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What does David Pleat do at Spurs?

theShiznit

Well-Known Member
Jul 26, 2004
19,041
26,270
He wasn't one for pronouns... siations was our Dave :cautious:

Shimbomba was the pinnacle though 👌
 

NRH

Active Member
Apr 5, 2015
119
187
After more than two decades of association with the Club, David Pleat is stepping back from his scouting duties.

Daniel Levy, Chairman said: “I should like to thank David for his contribution over so many years and in so many ways. He had, and continues to have, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and players. I know he will continue to enjoy watching our games at all levels.”

David Pleat said: “Football is my life and continues to be. Spurs has been a huge part of that. However the game and its methods change and it’s time for me to now step back from my scouting role. I look forward to watching the Club have great success in the coming years. I hope to continue my association with the game.”

David’s first involvement with us came in May, 1986, when he was appointed Manager. In his debut season, he led us to a third place finish in the old First Division and reached the FA Cup final. He departed the Club in October, 1987.

David returned in January, 1998, as the Club’s first Director of Football and during his time at the Club, he took charge of the team as Caretaker Manager on three occasions; September, 1998, March, 2001, and September, 2003.

Following the conclusion of his time as Director of Football in May, 2004, he returned once again in 2010, as part of the Club’s scouting department.

 

sparx100

Well-Known Member
Jan 8, 2007
5,265
7,980
What a loyal servant to our club. Managed our club and has been a part of our scouting network for a long time. Deserves respect, thanks and hopefully a long and happy retirement.
 

Pellshek

Well-Known Member
Dec 30, 2015
2,743
8,063
Pleat has made an incredible contribution to Spurs and English football more widely.

He was Spurs manager when Clive Allen had his monumental 49 goal season in 1986/7. Spurs finished 3rd that season, and got to the Cup final, which ended with our first, gut-wrenching Cup final loss and that Gary Mabbutt own goal, which I still refuse to believe actually went in. There's some meaty Spurs history contained in that single season. That was a thrilling, attacking Spurs team he built, and was probably the best Spurs team until Poch came along some 30 years later (Venables, who took over from Pleat, has a shout too).

Pleat's skip across the pitch at Maine Road in 1983 remains an iconic moment in English football. Pleat had built an attacking team at Luton and got them promoted and doing well in Division 1 (the top tier), which is what got him the Spurs job a few years later. He was skipping because Luton had just scored a late goal on the last day to improbably dodge relegation.

Best of luck to him after he leaves Spurs & thanks for the memories.
 

TheChosenOne

A dislike or neg rep = fat fingers
Dec 13, 2005
49,348
53,042
AFAIK Pleaty owns/owns a lot of property in and around Mill Hill going back to when we used the training ground over that way.

A lot of the star players signed were given these houses as part of their contract and the club footed the bills
 

Westmorlandspur

Well-Known Member
Feb 1, 2013
3,982
6,549
Sad day when Pleaty got sacked. Would definitely have won something as our manager. Got the best out of Hoddle. Probably England manager but for his supposed misdemeanours.
Yet another top manager coming from a good youth player who got a bad injury at a young age, then took up coaching,
Mckenna, Rogers, could include Clough in that but he was a bit older when injured. Eddie Howe.
Lets hope Matt Wells carries on the tradition.
 

SUIYHA

Well-Known Member
Jan 15, 2017
1,947
9,501
Whats the story here??

Seem to remember him slagging off Pleat after he left, saying he was disrupting him behind the scenes and working to his own agenda as DoF instead of collaboratively with the manager. Seemed a common theme of ours in the 00s with Santini/Arnesen and then Jol/Comolli.

In fairness - the signings I seem to remember Pleat having a bigger hand in were actually pretty good - Simon Davies, Defoe, Robinson etc. His time as caretaker in 2003/04 was one of the worst I can remember at the club, the squad was crap but tactically he was an utter disaster and a joke in the media, but to be fair we had a good run of form towards the end to avoid relegation and as a scout/talent spotter he did well.

