Tributes to Terry | Gary Mabbutt on ‘one of the best half-time team talks I’ve ever had’

As we continue to mark the sad passing of Terry Venables, we've spoken to the men who knew him best - his players. In the first of a number of tributes, Gary Mabbutt takes us back to the dressing room at half-time of the 1991 FA Cup Final at Wembley, where things had gone against us in the first half, we trailed 1-0 against Nottingham Forest and had lost Paul Gascoigne to injury. Enter Terry...

Approximately an hour before his greatest moment in football, Gary Mabbutt was coming to terms with, as he now describes it, a first half in the FA Cup Final where ‘everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong’.

Certainly, to anyone of a Spurs persuasion, the first half of the 1991 showpiece at Wembley was somewhat of a disaster against Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest.

At half-time, we were 1-0 down, we’d had a goal controversially chalked for offside and Gary Lineker had seen a penalty saved. That wasn’t the worst of it, though – Paul Gascoigne, whose performances had inspired the run to the final, was now watching the rest of the game in Princess Grace Hospital having ruptured knee ligaments in a flying challenge on Gary Charles.

Gary describes a ‘calm as anything’ Terry Venables speaking to the team during the interval. His words were heeded as Paul Stewart levelled, taking the game into extra time when Stewart flicked on Nayim’s corner and Forest defender Des Walker, knowing Mabbsy was ready to meet the cross behind him, headed into his own net.

Legendary former skipper Mabbsy, 611 appearances from 1982-1998, captain for 11 years, went on to achieve every schoolboy’s dream by lifting up the FA Cup to our jubilant fans.

Here’s how he remembers that half-time…

18 May, 1991…

“It was one of the best half-time team talks I’ve ever had. Everything that could have gone wrong in that first half did go wrong. Gazza had picked up his bad injury and gone off to hospital. Our talisman for the whole season, gone. From the free-kick he gave away, Forest scored. That should have been a free-kick for us, by the way, as I was pulled to the floor. So, that should have been disallowed, but wasn’t. Then we had a perfectly good goal ruled out for offside, Gary Lineker. Then we had a penalty that Gary had saved. Everything was going wrong.

“We came in and Terry was as calm as anything. He said, ‘keep playing the same way, keep getting at them, come on, you’ve got it in you do to it, I believe in you, go out there and do it’. Then he came over to me, and said, ‘Mabbs, go out in the second half and play exactly the same way, maintain exactly the same attitude, until the end, and you will lift the FA Cup’. That was it. And we did. We went out there in the second half and turned it around to win 2-1. I remember a great embrace between myself and Terry on the side of the pitch, manager and captain, after winning the trophy.

“Terry had that magnetism that drew you in. He was that larger-than-life character as a manager and a coach. I have to say he was the best manager I worked with in terms of man-management of players, getting players prepared and ready for matches, getting the best out of players - that’s what Terry did best.”