What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (72 page)

Venables went on to publish an autobiography in which he told a pack of lies about me, and I sued him. I won't bore you with the legal stuff, but to cut a long story, his publisher's insurers took the rap for his lies and paid out PS100,000 to me, which I donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Venables would not apologise, so the best I could get was an announcement read out in open court. I arranged for a giant cheque to be printed - sarcastically from the Porky Pie Bank - made out for PS100,000 and signed by Terry Venables. I had my photo taken outside the court with a Great Ormond Street nurse and gave the picture to the media - quite fun.

*

All this was very time-consuming. I'd become obsessed with it, devoting seven days a week to fighting this legal battle. I'd completely taken my eye off the ball at Amstrad. What's more, I realised things could potentially get worse, as without Venables I was faced with having to run the
whole
football club.

The players were very unhappy with the situation. Some of them had been negotiating with Venables for new contracts and were demanding an audience with me to resolve outstanding issues. I had no experience whatsoever in discussing contracts with players' agents and was about to embark on a whole new world of ducking and diving!

The most important thing to put in place was a new manager. Tony Berry, who was now onside (he
had to be
once Venables was booted out), became very friendly, offering me assistance in choosing the new man. Two names were put forward: Ossie Ardiles, who was manager at West Brom, and Glenn Hoddle, who was rumoured to be signing a contract to become manager at Chelsea.

Berry told me he knew Hoddle quite well and would discuss the issue
with him. Hoddle explained that he had virtually agreed on a deal with Chelsea's Ken Bates and was ready to sign. Had he been approached a week earlier, he may have been able to take the Spurs job. He said he was very frustrated, but what came across was that he didn't want to take the job of Spurs manager only to be forced out one day by Venables.

I told Berry that this was a load of rubbish; Venables was
not
coming back, however much the newspapers insisted he'd be suing me. The papers had quoted Venables as saying that
when
he won the court case (not
if
he won) he would retake control of Spurs. Still, Hoddle felt this was a risk he didn't want to take, so he took the job at Chelsea.

We were left with Ossie. Tony Berry had made contact with him and he agreed to meet me at my house to discuss the job. Ossie was very excited. To use his words, I think he said he would crawl on his hands and knees to get the job.

Louise, Daniel and Simon happened to be round when Ossie arrived and were quite excited to meet him, as he was a Tottenham legend. Ann was there too, but she didn't really know much about football and footballers. Ann has a kind of olive complexion and on that particular day she had her hair tied back - when she did this, people often thought she looked Spanish or South American. In her normal, quiet way, she brought some drinks into the room where I was meeting with Ossie. I introduced her to him and she shyly said hello. Ossie started to speak to her in Spanish and she looked nonplussed. I asked him why he was speaking in Spanish and he told me, 'Your wife looks like a Spanish or South American lady.'

Ossie agreed to sign for the club that night and was announced as the new manager on 19 June 1993. He employed Steve Perryman, another ex-player, as his assistant and took control of the club for the start of the next season. This was a big relief to me. I had employed an ex-Tottenham hero, hoping the fans would be receptive towards him, which they indeed were. They gave him a great welcome on his first day.

However, the players were still angry at the dismissal of Venables and a lot of stuff was still going on behind the scenes. There seemed to be a clique of players that I suppose you could describe as Venables' allies and they were torn between playing for their club and supporting Venables. Some of them would visit Venables' nightclub, tittle-tattling about what was going on at Tottenham. In my opinion, that little mini-mafia gave Ossie a lot of headaches at the time. I think he found it hard to win them over, but the way you win players and fans over is to win games on the pitch. Of course, you're only ever as good as your last game.

The season started off brightly, but soon we were struck down with a few injuries, including one to our main striker, Teddy Sheringham. In the end, we struggled through the season, romancing the relegation zone. In the last week, we had two games to play - the first was at Oldham and the final game was against QPR. If we'd lost both matches, we would have been relegated.

I remember travelling up to Manchester by plane for the Oldham match. It was touch and go whether the game would be on, as it was pouring with rain and the pitch was a mud-heap. Happily for us, the game went ahead and, thanks to some great passing by Vinny Samways, we won 2-0. On the following Saturday, now safe from relegation, we lost our final game to QPR at home.

In order to sort out the mess at White Hart Lane, I decided to transfer my son Daniel from Amstrad to Tottenham to assist in the administration and running of the club. Claude Littner was also seconded and put in place as chief executive to sort out the financial issues. Claude's appointment turned out to be very unpopular, as he tightened the purse-strings within the organisation, which was very much needed. Allegations were flying around that he was cutting off the benefits that players had enjoyed in the past. It's terrible how snipey people can be, leaking malicious stories to newspapers. One of the lies printed in the papers to try to make our management regime look bad was that Claude had refused to allow Gary Mabbutt, our loyal captain of the club and a diabetic, to have Diet Coke on the club coach. This was absolute garbage, but the sort of below-the-belt stuff that can turn fans against you.

Claude got rid of all the accounting people, put in place a senior finance director - releasing Colin Sandy back to his duties at Amshold - and took on some other management, including a new physiotherapist and club doctor. In addition, the merchandising department was professionalised, with proper credit control and inventory control, as well as new warehousing for the mailorder department.

We also had to comply with new laws applying to football stadiums following the Taylor Report, commissioned after the Hillsborough disaster. All Premier League stadiums now had to be all-seater, and reconstructing the whole stadium required a tremendous amount of capital expenditure. Claude handled all these matters.

Within a year or so, we looked like a professional organisation. It's a shame that the efficient way in which we streamlined the affairs of the club was not reflected on the pitch. The external sniping did not let up, as the newspapers continued to write bad stories about Tottenham and, in particular, me.