Anyone who is involved with the club for that long deserves our respect. Good luck to him and happy retirement.
 

wpd659

Well-Known Member
Jan 24, 2011
2,312
5,369
Was a gentleman, always had time for a chat and just loved the game. Yes there was something’s that will be talked about. But at the end of the day he was spurs through and through and loved the club.
 

ERO

The artist f.k.a Steffen Freund - Mentalist ****
Jun 8, 2003
6,027
5,956
Instrumental in us getting Dele Alli, which seems to go under the radar.

Whatever narrative you go with for his alleged indiscretion, it's such a drop in the ocean compared to what the people of the football industry are doing regularly today, and it's a shame his reputation is tainted by it.

Love Pleat. Club legend.
 

Ghost Hardware

Well-Known Member
Aug 31, 2012
21,763
86,476


David Pleat: Tottenham preferred data over my ‘eyes and ears’ in scouting — it’s nonsense​

Pleat recalls managing in an age when stylish football mattered and complimenting the chairman’s wife was key to keeping your job​

Jim White10 September 2024 • 7:57am

David Pleat is talking, for the first time in public, about his recent departure from Tottenham. Since 2010 he had been a consultant scout at the club he had once managed, spotting and bringing in players like Jan Vertonghen, Dele Alli and Ben Davies.
But he was told by the club chairman at the end of last season that his services were no longer required.
“Daniel Levy called me in and said, ‘you know it’s all data driven now, we don’t need eyes and ears’. What a nonsense. I didn’t argue. He’s in charge. Actually, I have huge respect for him. The legacy of the new stadium and training ground will always be there. That is all down to him and his drive.”
He pauses for a moment and smiles.
“Although they’ve won nothing for years.”
Now approaching his 80th birthday, after spending a lifetime negotiating football’s ever-changing landscape, Pleat says this is by no means the end for him. He is not the retiring sort and since the start of the new season he has continued as he always has: watching at least three live matches a week, his eyes and ears ever alert.
“Two or three people have spoken to me about things. We’ll see. But I’m not finished. How can I step away? When it comes to football, I’m afraid I’m a total obsessive.”

Pleat is talking to the Telegraph in a hotel in Watford. As he arrives, he reveals he once met up there with Howard Kendall to complete a deal. Though you suspect, given his longevity in the game, there is barely a hotel in the south of England that has not played host to him negotiating a deal. He is here this time, however, to talk about his newly published autobiography, Just One More Goal, its title chosen as a four word summation of his approach.
“I’d never park the bus,” he says of his managerial philosophy (though he is sufficiently old-school never to describe it as such). “If I’m 1-0 up, I want to be 2-0. Always want one more goal. I don’t want to sit back and counterattack. I never played that way. I could never understand ‘1-0 to the Arsenal’. The same with [Jose] Mourinho or [Antonio] Conte’s approach. My edict was entertainment. The game is about glory. That Tottenham thing stuck in my mind, since I saw them in the double 60-61 season.”
And he reels off, without the slightest hesitation, the entire Tottenham side – from Brown through Blanchflower to Allen – he saw that day.
“You can’t compare eras, who knows how they’d survive now. But I do know one thing: that was the best side I ever saw play.”

‘The most important thing to flatter the chairman’s wife’​

Almost from the first time he kicked a ball Pleat was fascinated with tactics and management. At 18, as a promising junior at Nottingham Forest, he took his first coaching certificate. Plagued with injury, his was not the most stellar of playing CVs as he moved across the country, from Forest to Luton to Exeter and back to Peterborough (“I always say I had less a career, more geography A level”).

