LEEDS BOSS EVANS COMES OUT FIGHTING
STEVE PERRYMAN has got an FA Cup secret. If it had been down to him, one of Wembley’s greatest moments might never have happened.
Ricky Villa’s slalom run through Manchester City’s penalty area before scoring the winner in the 1981 final replay remains one of the competition’s all-time favourite goals.
But if Spurs manager Keith Burkinshaw had listened to Perryman, his inspirational captain, the Argentinian wouldn’t even have been on the pitch. Villa had been subbed with 68 minutes gone in the first game and stormed off to the dressing room. Perryman recalls: ‘I think we were still at Wembley, getting ready for a dinner we didn’t really want to go to, thankful we’d got out of jail with a lucky equaliser, when Keith just said to me, “Would you play Ricky in the replay?”.
‘I said, “No chance”. I thought he’d turned his back on the team. When you get substituted and you walk off — well, I’m a team-orientated person, always have been, always will be. I think you have to sit and watch it out in the hope an equaliser is coming.
‘Fortunately Keith was an experienced manager. He felt it was just that Ricky had been so disappointed about his own performance, when it was live on TV back in Argentina. He said, “He’s playing”.
‘Well done Keith. I tell myself Ricky might have come on as sub and scored an even better one — but what a goal that was. It was the day that put Spurs back on the map as a glamour club.’
Perryman (right), now 64 and looking wonderfully fit and well after recovering from a massive heart attack three years ago, has invited Sportsmail to his home in a pretty Devon village and is taking an FA Cup trip down memory lane.
He is director of football for League Two Exeter City and a televised third-round tie with Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool tonight is bringing a £500,000 windfall to his hard-up club. The Cup has been the gift that keeps giving throughout his career and has worked its magic again.
It was the 1967 final that pointed his career to White Hart Lane in the first place. Otherwise his record 866 games for Spurs might have been for Chelsea.
‘I’m from west London and at 15 when I was leaving school I had the choice of about 30 clubs,’ he says. ‘I had been training with Spurs but going to other clubs and when it came to the crunch it was between them and Chelsea, and they were playing each other at Wembley.
‘Chelsea, without mentioning “Are you signing”, invited all my family. They were going to pick us up in a chauffeur-driven car, we were going to be at the banquet after, I was going to be in the dressing room.
‘But it was typical of Bill Nicholson — which I think attracted me in a way — that I met him across the car park one training night and he asked, “Are you going to sign for us or not?”. ‘I said I wasn’t sure, and he came back, “If you are not, you are not getting a ticket for Wembley”.
‘I just liked the idea of joining that straightforwardness, and when Spurs won the final too that made up my mind.’ That started a lifelong love affair with Tottenham, even if it was soured by working for Alan Sugar as assistant to Ossie Ardiles in the mid-1990s. That falling out with the tycoon is one reason he’s been at Exeter 12 years since returning from two successful spells managing in Japan.
It has also been the ideal place to regain his health. On the final day of the season in 2012 he felt ill, collapsed, and needed lifesaving surgery to repair a torn aorta.
‘At first I worked for the club for nothing,’ he reveals. ‘I did that for four years. I think that’s why the club showed faith in me when I was lying on a slab not knowing if I would live or die.
‘They told my stepson I probably wouldn’t pull through. When you hear that now . . . well I’m only glad I didn’t know at the time.
‘A few months ago I met the chap who did the operation, waiting for a plane to go to Manchester. It’s quite inspiring to meet the man who saved your life.
‘Has it made me look at life differently? I don’t think so. I was ready to go back to work and I have done. It isn’t a soft job.
‘When you haven’t got money to pay the wages, that’s not soft, when you have to tell youngsters you are not taking them on because although they are good enough there isn’t enough in the budget, that’s not easy.
‘There’s a lot of nonsense involved, but it is real. I sometimes watch the Premier League, as you do, and it’s a bit Hollywood. Perfect pitches, perfect kit.’
Liverpool will leave their Hollywood lifestyle and get that taste of real life tonight. And just maybe for Steve Perryman the famous trophy will have a couple more magic memories in store.