My part in first fly-on-the-wall

THE talk about a new Netflix fly-on-the-wall Premier League series took me back to my early years at Tottenham and the club being the subject of the first project of that kind, when the writer Hunter Davies spent a season around the players for his book,

The Glory Game.

Hunter arrived with a standing as a serious writer, having written the authorised biography of The Beatles four years earlier, and to begin with everyone was very helpful. I was a young player, on the outside looking in. But the senior players started to realise that they could be vulnerable and were less enthusiastic about the idea as the season went on.

Eddie Baily, manager Bill Nicholson’s assistant, tended to use colourful language and they thought that could be portrayed negatively.

I believe it was a fabulous book and ahead of its time, if not 100 per cent accurate. Hunter described me driving a Ford Anglia, when my first car was a sky-blue Fiat 125. I never had an Anglia and wasn’t an Anglia man. But the reticence some players felt shows the difficulty of producing something that captures a club as it really is.