But when, at the age of 26, he was obliged to retire after a rival player stamped on his back, he found his true métier: in the dugout when he was appointed manager of non-league Nuneaton Town.
“I got the job because of Peter Taylor, Brian Clough’s assistant,” he recalls. “When he was at Burton he took the job with Cloughie at Hartlepool and got a local removal firm run by a chap called Sam Downes to move his stuff. Turns out, he didn’t pay him. The poor chap complained. Taylor said: ‘Don’t worry son, I’ll do you a favour down the line.’ Anyhow, Downes was on the board at Nuneaton. And do you know what the favour was? Recommending me to be the manager. I remember saying to Taylor: ‘How do you know I can do it?’ He said: ‘Of course you can. Most managers out there are crap, you’ll be all right.’”
Pleat was more than all right. From there he went to Luton Town, as a coach under the manager Harry Haslam.
“He was some character,” he remembers. “He told me the most important thing a manager had to do is always to flatter the chairman’s wife, tell her she looks lovely.”

‘Man City chairman told me they’d never recover’​

If not following Haslam’s advice to the letter, Pleat nevertheless quickly understood that managing upwards was a vital part of the job. Not least at Luton, where he was appointed manager after Haslam left, by David Evans, the politically motivated controversialist chairman who, in the 80s, banned away fans at Kenilworth Road.
“Horrible man,” Pleat says of Evans. “Nasty. You should have seen the obituaries when he died. Really scathing stuff.”
Nonetheless he was able to manage upwards sufficiently to stay in charge for eight years, taking the club into the First Division and signing a long line of fine players, from Brian Stein to Peter Nicholas. Though the thing most people remember about his time at Luton is that image of him conducting a one-man invasion of the pitch at Maine Road on the final day of the season in 1983, after his team had just won with a last-second goal to stay in the top flight. He was less eyes and ears that day, more grey slip on shoes and suit jacket flapping, as he raced, arms outstretched, to embrace his team captain Brian Horton.

“Oh, do we have to?” he says, when pressed to recall the details of what still counts as the most glorious managerial victory celebration in football history. But, being David Pleat, a man with a magnificent portfolio of anecdotes, when pressed he is happy to remember.
“When I ran on the field like a whirling dervish, it was all the emotion of what that win meant,” he says. “Not just the fact we had avoided relegation at the very last. But the fact if we had gone down it would probably have been curtains for the club, financially.
“As it was we sent Manchester City down. I remember Peter Swales [the then City chairman] came up to me afterwards, in his platform shoes, his hair with that comb-over, and he said: ‘We’ll never recover from this.’ This was Manchester City. Never recover? Yeah, right.”

‘It was nice when aesthetic football won’​

Luton consolidated after that win, getting better all the time, playing quick, progressive, possession-based football under his direction. Pleat particularly enjoyed getting one over the local rivals Watford, then managed by Graham Taylor.
“Graham was a lovely man, a great friend. We played him 10 times when I was at Luton and beat him seven and that was important to me. He played direct football, and was very good at it. But let’s just say it was nice when aesthetic football won out over direct.”
Pleat’s mastery of aesthetic football took him from Luton to Spurs, where, for one season in 1986-87, it reached its apex. Playing a five-man midfield including Glenn Hoddle and Ossie Ardiles, he took Spurs to third in the league and to the FA Cup final.
“I think I was a good creative coach going forward,” he says. “People said I didn’t do enough on defending. Maybe that was true.”

Pleat was lauded for the creative attacking football that his teams

He left Spurs under a cloud after a tabloid sting on his private life (though the rumour at the time was that it was a convenience to allow the chairman to appoint Terry Venables). But he continued to practise his creative methods at Leicester City. That was a four-year sojourn he really enjoyed. Even the manner of his departure makes him smile years later.
“Terry Shipman was the chairman, lovely man, very nice to me. He rang me up and said: ‘I’ve got bad news. Unfortunately we had a board meeting and we’ve decided to make a change. I must tell you, I was right behind you, I didn’t want you to go. But you’ve got to go’. He then said: ‘but what’s far worse is, they want me out too.’”
He then had another four years at Luton, before returning to Tottenham in 1998 for a brief spell as caretaker. He took on the role twice more in his long association with the club, finally settling into his position seeking out new playing talent.

