50 years ago today - Steve Perryman on his debut
It’s 50 years today that a young midfielder - 17 years, 280 days old - made his debut for Spurs.
A 1-0 home defeat against Sunderland may not exactly have people scrambling around for memorabilia or records of that day, but 27 September, 1969, was the start of something special. Club record appearance-making special. Most trophies won by a Spurs player special. Over 550 games as captain special.
Steve Perryman detailed his thoughts to us on the 40-year anniversary of his debut, back in 2009. He remembered how the team had just come off a 5-0 loss at Derby and Bill Nicholson called both him and Dennis Bond into his office on the Friday.
The outcome - one or both of them would play against Sunderland. “I assumed that was going to be Dennis, a player the club had purchased, but I hoped it would be both of us,” recalled Steve back then. "We got to the game, he named the team and I was in, so was Dennis. It was a great honour and a great feeling. It was a chance to get into the team early and at Spurs that was quite a rarity at such a young age.
“I remember it was a big crowd, a sunny day. The debut is the starting place of something good, you hope, and you just want the people who are paying the money to think well of you.”
It’s safe to say that was the case – and the case of the man that mattered, Bill Nick, who played Steve a total of 28 times in the old First Division and FA Cup that debut season, 1969/70. Three years on from his debut, Steve captained the team for the first time. He’d already won his first medal – the League Cup in 1971 – and was on his way to lifting the UEFA Cup.
Ten years have flown by since that chat in 2009. Steve, 67, is now an associate director at MK Dons and as we spoke earlier this week, he was preparing to face European champions Liverpool in the Carabao Cup.
What did he think now on the 50-year anniversary of his debut?
“I think of me in Bill Nicholson’s office as a 21-year-old, knocking on his door asking for a new contract,” he said. “The nature of Bill Nick and that era was his response ‘how many people do you think come to watch you play?’, quite a stark question!
“I roomed with Alan Gilzean and I know I shouldn’t have really known what he was earning, but I did, I’d been in the team for three years and I thought I needed to be a bit closer to them. In hindsight, my answer should have been ‘how much would our opponents pay not to have to play against me?’, so judge me by what my opponents thought of me, not necessarily who bought a ticket.
“I can’t believe anyone ever bought a ticket to watch me play. I don’t mind that, because that’s me being realistic. But I helped the players who people did pay money to see, like Glenn Hoddle, Ossie Ardiles, Pat Jennings, Alan Gilzean.
“I always say about our team of the 1980s that Glenn was the leader of the orchestra. That might seem strange coming from the captain, but he was leader of the orchestra in the way that he played, and we followed his lead. I’m not embarrassed to say that. I got the rest of the orchestra there on time. That’s putting it into perspective.
“I guess the supporters sort of linked into me. If they could see themselves on the pitch, they couldn’t really see themselves as Glenn Hoddle, that is something extra special. But they could see themselves as me, working hard, doing the running, the graft, putting my foot in, ‘beat me but over my dead body’, that attitude.
“I was consistent, selectable, very rarely got injured and that, and I know from experience of being a manager, is gold dust.
“I’ve still got the letter from Bill Nick to my dad, and this is ‘Mr Tottenham’, writing to the father of a 15-year-old boy saying, ‘I would never have been so happy for a lad to join us if Steve decides to join us’. That’s not Jimmy Greaves or Pat Jennings, and that’s how he made me feel – apart from when it came to money!
"That letter to that 15-year-old ended up being to the parent of the son who played the most games and won the most trophies for Tottenham Hotspur. That’s not bad, is it?”