joke. Well, I’m sorry, Darren, but I stand by it, even today. It was a shocking miss, one of the worst I have seen. And I could have been ruder. I could have said that for £60,000 a week, or a £16.5 million transfer fee, we expected a bit more – which also would be the truth. As it was, I accepted that Darren didn’t do it on purpose, and I took the mickey rather than rant and rave. I think it is a shame that people are too precious to laugh at themselves these days. I’ve made some rickets in my life, and I’m the first one to find that funny. Football, and footballers, are too serious these days. Asking for a transfer because his feelings were hurt? He would have been better off spending another hour each night on the training pitch, to make sure it never happened again.

The one positive in following Juande Ramos was that it gave me the freedom to select my own backroom staff. I like to give people a chance, so I kept Clive on, because I thought it was important to have somebody who was familiar with the club. I know some managers come into a place looking to sack everybody that was part of the previous regime, but that has never been my style. If I can find a way to work with somebody, I will, certainly a good lad like Clive. I can remember being coached by his dad at school all those years ago, and he had played for me at West Ham. He wasn’t a stranger. The only real change I made was getting rid of Ramos’s goalkeeping coach, Hans Leitert, who had a very scientific approach, which wasn’t my style. I brought in
Tony Parks, who did a great job, and has been retained by André Villas-Boas.

The one area in which I think a British passport makes a difference is that of goalkeeping coach. I brought Tony Parks in at Tottenham because I think the demands of the English game are totally different to the rest of Europe and it needs a man who can convey that and make preparations for a very different physical contest. It doesn’t matter where the goalkeeper comes from – he has to learn that England is a game apart in the six yard box. And a Brazilian being taught by another Brazilian will simply not understand that. How can a guy that has never played in England know that, up against a team managed by Sam Allardyce, you are going to get four guys around you at corners, Kevin Nolan backing in, the referee turning a blind eye, and you’ll have to be ready to deal with this? It has never mattered to me what nationality my goalkeeper is – providing the coach taking him for training knows English football inside out, every little trick and stroke that is going to be pulled.

Tony was, of course, a Tottenham man, and I added Tim Sherwood and Les Ferdinand to the coaching staff for much the same reason. I wanted young, fresh voices to work with the junior players – but also people who knew Tottenham and its culture of good football. I thought it was important to get back to that, and I believe during my time there the fans enjoyed our open, attacking style, with lots of width, and Modrić pulling the strings in the middle.

My favourite member of staff, though, was the legendary Northern Ireland goalkeeper Pat Jennings. He wasn’t involved with the first team, but would come in a few times each week to
work with our young goalkeepers. I really looked forward to those days. What a lovely, gentle man. One of the best guys I have ever met through football: so much wisdom, so much common sense, a real asset to the club. It was a pleasure to talk football with Pat each day. Every club should have a Pat Jennings, and it amazes me how many discard these characters, the fantastic club servants, without a second thought. Just his presence and influence around the place was worth its weight in gold. You could talk to Pat about anything, ask his advice on players, and his opinion was always worth hearing.

I wasn’t always having to go to the transfer market at Tottenham, though, because the squad was basically strong. I’ve been at clubs where after two weeks I have thought we needed nine players, and that is a scary feeling. Tottenham could not have been more different. People say I didn’t buy because Daniel Levy wouldn’t sanction the transfers, but the truth is we didn’t really need much. We bought, of course we did, and Daniel does drive a hard bargain – but some of the answers were under our noses, not least the one that ended up transforming my second season. That was the year Gareth Bale came of age, and helped propel us to the Champions League late in the day.

There is some right old rubbish talked about Gareth’s time with me at Tottenham, so I would like the opportunity to correct it now. Was I ever going to sell Bale? No. Was I going to loan him? No. I’ve heard talk – everyone from Richard Keys to Alex McLeish – making it sound as if what happened to Bale’s career was a fluke and that I never fancied him. I would say in response that whatever faults I may have, I do know a player, and if you go right back to the first team I ever picked as Tottenham manager, against Arsenal on 29 October 2008, Bale was in it. In fact, he played for me a further
nineteen times that season – in all four competitions: Premier League, FA Cup, Carling Cup and UEFA Cup. The problem was, he rarely won. There is a lot of false information bandied around about Bale’s losing run at Tottenham, too. It isn’t true that he didn’t win a game for close to three years. He started when we beat Liverpool 4–2 in the Carling Cup, again when we beat Wigan Athletic in the FA Cup, Burnley in the Carling Cup semi-final, and when we defeated Dinamo Zagreb and NEC Nijmegen in Europe. He just couldn’t get a win in the league. It was an anomaly, and one I was determined to break in my second season. I put him on against Burnley on 26 September 2009, when we were 4–0 up with five minutes to go. There was no way we were going to fail to win from there – in fact, Robbie Keane got his fourth goal of the game and we won 5–0 – and the next time Bale played in the league, nobody could say he was a bad luck omen for Tottenham.