Leaving BBC radio was ‘pure ageism’​

In his time in football Pleat has seen enormous change in the way things are organised behind the scenes. Not all of it for the good.
“There are so many processes. You recommend a player and it has to go through a recruitment person, then the head of recruitment, then the director of football, then the manager, then the chairman. But do you know who has the last say? The bank manager. I think there’s too many voices now. Peter Taylor once told me that when it comes to making a decision, two’s company three’s a crowd.”
While scouting he would often combine the job with working for BBC Radio 5 Live. He was a superb pundit, his ability to put things in historical context second to none. Not for the first time in his life, he believes he was let go from that role prematurely.
“Pure ageism,” he says.
Pleat combined his scouting work with evenings moonlighting as a pundit

Though in the latter years of his broadcasting career he was unable to devote as much time as he would have wished to caring for his wife Maureen, who was stricken with a degenerative form of motor neurone disease. She died in 2020. And part of the profits from his memoir will be donated to charities seeking a cure.
“I’m not expecting it to be a fortune,” he smiles. “But every little helps fighting that horrible disease.”
Not that there will be any copies available in the Tottenham club shop.
“They’re not selling it there, something to do with it not being through the club’s official publisher,” he says. “I asked Daniel if I could have a room there to launch it and do a presentation. He said he’d get back to me. I’ve not heard anything. It’s funny. Arsenal gave Bob Wilson a seat for life. They’re a classy club, Arsenal. Me, I was told I can get a ticket at Spurs subject to availability. Subject to availability. Ha! Mind you, Bob did much more for Arsenal than I ever did for Tottenham.”
There are plenty of Spurs supporters who might well argue with that suggestion.
 
Last edited:

cjbyid

Well-Known Member
Jan 4, 2009
8,597
29,098


David Pleat: Tottenham preferred data over my ‘eyes and ears’ in scouting — it’s nonsense​

Pleat recalls managing in an age when stylish football mattered and complimenting the chairman’s wife was key to keeping your job​

Jim White10 September 2024 • 7:57am

David Pleat is talking, for the first time in public, about his recent departure from Tottenham. Since 2010 he had been a consultant scout at the club he had once managed, spotting and bringing in players like Jan Vertonghen, Dele Alli and Ben Davies.
But he was told by the club chairman at the end of last season that his services were no longer required.
“Daniel Levy called me in and said, ‘you know it’s all data driven now, we don’t need eyes and ears’. What a nonsense. I didn’t argue. He’s in charge. Actually, I have huge respect for him. The legacy of the new stadium and training ground will always be there. That is all down to him and his drive.”
He pauses for a moment and smiles.
“Although they’ve won nothing for years.”
Now approaching his 80th birthday, after spending a lifetime negotiating football’s ever-changing landscape, Pleat says this is by no means the end for him. He is not the retiring sort and since the start of the new season he has continued as he always has: watching at least three live matches a week, his eyes and ears ever alert.
“Two or three people have spoken to me about things. We’ll see. But I’m not finished. How can I step away? When it comes to football, I’m afraid I’m a total obsessive.”

Pleat is talking to the Telegraph in a hotel in Watford. As he arrives, he reveals he once met up there with Howard Kendall to complete a deal. Though you suspect, given his longevity in the game, there is barely a hotel in the south of England that has not played host to him negotiating a deal. He is here this time, however, to talk about his newly published autobiography, Just One More Goal, its title chosen as a four word summation of his approach.
“I’d never park the bus,” he says of his managerial philosophy (though he is sufficiently old-school never to describe it as such). “If I’m 1-0 up, I want to be 2-0. Always want one more goal. I don’t want to sit back and counterattack. I never played that way. I could never understand ‘1-0 to the Arsenal’. The same with [Jose] Mourinho or [Antonio] Conte’s approach. My edict was entertainment. The game is about glory. That Tottenham thing stuck in my mind, since I saw them in the double 60-61 season.”
And he reels off, without the slightest hesitation, the entire Tottenham side – from Brown through Blanchflower to Allen – he saw that day.
“You can’t compare eras, who knows how they’d survive now. But I do know one thing: that was the best side I ever saw play.”

