Bill Nicholson’s Tottenham Hotspur side of the early 1960s will always have its place etched in the history of the North London club.
The Lilywhites became the first English side to win the League and Cup double in 1961 and did so playing a style of football the likes of which this country had never seen before.
Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville compared the greatest teams in English football history in this week’s edition of Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football and unsurprisingly, Nicholson’s side was among those that made the shortlist.
Although Carragher admitted to having not watched the team the Tottenham team of the early sixties in action, he revealed how the team’s achievements were still talked about when he was coming through the ranks a couple of decades later.
The former Liverpool defender said: “To be honest, when I first starting watching football it was the 1984/85 season with Everton, when I was a kid, I remember that team getting spoken about.
“I’m sure Howard Kendall spoke about how if he ever wanted a team to play a certain way, it’d be how the double team of Tottenham, I always remember it vividly.
“It was the push and run team, the way that they played. I don’t think it’s just down to the trophies, I think it was the actual way they played football and probably that legacy went on for years when we looked at players and thought ‘he’s a Tottenham player’.
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“They had some greats, Jimmy Greaves, there’s a big petition to get him knighted and rightly so, but I don’t know too much about that team, only what has been passed back from my dad and that.”
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It is not just the trophies that this side won that makes them so special but they actually managed to change the way football was played in this country. It is fair to say that Nicholson would have been rolling in his grave from the negative approach we employed in our last two matches against Chelsea and Leipzig.
While Carragher references the ‘push and run team’, it was actually Nicholson’s former manager at White Hart Lane, Arthur Rowe who initiated the style of play in 1949 (Guardian).
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