It is funny, because I had been speaking to Sir Alex Ferguson about him a couple of weeks earlier, telling him about the problem with his winless streak, and Alex revealed a superstitious side. He said he didn’t think he could select a player that had gone twenty-five league games without winning, no matter how good he was. He feared that the rest of the players would see his presence as a curse and that it could harm them psychologically. I’m glad I never took his counsel on that one.

With Gareth, it was all about building up his confidence. I brought him on late against Manchester City and West Ham around Christmas, when we were in control of both games, and I played him in matches when I fancied our chances – Peterborough in the FA Cup, or away at Leeds United. The idea that I was prepared to let Gareth go is, frankly, ridiculous. I had watched him emerge as a
youngster at Southampton, and as manager of Portsmouth I’d see one of his early games for Tottenham, against Fulham. He scored the goal that put Tottenham 3–1 up – they ended up drawing 3–3 – and I raved about Bale to Joe Jordan all the way home. When I joined Tottenham, one of the players I was most excited about working with was Gareth. I really fancied my chances at getting the best out of him – he struck me as an exceptional talent: strong, quick, with a superb shot. It upsets me that people believe I was ready to ditch him – although the story has been told so many times now that maybe even Gareth thinks it is true. Alex McLeish says I was going to loan him to Birmingham City but, although I remember the conversation, it never got beyond the wait and see stage, and would only have happened had I thought Bale couldn’t get enough matches with us. Nottingham Forest wanted him on loan, too, with a view to a permanent transfer, but I did not entertain that for a second. I would never sell Gareth. All he needed was toughening up.

We had to tease that combative streak out of him because, at that time, he was regarded as a left-back and was up against Benoît Assou-Ekotto, one of the best in the Premier League. Gareth seemed too soft to be a defender, so we decided to try him further forward. He drove me mad in training. Technically, he was outstanding, but he always seemed to be playing with his hair. It was never right. He’d be flicking the fringe, or wiping it out of his eyes and I would be going quietly mad, just watching. ‘Gareth, leave your barnet alone! Gareth! Stop touching your hair!’ He was always getting a little knock in training, too. He’d go down, then limp off, and I always thought the physios made too much fuss of him. It was the same pattern every morning: Gareth would tumble
and stay there, and they’d all go running over. In the end, I told them just to leave him alone. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘he’ll be fine in two minutes. If it is anything urgent, we’ll soon know.’ That’s what they did and, as predicted, Gareth got up, got on with it, and got better and better. He was beginning to show his true potential. We shifted him to wide left, and moved Modrić inside, so they would link up. Now we were beginning to hurt teams. That Tottenham side had a nice balance, and Gareth began showing the form we saw on the training ground. At the crucial closing stages of the season he scored the goals that proved to be the difference in victories over Arsenal and Chelsea.

Those matches set us up for a sprint to the finish line and in the end it came down to a match away at Manchester City on 5 May 2010. Whoever won was going to claim that last Champions League place – and most of football had no doubt it was going to be the home team. They were managed by Roberto Mancini and had spent an absolute fortune on players. When I look at their team that night – Emmanuel Adebayor, Carlos Tevez and Craig Bellamy up front; Roque Santa Cruz on the bench – I’m still not sure how we pulled it off in such style.

I think that is one of my defining matches as a manager, because of the way we played. I decided that it did not matter that we were the away team, this was a Cup final, a one-off, and we were going to go for it. We played a very attacking team – Peter Crouch and Jermain Defoe up front; Bale, Modrić and Lennon in midfield, with Tom Huddlestone holding. It was said that it looked as if Tottenham were at home, and I’m happy with that. Without wishing to stereotype, maybe Mancini’s Italian nature got the better of him. Serie A teams often tend to be quite cautious,
and perhaps he did not feel comfortable taking the risk we did. He certainly seemed a different animal the following season. I was getting a lot of advice from my coaches that week, and all of it seemed to be that we should shut up shop and try to nick a win on the break – but I thought our midfield had the beating of City and couldn’t see the point in putting the handbrake on. I wanted to occupy their defenders with two forward options, and when everyone was telling me to play 4–5–1, I disagreed. I thought we could get at them – particularly down the flanks. Lennon was half-fit, but he came through for us that night, and Bale was immense. The midfield worked like stink, none more than Modrić, and with eight minutes to go Crouch scored a thoroughly deserved winner.