‘The most important thing to flatter the chairman’s wife’​

Almost from the first time he kicked a ball Pleat was fascinated with tactics and management. At 18, as a promising junior at Nottingham Forest, he took his first coaching certificate. Plagued with injury, his was not the most stellar of playing CVs as he moved across the country, from Forest to Luton to Exeter and back to Peterborough (“I always say I had less a career, more geography A level”).

But when, at the age of 26, he was obliged to retire after a rival player stamped on his back, he found his true métier: in the dugout when he was appointed manager of non-league Nuneaton Town.
“I got the job because of Peter Taylor, Brian Clough’s assistant,” he recalls. “When he was at Burton he took the job with Cloughie at Hartlepool and got a local removal firm run by a chap called Sam Downes to move his stuff. Turns out, he didn’t pay him. The poor chap complained. Taylor said: ‘Don’t worry son, I’ll do you a favour down the line.’ Anyhow, Downes was on the board at Nuneaton. And do you know what the favour was? Recommending me to be the manager. I remember saying to Taylor: ‘How do you know I can do it?’ He said: ‘Of course you can. Most managers out there are crap, you’ll be all right.’”
Pleat was more than all right. From there he went to Luton Town, as a coach under the manager Harry Haslam.
“He was some character,” he remembers. “He told me the most important thing a manager had to do is always to flatter the chairman’s wife, tell her she looks lovely.”

‘Man City chairman told me they’d never recover’​

If not following Haslam’s advice to the letter, Pleat nevertheless quickly understood that managing upwards was a vital part of the job. Not least at Luton, where he was appointed manager after Haslam left, by David Evans, the politically motivated controversialist chairman who, in the 80s, banned away fans at Kenilworth Road.
“Horrible man,” Pleat says of Evans. “Nasty. You should have seen the obituaries when he died. Really scathing stuff.”
Nonetheless he was able to manage upwards sufficiently to stay in charge for eight years, taking the club into the First Division and signing a long line of fine players, from Brian Stein to Peter Nicholas. Though the thing most people remember about his time at Luton is that image of him conducting a one-man invasion of the pitch at Maine Road on the final day of the season in 1983, after his team had just won with a last-second goal to stay in the top flight. He was less eyes and ears that day, more grey slip on shoes and suit jacket flapping, as he raced, arms outstretched, to embrace his team captain Brian Horton.

“Oh, do we have to?” he says, when pressed to recall the details of what still counts as the most glorious managerial victory celebration in football history. But, being David Pleat, a man with a magnificent portfolio of anecdotes, when pressed he is happy to remember.
“When I ran on the field like a whirling dervish, it was all the emotion of what that win meant,” he says. “Not just the fact we had avoided relegation at the very last. But the fact if we had gone down it would probably have been curtains for the club, financially.
“As it was we sent Manchester City down. I remember Peter Swales [the then City chairman] came up to me afterwards, in his platform shoes, his hair with that comb-over, and he said: ‘We’ll never recover from this.’ This was Manchester City. Never recover? Yeah, right.”

‘It was nice when aesthetic football won’​

Luton consolidated after that win, getting better all the time, playing quick, progressive, possession-based football under his direction. Pleat particularly enjoyed getting one over the local rivals Watford, then managed by Graham Taylor.
“Graham was a lovely man, a great friend. We played him 10 times when I was at Luton and beat him seven and that was important to me. He played direct football, and was very good at it. But let’s just say it was nice when aesthetic football won out over direct.”
Pleat’s mastery of aesthetic football took him from Luton to Spurs, where, for one season in 1986-87, it reached its apex. Playing a five-man midfield including Glenn Hoddle and Ossie Ardiles, he took Spurs to third in the league and to the FA Cup final.
“I think I was a good creative coach going forward,” he says. “People said I didn’t do enough on defending. Maybe that was true.”