Throughout the course of this fiasco, a couple of television channels decided to make programmes about Venables and his company dealings. BBC's
Panorama
did a big expose of his company Edennote and the fact that he'd raised money against assets that didn't exist. It also looked into Gino Santini, the Swiss bank account his money was paid into, and made claims he was being pursued by the Inland Revenue for tax evasion. Channel Four also ran a similar expose.

Venables by now had been appointed England coach. FA chief executive Graham Kelly was getting a bit concerned that all these revelations were making Venables' appointment look a bit ill-judged and he was desperate to protect Venables in any way to try to maintain his credibility. The Department of Trade and Industry had started an inquiry into Venables' affairs (which eventually resulted in him being banned from acting as a director of limited companies for seven years). News of the inquiry did not send out a good message to the FA either and the newspapers made a lot of play of it at the time.

At the end of the 1993-4 season, we were approached by Granada television, who told us they had been given loads of documentation to do with illegal loans Tottenham had made to its players during the previous regime under Scholar. Some of these claims even related to illegal payments allegedly made to Ossie in his playing days. Not wishing to get too complicated, FA rules stated that everything you paid to a player had to be expressed in the player's contract. If you incentivised a player
outside
his contract, this would be deemed a serious breach of the rules. Past examples of this had resulted in some clubs being punished by relegation.

The information leaked to Granada resulted in them making a rather stupid programme. However, what happened next was quite remarkable. An impromptu press conference was called by Graham Kelly at 5 p.m. on Friday 12 May 1994. It took place on the doorstep of the FA headquarters at Lancaster Gate.

Kelly read out to the gathered media that Tottenham Hotspur were about to be charged with illegal loans dating back over ten years, including some initiated when Terry Venables was manager under the Scholar regime. If the charges were upheld, it could mean relegation for Spurs, possibly by two divisions. After all, there was a precedent - just a few years earlier, Swindon Town had been relegated by two divisions for similar misdemeanours. It was a very serious matter.

This sudden action by Kelly made no sense. He had been advised of the loans at a meeting I'd previously held with him and Rick Parry, the Premier
League CEO. As far as I was concerned, the matter had been disclosed and I was shocked that the FA was now bringing charges. Indeed, the issue of illegal loans was brought up at a board meeting back in the so-called 'friendly days' just after Venables and I took over the club. In fact, on discovering this information at the time, it was my suggestion that Venables and I go to the FA and inform them that, as the new owners, we had just uncovered this and wanted to clear the decks. This suggestion was turned down by the brain surgeon Crystal, who advised that even if we were up front with the FA, we would still get into trouble.

Instead, they consulted Peter Leaver, the ex-director and barrister, for advice. He was at a board meeting one day and gave his opinion, saying that,
technically,
these were breaches that occurred under the Football League administration and we were now in the Premier League, a completely separate entity which had no jurisdiction over past events. Moreover, he suggested that the Football Association had no jurisdiction over these events either. The only organisation which could have jurisdiction would be the Football League, which now governed the old second, third and fourth divisions. His legal advice was that we had no case to answer. Had we been relegated that season, then we
would
have been under the jurisdiction of the Football League and if we'd then been found guilty of past misdemeanours, we could have been relegated a further two divisions - to the old fourth division!

Though I had no proof, I was pretty sure Venables or his hangers-on had had something to do with this and were rattling Kelly's chain. I guess Kelly's idea was cooked up in the midst of the poor season we were having. However, he had overlooked the fact that as we didn't get relegated, any action would be limited to a Premier League inquiry rather than a Football League inquiry.

Once again, our contribution to global warming kicked in. The newspapers were full of this story, which seemed like a deliberate attempt by Kelly to pay me back for giving him so much aggravation over his England coach.

At the meeting held with Kelly and Parry, apart from discussing the loans, we also talked about the Clough affair. This resulted in a separate FA inquiry being called to look into the Clough bung situation. Rick Parry also recalled this meeting in which I showed them all the documentation and invited them to take it away as part of their inquiry. Included in it was our disclosure to them of the illegal loans we had uncovered, as well as board minutes documenting the discussion. Despite seeing all this, Kelly called upon the Premier League to disclose to the FA
just
the findings relating to the
illegal loans,
not
the Clough bung allegations. And on the basis of that report, Kelly called his kangaroo court press conference that Friday night.

Rick Parry was furious with Kelly - he could see straight through this whole charade. Rick saw that this was
a political
matter and was totally on our side. He knew these illegal loans had been openly disclosed to both of them - there were no secrets - and he was fuming that Kelly had pulled this stroke.

A hearing about the illegal loans was set for two weeks later. It was held at a conference suite at Wembley, allowing the press to have their fun with comments like, 'This is the only way Spurs will ever get to Wembley.' The FA assembled their panel of so-called experts to adjudicate on this issue. We employed the services of Tony Grabiner (now Lord Grabiner), another Tottenham fan and leading QC, to put forward our case in front of the tribunal.

Just to show what a sham this was, Alan Watts, who was there representing Herbert Smith, was taken aside by someone from the FA who suggested that if we were to plead guilty, the matter would be over quickly. We struggled with this offer, as we had no indication from them what sort of punishment they had in mind. We spent an hour discussing this amongst ourselves and concluded that we couldn't risk it, as they might be thinking of relegating us.

The hearing went ahead and Tony Grabiner put it to the FA that they had no authority whatsoever to relegate Tottenham. Tottenham was now in the Premier League, so even if Tottenham
were
to be held to account for these past offences, they had happened when the club was a member of the Football League, so their jurisdiction did not apply.