OBITUARY: Bill Nicholson
Footballer, coach and manager of Tottenham Hotspur, he led his team to win the double in 1961 and two European trophies
Monday 25 October 2004 00.05 BST
When Bill Nicholson, who has died aged 85, was made manager of Tottenham Hotspur in 1958, the club he had joined as a player before the second world war and then served as a coach, he scarcely believed it. He did not even tell his loyal and long-suffering wife Grace, always known as Darkie, who found out about it second hand. Though an ardent Spurs fan, she was, in any case, banned by him from attending any matches for reasons of superstition, as were his daughters Jean and Linda.
Yet in Nicholson's first five years in the post, Spurs won the Championship and the FA Cup in 1961 - the century's first instance of that double - the FA Cup again in 1962, and the European Cupwinners' Cup in 1963. In an age of flashy club managers, forever rattling their jewellery, Nicholson remained the same taciturn and modest Yorkshireman he had been when he joined the club in 1936. The key to his character was perhaps that having been brought up in a large family in Scarborough during the Depression, he expected and demanded little out of life, and was surprised by what he eventually got.
His father was a groom in the winter, and drove a horse-drawn cab along the sea front in the summer. Bill was the only one of the five sons and four daughters to gain a scholarship to Scarborough high school, and on leaving, he worked in a laundry. However, a happy chance led a local dentist, who ran the Young Liberals team Nicholson played for, to recommend him to Spurs, who took him on as a ground-staff boy.
Gingery-haired, compactly built, he was an inside-left at first, and played stopper and full-back, too. After a war throughout which he was a sergeant physical education instructor in the Durham Light Infantry, he settled down as a right-half.
Typically provident, he lost no time on leaving the army in qualifying as an FA coach. Coaching, indeed, would always be his forte. Perhaps the most famous example of it was in the 1958 World Cup in Gothenburg. Working as the assistant to England's team manager, Walter Winterbottom, Nicholson devised a strategy whereby England were able to hold Brazil, the eventual World Cup winners, to a goalless draw. His coaching method consisted largely in isolating a weakness and concentrating on eliminating it.
In 1949 Arthur Rowe, once Tottenham's centre-half, arrived as manager, initiating the classic push-and-run style. Nicholson played in front of the new right-back, Alf Ramsey, and, the sceptics would say, "did his tackling for him". Nicholson was a bread-and-butter player, but a vital one. He had much to do with Tottenham's successive titles in the Second and First Divisions in 1950 and 1951. In May 1951, he was capped for England against Portugal at Everton, and scored one of his rare goals, within 19 seconds.
The next autumn, he was chosen to play against Austria at Wembley, the plan being that Billy Wright, the right-half, and captain, would operate at inside-left, marking Austria's Ernst Ocwirk. But Nicholson was injured, and never got another chance.
While still playing, he coached Cambridge University and enjoyed it, though well aware that a football brain and an academic brain were two quite different things. "I prefer players not to be too good or clever at other things," he observed. This inevitably caused potential problems when the captain of his double-winning team was Danny Blanchflower. The loquacious Ulsterman was a right-half like "Billy Nick", but there the resemblance ended. Where Nicholson had been fustian, Blanchflower was all flair and illumination, a tremendous inspiration to his teams. Occasional clashes were inevitable, but overall they complemented one another, and the partnership worked remarkably well.
There was a celebrated occasion when, in Rotterdam, Spurs met Atlético Madrid in the 1963 final of the Cupwinners' Cup. Thorough and typically glum, Nicholson gave his tactical talk, extolling the merits of the various Atlético players, to such an extent that Blanchflower saw the heads going down. He therefore followed up with a team talk of his own, extolling the virtues of the Tottenham players. Heads went up, and Tottenham won 5-1 at a canter.
An outstanding coach who always knew what he wanted from his players, Nicholson was an almost instant success once he had recovered from the shock of the chairman telling him he would now be the manager. But he continued, unlike most managers, to change in the players' dressing-room and to live in the same modest house he had been given as a player.
He skilfully used the secretarial office next to his own as a sounding board, but man management was not his strong point. Once, when Spurs' big, but elegant, centre-forward Martin Chivers had scored goals in an important game, Nicholson said: "I told him afterwards that was a sitter that you missed. And then I thought, maybe I should have said, 'well played,' and then told him!"
Nicholson lasted as manager longer than most; not least perhaps because his job obsessed him. He was in tears at the wedding of one of his daughters, remarking that he hadn't "seen her grow up". Spurs won another European trophy, the Uefa Cup, in 1972, to add to a third FA Cup in 1967 and the League Cup in 1971 and 1973. But things went awry in the 1974-75 season. Nicholson resigned and worked for West Ham, but returned to Spurs as a consultant from 1976 to 1991, when he was named president.
The club now displays a bust of its most successful manager. His wife and daughters survive him.
· Bill Nicholson, footballer, coach and manager, born January 26 1919; died October 23 2004
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