Pleat was lauded for the creative attacking football that his teams

He left Spurs under a cloud after a tabloid sting on his private life (though the rumour at the time was that it was a convenience to allow the chairman to appoint Terry Venables). But he continued to practise his creative methods at Leicester City. That was a four-year sojourn he really enjoyed. Even the manner of his departure makes him smile years later.
“Terry Shipman was the chairman, lovely man, very nice to me. He rang me up and said: ‘I’ve got bad news. Unfortunately we had a board meeting and we’ve decided to make a change. I must tell you, I was right behind you, I didn’t want you to go. But you’ve got to go’. He then said: ‘but what’s far worse is, they want me out too.’”
He then had another four years at Luton, before returning to Tottenham in 1998 for a brief spell as caretaker. He took on the role twice more in his long association with the club, finally settling into his position seeking out new playing talent.

Leaving BBC radio was ‘pure ageism’​

In his time in football Pleat has seen enormous change in the way things are organised behind the scenes. Not all of it for the good.
“There are so many processes. You recommend a player and it has to go through a recruitment person, then the head of recruitment, then the director of football, then the manager, then the chairman. But do you know who has the last say? The bank manager. I think there’s too many voices now. Peter Taylor once told me that when it comes to making a decision, two’s company three’s a crowd.”
While scouting he would often combine the job with working for BBC Radio 5 Live. He was a superb pundit, his ability to put things in historical context second to none. Not for the first time in his life, he believes he was let go from that role prematurely.
“Pure ageism,” he says.
Pleat combined his scouting work with evenings moonlighting as a pundit

Though in the latter years of his broadcasting career he was unable to devote as much time as he would have wished to caring for his wife Maureen, who was stricken with a degenerative form of motor neurone disease. She died in 2020. And part of the profits from his memoir will be donated to charities seeking a cure.
“I’m not expecting it to be a fortune,” he smiles. “But every little helps fighting that horrible disease.”
Not that there will be any copies available in the Tottenham club shop.
“They’re not selling it there, something to do with it not being through the club’s official publisher,” he says. “I asked Daniel if I could have a room there to launch it and do a presentation. He said he’d get back to me. I’ve not heard anything. It’s funny. Arsenal gave Bob Wilson a seat for life. They’re a classy club, Arsenal. Me, I was told I can get a ticket at Spurs subject to availability. Subject to availability. Ha! Mind you, Bob did much more for Arsenal than I ever did for Tottenham.”

There are plenty of Spurs supporters who might well argue with that suggestion.

Christ almighty this bit is sad.
 

tubbygold

Well-Known Member
Jan 12, 2021
2,220
5,752


David Pleat: Tottenham preferred data over my ‘eyes and ears’ in scouting — it’s nonsense​

Pleat recalls managing in an age when stylish football mattered and complimenting the chairman’s wife was key to keeping your job​

Jim White10 September 2024 • 7:57am

David Pleat is talking, for the first time in public, about his recent departure from Tottenham. Since 2010 he had been a consultant scout at the club he had once managed, spotting and bringing in players like Jan Vertonghen, Dele Alli and Ben Davies.
But he was told by the club chairman at the end of last season that his services were no longer required.
“Daniel Levy called me in and said, ‘you know it’s all data driven now, we don’t need eyes and ears’. What a nonsense. I didn’t argue. He’s in charge. Actually, I have huge respect for him. The legacy of the new stadium and training ground will always be there. That is all down to him and his drive.”
He pauses for a moment and smiles.
“Although they’ve won nothing for years.”
Now approaching his 80th birthday, after spending a lifetime negotiating football’s ever-changing landscape, Pleat says this is by no means the end for him. He is not the retiring sort and since the start of the new season he has continued as he always has: watching at least three live matches a week, his eyes and ears ever alert.
“Two or three people have spoken to me about things. We’ll see. But I’m not finished. How can I step away? When it comes to football, I’m afraid I’m a total obsessive.”

