Tribute to the Lane is full of sadness and celebration

THERE is a moment of incalculable sadness in the new documentary film about White Hart Lane, available this week on BT Sport, when a desperately diminished Jimmy Greaves, now in a wheelchair and barely able to speak, is wheeled into the dressing room he graced for nine years. His son suggests to him that he ‘loved every minute’ of his time at the ground, from 1961, and for just a moment the 77-yearold makes to describe those days. ‘Yes,’ Greaves (below) says, brightening. Then the limitations he has faced since suffering a severe stroke last year kick in. ‘Yes… I mean… yes.’ And that is all he can offer. Steve Perryman, part of the fabric of the place from 1969 to 1986, does find the words — and immensely eloquent ones at that. ‘These were my people and I felt I was representing them,’ he says. ‘You want the game to go on forever, 40,000 people putting their hopes and their desires on to you. It drove me to a height I never believed I could get to.’ Tottenham intended the one-hour film, entitled The Lane, to be a celebration, though the pathos is all-pervasive. For Perryman, there is the knowledge that nothing in his life will ever match the sensation of playing in the place. ‘If I could feel like that every week… pfff…’ For fans, the sense of community will never be quite as it once was. The black man who found London a difficult place to be in the 1970s was embraced when he stepped inside those gates. We know that those old days were not all roses and honey. The experience of attending the Hillsborough inquests, which concluded last year, were a reminder of that: a journey back into the world of terrace cages, police officers’ radios that didn’t work, impractical turnstiles and unspeakable horror. But they — and the Lane — certainly had something which has now been lost. The best published definition of what it was comes in The Homes of Football, a book by the documentary photographer Stuart Roy Clarke, who took his camera on his journey around a domestic game on the cusp of a modernisation in the 1990s, post-Hillsborough. There is an image of White Hart Lane’s legendary Shelf terrace, taken just after fans had gathered there for the last time before the stadium became allseater for the 1994-95 season. Multi-coloured ribbons and crisp packets litter the place. They evidently had a party to say goodbye. Clarke’s book captures much more: Liverpool fans tucked into a crow’s nest vantage point before the 4-0 victory over Manchester United in 1990; beaming Chelsea fans waiting to be let out of Highbury’s Clock End after a 1-0 win over Arsenal in 1990; a sea of faces on The Dell’s steep Milton Road Stand upper terrace in 1992. Yet he could not find a British publisher. A German company commissioned the book, reflecting how Germany has had a more enduring fascination than us with 1990s English football just before the big money, the modernity and the million-pound-amonth salaries. The writer Ronald Reng’s commentary to Clarke’s book suggests it is too simplistic to say the purpose-built stadiums have erased the soul which existed when The Lane was in its pomp. ‘While fans in Germany just reel off their atmospheric sing-alongs, completely regardless of the action on the pitch, the English first and foremost are interested in the game itself,’ Reng writes. Yet while Tottenham will be returning to the scene of old glories next season when their new stadium is completed, it is hard not to feel grief at the loss of finer, simpler, purer days before the game went global. Glenn Hoddle tells the filmmakers how he would shin up to the famous cockerel high above The Shelf and clean it after training. Cyril Penney, a fan for more than 70 years, describes paying 9p to be a part of the great fan collective in The Cage. And old footage of Arthur Rowe, architect of the side’s legendary creed of ‘push and run’, captures the moment he was asked, in retirement, what the club means to him. ‘Everything,’ he replies, fighting back tears.

The Lane is on BT Sport 3 tomorrow at 9.45pm, BT Sport 1 on Thursday at 10.30pm and Sunday at 6.15pm.