Terry Venables: you only get one life, so you might as well live it, right?
Former footballer and coach, detective novel writer, nightclub singer and, umm, businessman Terry Venables has died. He certainly did it his way.
Consider for a moment that you were born with a preternatual ability. And not only that. This is an ability that is exceptionally rare, and one which most of your contemporaries would give their high teeth to be able to share.
You have it in you, not just to be able to make a living from playing football, but to do so close to its summit, where there's silverware and the adoration of thousands. You won't be able to retire off it. Even greater riches await those who will follow you. But you will experience that life. And that will only be the start.
As that playing career winds down, you start to survey your options. It's been a successful career. Not as successful as others, but enough to give you options. More options than you ever would had you never started to kick a ball around in the first place.
You have a go at writing detective novels and… they're okay. Neither Raymond Chandler nor Philip K Dick will be losing any sleep over them, but they're worth the price of admission. Some of them end up as the basis for a TV series about a wisecracking cockney private detective. You have to use a nom de plume for that.
You can sing a bit, too, and this leads to you ending up on the television, belting out, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?” on The Russell Harty Show. There's no career in this, but well, you only get one life, so you might as well live it, right? You were even a founding signatory to The Anti-Nazi League.
Coaching is where you end up, getting close to the pinnacle of that, as well. You end up an agonising penalty shootout from leading one of the world's great football cities to its first European Cup, and then a whole country one from their first appearance in a final. But you do win the league in Barcelona, while getting a tune out of the England bequeathed to you by Graham Taylor is no mean feat, either.
But that's not all, is it? You create ‘The Team of the Eighties’. A couple of years later, temporary gap opens up at the top of the First Division, but the Crystal Palace team of which there had been so many hopes just a couple of years earlier has already broken up. Aston Villa and Ipswich duke it out and Villa win it. It's a silly what if, but what if Palace actually had turned out to live up to that - with hindsight hopelessly over-optimistic - moniker?
By the time that Aston Villa are celebrating that title win you’re in a new job and the Palace team you built has already dissolved. You’re a salesman now and the pitch is, well, a pitch. Who better to have as the frontman for English football's first artificial playing surface? It’s hardly as though there isn’t any persuading to be done.
When the BBC visit QPR in 1981, shortly after its installation, Barry Davies has questions, particularly about the vertiginous bounce of the ball, the evidence of our own eyes, and exactly what you'd expect from a pitch which is essentially a green carpet and a thin layer of sand on a lump of concrete. “Well, balls bounce, Barry”, you reply mischievously, eyes twinkling and a smile spreading across your face.
UEFA aren't convinced. A couple of years later you have to play your home UEFA Cup matches at Highbury. But well, by that time you're in the UEFA Cup in the first place. Took Spurs to a replay in the FA Cup final, too. They were in the Second Division when you got there. Now, how much of that was the pitch and how much of that was you? A little from column A and a little from column B, I'd suggest.
***
And then there's Spurs.
So, if I may.
By the time of the end of that 1982 FA Cup Final replay, I was exhausted rather than anything else. I was already growing accustomed to that trophy winning feeling by the age of nine - yeah, about that - how on earth would school be the next day if they lost to these? By the grace of Hoddle, we never had to find out.
My interest in top level football had diminished by 1991, although that period was also the time when I was still most likely to hop up to White Hart Lane on my own. My actual football identity was wrapped up in non league football by this point. In 1982, I lived about three miles away. By 1992, that time was half my life away and felt like far longer ago than that.
But Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker playing for my team was enticing. I didn't expect them to beat Arsenal in Wembley's first ever FA Cup semi-final, but they managed it. Davies again, catching the moment with a line so arcane that it flew straight over this 18 year old's head.
I watch the 1991 FA Cup final in The Bunch of Cherries pub in St Albans. Most of my (by this time former) school friends supported Spurs, too. We drank. And we drank. I laughed at Spurs’ comically large shorts as the teams came out. I winced at Gascoigne's tackle, and for more than one reason. I winced again when Stuart Pearce's free-kick crashed into the stanchion in the back of the goal. And again when Lineker put the ball into the Nottingham Forest goal, only for it to be pulled back for offside. And again, after he then missed a penalty after being brought down by the goalkeeper.
If all of that had happened thirty years later, the feeling by half-time would have been pretty sombre, but at that point in my life I hadn’t had Spursiness quite beaten into me. Paul Stewart equalised. Extra-time. Paul Walsh hit the crossbar. And then Gary Charles obliged, albeit with Gary Mabbutt just behind him and pretty much certain to score himself, with an own goal to settle the match. And after the match, the one person who whadn’t been drinking bundled us all into the back of his Datsun 120 and drove into town, scarves and flags flying from our windows. I’d never know such joy again.
***
There were always the ‘outside interests’. The accusations that you were a ‘wideboy’ were never that far away, and neither were they without substance. There’s a lengthy period of disqualification from acting as a company director and there are questions marks over your involvement at Portsmouth. Your periods at Spurs and in the England job both end up under a cloud, both times on account of those ‘outside interests’.
And then there’s the England job, during which time you were always talked of as the ‘coach’ rather than the ‘manager’ on account of those allegations, and which you have to announce your post-tournament resignation from long before Euro 96 even begins. This really ends up as the last hurrah for your coaching career. Australia doesn’t work. Crystal Palace doesn’t either. Neither does Middlesbrough or Leeds. At the former, you keep them up. At the latter, you're a symptom rather than a cause. Even a return to the national team, as assistant to Steve McClaren, doesn’t go anything like you’d hoped it might.
You spend your retirement in the Spanish sun. And when your time finally comes, when it’s time to face that final curtain, I find it difficult to believe that you don’t have the words to ‘My Way’ running through your head as you breathe your last. For better or for worse, you only get one life, so you might as well live it, right?