Pleat is talking to the Telegraph in a hotel in Watford. As he arrives, he reveals he once met up there with Howard Kendall to complete a deal. Though you suspect, given his longevity in the game, there is barely a hotel in the south of England that has not played host to him negotiating a deal. He is here this time, however, to talk about his newly published autobiography, Just One More Goal, its title chosen as a four word summation of his approach.
“I’d never park the bus,” he says of his managerial philosophy (though he is sufficiently old-school never to describe it as such). “If I’m 1-0 up, I want to be 2-0. Always want one more goal. I don’t want to sit back and counterattack. I never played that way. I could never understand ‘1-0 to the Arsenal’. The same with [Jose] Mourinho or [Antonio] Conte’s approach. My edict was entertainment. The game is about glory. That Tottenham thing stuck in my mind, since I saw them in the double 60-61 season.”
And he reels off, without the slightest hesitation, the entire Tottenham side – from Brown through Blanchflower to Allen – he saw that day.
“You can’t compare eras, who knows how they’d survive now. But I do know one thing: that was the best side I ever saw play.”

‘The most important thing to flatter the chairman’s wife’​

Almost from the first time he kicked a ball Pleat was fascinated with tactics and management. At 18, as a promising junior at Nottingham Forest, he took his first coaching certificate. Plagued with injury, his was not the most stellar of playing CVs as he moved across the country, from Forest to Luton to Exeter and back to Peterborough (“I always say I had less a career, more geography A level”).

But when, at the age of 26, he was obliged to retire after a rival player stamped on his back, he found his true métier: in the dugout when he was appointed manager of non-league Nuneaton Town.
“I got the job because of Peter Taylor, Brian Clough’s assistant,” he recalls. “When he was at Burton he took the job with Cloughie at Hartlepool and got a local removal firm run by a chap called Sam Downes to move his stuff. Turns out, he didn’t pay him. The poor chap complained. Taylor said: ‘Don’t worry son, I’ll do you a favour down the line.’ Anyhow, Downes was on the board at Nuneaton. And do you know what the favour was? Recommending me to be the manager. I remember saying to Taylor: ‘How do you know I can do it?’ He said: ‘Of course you can. Most managers out there are crap, you’ll be all right.’”
Pleat was more than all right. From there he went to Luton Town, as a coach under the manager Harry Haslam.
“He was some character,” he remembers. “He told me the most important thing a manager had to do is always to flatter the chairman’s wife, tell her she looks lovely.”

‘Man City chairman told me they’d never recover’​

If not following Haslam’s advice to the letter, Pleat nevertheless quickly understood that managing upwards was a vital part of the job. Not least at Luton, where he was appointed manager after Haslam left, by David Evans, the politically motivated controversialist chairman who, in the 80s, banned away fans at Kenilworth Road.
“Horrible man,” Pleat says of Evans. “Nasty. You should have seen the obituaries when he died. Really scathing stuff.”
Nonetheless he was able to manage upwards sufficiently to stay in charge for eight years, taking the club into the First Division and signing a long line of fine players, from Brian Stein to Peter Nicholas. Though the thing most people remember about his time at Luton is that image of him conducting a one-man invasion of the pitch at Maine Road on the final day of the season in 1983, after his team had just won with a last-second goal to stay in the top flight. He was less eyes and ears that day, more grey slip on shoes and suit jacket flapping, as he raced, arms outstretched, to embrace his team captain Brian Horton.

“Oh, do we have to?” he says, when pressed to recall the details of what still counts as the most glorious managerial victory celebration in football history. But, being David Pleat, a man with a magnificent portfolio of anecdotes, when pressed he is happy to remember.
“When I ran on the field like a whirling dervish, it was all the emotion of what that win meant,” he says. “Not just the fact we had avoided relegation at the very last. But the fact if we had gone down it would probably have been curtains for the club, financially.
“As it was we sent Manchester City down. I remember Peter Swales [the then City chairman] came up to me afterwards, in his platform shoes, his hair with that comb-over, and he said: ‘We’ll never recover from this.’ This was Manchester City. Never recover? Yeah, right.”

