Seedy Xmas for Greavsie
BACK in the early Sixties, Tottenham legend Danny Blanchflower was adamant that every member of the squad should attend the traditional Christmas luncheon with the board.
“He was the only one who was clever about it all, though,” his old team-mate Jimmy Greaves remembered five decades later.
“Nobody had really wanted to go but Danny, as captain, said, ‘No, it’s something the club have always done and we should make sure we support it’.
“Then he cleared off.” The players had decamped to the White Hart over the road after training for a couple of pre-meal liveners.
But two had become three and then some, and by the time they’d stumbled back to the stadium it was closer to 2pm than the 1pm at which they’d been expected.
Defender Ron Henry kept budgerigars and one of the boys had thought it amusing to put a dozen packets of budgerigar seeds on his plate, which caused pandemonium because, as Greavsie recalled, “It’s fair to say Ron didn’t react with particularly good humour and threw the whole lot over everybody.”
Things went from bad to worse when a bread roll was thrown and hit the vice-chairman.
And then worse still when the chairman stood up to deliver his speech and Dave Mackay heckled him.
“Dave shouted, ‘Sit down, you’re p*****,” Greavsie went on. “If our manager, Bill Nicholson, had had a shotgun that day I’m certain somebody would have copped it – and I suspect it would have been Ron.”
At clubs up and down the land, Christmas parties have always been, and continue to be, the bane of a manager’s life – certainly in recent years many have been beset by problems.
Tottenham were involved again in 2009 when Harry Redknapp sat before the media and informed them he’d banned his lads from celebrating the festivities that year.
They would “never take the liberty” of arranging a Christmas night out after his decree, he said.
But, unbeknownst to Redknapp, they had very much defied his orders already, having arranged for a private jet, at a reported cost of £2,000 each, to whisk them to Dublin for an all-day session that rolled into a night out clubbing.
Arguably, the worst Christmas festivities scrape — or at least the worst that has got out — happened at Manchester City’s party in 2004, when Joey Barton was alleged to have stubbed out a cigar in the eye of youth player James Tandy.
“It’s bad, I know,” Barton wrote years later, before adding, in mitigation, “I was drunk and angry after the f****** idiot had set my shirt on fire.”
Bad? Well, there’s an understatement.
Although at least their antics didn’t leave the rest of the squad picking bird seed out of their barnets for the three or four days that followed.