Danny Blanchflower-Great Leader Of A Fine Team

Press, Volume C, Issue 29503, 3 May 1961, Page 13

Danny Blanchflower-Great Leader Of A Fine Team

[Bv

SIMON KAVANAUGH]

“TT'S a breathless world of 1 practical truths, and nothing false or shallow can for long withstand its harsh competition. Every moment is a moment of truth.” No philosopher said that. These are the words of Robert Dennis Blanchflower, footballer, talking about football.

One must give Robert Dennis Blanchflower credit for knowing what he is talking about He is captain of Tottenham Hotspur. For the benefit of those just returning from outer space it must be mentioned that Tottenham Hotspur are poised to make British soccer history by winning the League Championship and F.A. Cup in one season. People in Britain have been given an inkling of this by headlines which get ever thicker, blacker and larger and by adjectives which reach a detergent degree of superlativeness. Merits of Side

Football fans, who place arguing about soccer equal to watching it, heatedly discuss the merits of the present Spurs side compared with great teams of the past. The argument can never be settled—which makes the topic such a wonderful one for argument. The fact, however, remains. Spurs are on the brink of an achievement never accomplished this century. Back in the soccer days of long moustaches and longer shorts two teams, Preston and Aston Villa, pulled off the Cup and League “double.”

Without getting involved in a football is/isn’t what it was debate it can be stated that competition in those days was far less fierce and extensive than it is today.

The fact is that Spurs are a pretty remarkable team, and that their captain is an extremely remarkable man. He can not only play football, he can portray it. The man who speaks of moments of truth is the player who prepares himself for them mentally and physically.

Blanchflower the romantic who says: "There are no limits to what people can do unless they themselves decide the limitations,” is the realist who at the beginning of his soccer career decided that he needed to be fitter and got up earlier in the morning to put in half an hour’s training in a field.

Aims To Be True In everything he does Danny Blanchflower aims to be true—to himself and to others. Football means so much to him, that he must give much to it. Everything he does must be constructive. One could no tnort imagine him making a careless kick than Rembrandt making a slapdash stroke of the brush. The more difficult the situation, the more measured is his move.

The result is a great player, and a great team. He has many fine players alongside him, and to Bill Nicholson the club have one of the shrewdest mangers to football. But Blanchflower is the spirit of Tottenham, the man who inspires his men to play not only harder, but better. How different from the situation at Tottenham two years ago. Then, Spurs were fighting against relegation. The position was

desperate and Spurs tried a desperate remedy. They dropped Blanchflower, the £30,000 star who at the end of the previous season had been voted England’s footballer of the year and who had led unranked Ireland to the quarter-finals to the World Cup. It was felt that his attacking style left too many defensive gaps. Danny did not agree, but said that he respected the right of the manager to choose the team. He added that as his style not seem to fit in at Tottenham it would be better it he were transferred to another club.

The logic of the request could not be denied. But some critics felt that Blanchflower could have delayed it until the team were out of trouble. Against that it could be said that at the age of 32 a footballer cannot afford to wait around. However Spurs turned down his request. Blanchflower returned to the side at inside right and to defeat First Division Tot. tenham were knocked out of the F.A. Cup by the Third Division men of Norwich.

The relegation threat grew and manager Nicholson gambled again. Danny, back at right half, was given back the captaincy of the side. Blanchflower, as ever sticking rigidly to his principles, had been relieved of it three years earlier. As captain he felt that he should be in complete command on the field, with the right to make positional changes if he felt the situation demanded.

“No” said the Tottenham management, “We decided on the line-up of the team.” Blanchflower felt that captaincy should be all or nothing, and was relieved of his post.

Vital Match He came back to lead the side in a vital away match with Wolves to the closing weeks of the 1958-59 season. Spurs fought to a 1-1 draw, the following match saw them slam six goals past Leicester, the final one being notched by Blanchflower. Relegation was avoided and from the dying embers of a football side were to be fanned the flames of greatness Danny Blanchflower is as Irish as the Blarney Stone. He first learned his football in the back streets of Belfast, where he was born and in his back garden where he was shown the rudiments of the art of kicking by his mother who played for the Belfast ladles team. Another family pupil was younger brother Jackie,' who went on to play for Manchester United and Ireland and whose soccer career was ended by injuries sustained in the Munich disaster. Having made his mark in the Wolf Cub team, Danny graduated to his school side. Little sign of future greatness here in an eleven that was regularly beaten by six or seven goals, with young Blanchflower, the freckle--faced centre half, being just as regularly reprimanded by the master to charge for holding on to the ball too much.

Notwithstanding these strictures, ■ or maybe because of them —“they may have helped me face up to criticism,’’ Blanchflower went on to become a professional with Glentorran. From there, in 1949, he moved to English League football with Barnsley for a £6,500 fee and on to Aston Villa in 1951 for £15,000 before settling at Tottenham in 1954,

He is devoted to soccer—but not to the exclusion of all else. As befits a man whose education took in a year at St Andrew's University, Scotland, he is a man of many parts. As a television personality he brings to the screen the same smooth assurance he shows on the football field.

He must be the only man to conduct a television interview with himself. It happened last year when, with Irish team manager Peter Docherty unavailable through illness, Blanchflower, took over the managership of the side. So there was projected into the British living rooms a discussion between Danny Blanchflower Irish skipper, talking tactics with Danny Blanchflower, Irish manager. Introductions were made by that well-known television personality Danny Blafichflower. Logic Answered

It must have been one of the few occasions when Danny found someone capable of answering and fathoming his Irish logic. He made his greatest television impact by not appearing on a programme at all. In February this year he refused to appear on “This Is Your Life,” the first time the programme had encountered a refusal in its six vears of operation. Taken to task by a newspaper reader for showing “strange incompatibility for refusing to appear in the programme but for allowing intimate home projections in television food advertisements” Blanchflower, ever the champion of freedom replied “well that’s his opinion. . . that I have a strange incompatibility.” In spite of his sporting and public life, Danny Blanchflower does have a private life, in a comfortable suburban house in North London, naif an hour’s drive from the Tottenham ground.

There, when sporting and other commitments permit, Danny lives an upper-middle-class life with wife Betty and their three children They also now have an Austrian maid living in. Even at home a publie figure cannot escape from his public. Especially when a rumour goes around that he has been killed in a car crash. This happened in February last year. Said Danny: “I had the time of my life. People say such nice things about you when you are dead.”