‘It was nice when aesthetic football won’​

Luton consolidated after that win, getting better all the time, playing quick, progressive, possession-based football under his direction. Pleat particularly enjoyed getting one over the local rivals Watford, then managed by Graham Taylor.
“Graham was a lovely man, a great friend. We played him 10 times when I was at Luton and beat him seven and that was important to me. He played direct football, and was very good at it. But let’s just say it was nice when aesthetic football won out over direct.”
Pleat’s mastery of aesthetic football took him from Luton to Spurs, where, for one season in 1986-87, it reached its apex. Playing a five-man midfield including Glenn Hoddle and Ossie Ardiles, he took Spurs to third in the league and to the FA Cup final.
“I think I was a good creative coach going forward,” he says. “People said I didn’t do enough on defending. Maybe that was true.”

Pleat was lauded for the creative attacking football that his teams

He left Spurs under a cloud after a tabloid sting on his private life (though the rumour at the time was that it was a convenience to allow the chairman to appoint Terry Venables). But he continued to practise his creative methods at Leicester City. That was a four-year sojourn he really enjoyed. Even the manner of his departure makes him smile years later.
“Terry Shipman was the chairman, lovely man, very nice to me. He rang me up and said: ‘I’ve got bad news. Unfortunately we had a board meeting and we’ve decided to make a change. I must tell you, I was right behind you, I didn’t want you to go. But you’ve got to go’. He then said: ‘but what’s far worse is, they want me out too.’”
He then had another four years at Luton, before returning to Tottenham in 1998 for a brief spell as caretaker. He took on the role twice more in his long association with the club, finally settling into his position seeking out new playing talent.

Leaving BBC radio was ‘pure ageism’​

In his time in football Pleat has seen enormous change in the way things are organised behind the scenes. Not all of it for the good.
“There are so many processes. You recommend a player and it has to go through a recruitment person, then the head of recruitment, then the director of football, then the manager, then the chairman. But do you know who has the last say? The bank manager. I think there’s too many voices now. Peter Taylor once told me that when it comes to making a decision, two’s company three’s a crowd.”
While scouting he would often combine the job with working for BBC Radio 5 Live. He was a superb pundit, his ability to put things in historical context second to none. Not for the first time in his life, he believes he was let go from that role prematurely.
“Pure ageism,” he says.
Pleat combined his scouting work with evenings moonlighting as a pundit

Though in the latter years of his broadcasting career he was unable to devote as much time as he would have wished to caring for his wife Maureen, who was stricken with a degenerative form of motor neurone disease. She died in 2020. And part of the profits from his memoir will be donated to charities seeking a cure.
“I’m not expecting it to be a fortune,” he smiles. “But every little helps fighting that horrible disease.”
Not that there will be any copies available in the Tottenham club shop.
“They’re not selling it there, something to do with it not being through the club’s official publisher,” he says. “I asked Daniel if I could have a room there to launch it and do a presentation. He said he’d get back to me. I’ve not heard anything. It’s funny. Arsenal gave Bob Wilson a seat for life. They’re a classy club, Arsenal. Me, I was told I can get a ticket at Spurs subject to availability. Subject to availability. Ha! Mind you, Bob did much more for Arsenal than I ever did for Tottenham.”
There are plenty of Spurs supporters who might well argue with that suggestion.
The last bits.. really, Levy? Wow.
 

IfiHadTheWings

Well-Known Member
Aug 5, 2013
4,899
15,836
I really don't want to go overboard but that last paragraph has boiled my blood.

Levy at times really is a stain on this club.
 

samspurs92

Well-Known Member
May 17, 2010
2,167
7,779
Well that’s not a great look, as per usual.

People can argue the toss with Levy, “he only cares about money, not winning” or “the new stadium and training ground is incredible, the amount of commercial revenue etc”.

But time and time again, he comes across like a complete wanker.
 
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