Terry Venables led England to within inches of glory at Euro 96 and laid a blueprint at Barcelona – he was one of a kind
ASK almost anybody who ever played for Terry Venables and you get the same reply: “He was the best manager I ever had.”
Given that his managerial career spanned four decades, a time when some of the greatest bosses in English football were at their peak, that is the measure of a real compliment.
And Venables’ death, at the age of 80, represents a sad closure of a major chapter in the development of the game.
He was the boy wonder at Chelsea, another off the East End production line that included Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Moore and Martin Peters among so many others.
Despite becoming the only player to win England caps at schoolboy, youth, amateur, under-23 and full level – he played twice for Alf Ramsey against Belgium and Holland in 1964 – and a playing career that clocked up almost 600 games for Chelsea, Spurs, QPR and Crystal Palace, Venables did not quite become the player he was expected to be.
There were trophies on the way, mind. A League Cup win with Chelsea in 1965 before a massive fall-out with manager Tommy Docherty when he was one of eight players who broke a squad curfew before a game at Liverpool.
Then, in 1967, after an £80,000 move across London, an FA Cup triumph for Spurs against his former club.
But, just as with Docherty, Venables fell out with Bill Nicholson, feeling the first man to win the Double in the 20th century was too cautious.
It was the 1969 move to Loftus Road, though, that was the makings of Venables, a transfer he described as “blessed with so much good fortune”.
Under manager Gordon Jago, Venables’ footballing brain was allowed to flourish on the training pitch and while his 1974 switch to Palace only lasted half a season on the pitch before he was forced to retire, he made an instant transition to a coaching role.
That was under Malcolm Allison, a manager with the same instincts as Venables, who succeeded him in the top job in 1976.
Over the next four years, in the unlikely surroundings of Selhurst Park, Venables built something. The “Team of the Eighties” went from the third division to the top flight, with Venables’ reputation as an inventive and flexible tactician burgeoning.
A surprise return to Rangers in 1980 – the precise reasons were never clear – only served as the further springboard, as he took the second division side – including Terry Fenwick, Glenn Roeder, Tony Currie and Clive Allen – to the FA Cup Final, when only a Glenn Hoddle replay penalty edged it for Tottenham.
Promotion followed, with QPR fifth in their first season back in the elite.
Even so, what followed was the stuff of fantasy. Venables himself conceded: “I just couldn’t believe it.”
Barcelona wanted a manager. Someone new, fresh, exciting. That they might go for a 41-year-old Englishman was still not in most fans’ imaginations.
But, prompted by Bobby Robson, Barca made the approach – and a legend was born.
Venables arrived with a swagger – and smartly gave part of his opening address in Catalan with a cry of love for the club.
Suddenly, he was “El Tel” – although walking into something of a crisis as he replaced 1978 World Cup winner Cesar Luis Menotti to be told he had to sell Diego Maradona.
Demanding the club sign Steve Archibald from Spurs rather than Mexico’s Hugo Sanchez, was a brave step.
But Venables was a brave manager. Recruiting from the youth set-up – a blueprint for what has followed – and playing a high-tempo attacking press.
Would Pep Guardiola have been what he is now without the Venables; influence at the Camp Nou? Unlikely.
His first season saw Archibald score 15 as Barca won their first La Liga crown since 1974.
A year later they were red-hot favourites to lift the European Cup for the first time as they faced Steaua Bucharest in Seville.
The Romanians, though, choked the life out of the game before arguably the worst penalty shoot-out in history saw the underdogs win 2-0.
While Venables recruited Gary Lineker and Mark Hughes in 1986, the sands of time were running out. Just as the door to return to Spurs was being opened after the forced departure of David Pleat.
Lineker was desperate to be reunited and Tottenham were also able to tempt Paul Gascoigne to N17, while Fenwick was in harness alongside skipper Gary Mabbutt at the back, although Chris Waddle was an early exit.
Yet while things looked good on the pitch, the club were in a black hole financially as chairman Irving Scholar’s investment decisions – five years too early – backfired.
Gascoigne knew he had to be sold – his team-mates feel that may have been why he was so over-hyped before the 1991 FA Cup Final against Nottingham Forest, with catastrophic results – and Venables’ decision to join forces with incoming owner Alan Sugar was ill-starred.
Venables moved upstairs – away from the training ground he loved and a destabilising move on the team – but the thin ice in his relationship with Sugar cracked totally amid a fall-out that ended in a horrific court case in which the reputations of many were shredded.
Even before that, there were some skeletons in the background. Venables had never been content to just be a footballer.
He was also a crooner, a raconteur, and a businessman, owning various clubs and pubs, while some of his associates were, at best, dubious.
Those legal issues were in the background even when he was appointed to replace the sacked Graham Taylor after England failed to make the 1994 World Cup.
Immediately, the self-confessed “hired gun” altered the mentality of the England squad, installing the tactical flexibility he had always been famed for.
The players loved him. Almost unconditionally, as Venables cleverly used Don Howe and Bryan Robson to put in the hard yards while he was the tactical genius and morale-booster.
Yet the FA were unconvinced, still. The feeling that Venables “carried more baggage than a railway porter” persisted and when the infamous “international committee” refused a contract extension in December 1995, he announced he would quit after Euro 1996.
That might have been a mistake. Had Venables known what his players would achieve six months later, he would have been in such a strong position he could have doubled his money.
Instead, Hoddle was announced as his successor three months before the tournament.
England came into the Euros under a cloud after the shenanigans in the Hong Kong Jump Club and aboard the Cathay Pacific flight home, with the manager opting, publicly, for a stance of “collective responsibility”.
But with Football’s Coming Home the new national anthem, and England reaching the knock-out phase by a sumptuous thumping of the Dutch, Venables was a national hero.
The image of him consoling a distraught Gareth Southgate after the latter’s spot-kick miss against Germany summed up his relationship with the players, who were desperate for him to stay. But the die was cast.
Venables did get another international job, with Australia, but they lost a 1998 World Cup play-off to Iran and later jobs at Palace, Middlesbrough and a cash-strapped and collapsing Leeds were sad echoes of the past.
Briefly he returned to the England stage under the short-lived Steve Mclaren era but the magic was dissipating and he retired to Spain in 2014.
One of the greats. One of a kind. One of his own. Terence Frederick Venables.