‘I missed Terry Venables in his private members’ club and now we all do’
Football is coming to terms with missing Terry Venables after his battle with long illness ended on Saturday at the age of 80. I first missed him as a young child going to my first football match in 1980. My dad bought tickets to watch Venables’ exciting Crystal Palace’s young team but he had quit for QPR in unexplained circumstances by the time the match came around.
Then when I began my sports journalism career in August 1996, it was barely a fortnight after his finest hour.
He had united the nation in long-awaited anticipation of international football success and taken us all to the cusp of bringing Football Home with an impressionable Gareth Southgate in the side.
Sadly, Venables’ more shady business dealings were never far away from the football headlines and he stepped away from football to fight a court battle that ultimately ended with him being disqualified from acting as a company director for seven years.
His next appointment was in Australia and when he narrowly failed to get the Socceroos to the 1998 World Cup he spent a brief period mentoring Bryan Robson at Middlesbrough as head coach.
Venables then took another year out of the game – in the six years following Euro 96 he had worked just six months in English football. Yet, still the legend lived on.
In one of the game’s biggest managerial appointment shocks, Peter Ridsdale flew out to his holiday home in Spain and persuaded El Tel to have one final stab at “living the dream” with Leeds in 2002.
He flew into Yorkshire still wearing his bermuda shirt to accept the job in front of the camera and then promptly left for two weeks on pre-booked holiday.
Following Leeds on pre-season tour to Melbourne for his first game, it was amazing to see the warmth Australia still held for their former soccer manager and he was again in his element working with an exciting bunch of young players.
It was a small insight into what it must have been like to be around El Tel in his Barcelona heyday before building a Spurs team that is only just now again able to “dare” and “do” in the manner the fans want them too.
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Unfortunately, when I was finally in a position to watch him try to work the magic close up at Leeds, one-by-one his players were sold from beneath his feet. Most notably a developing Rio Ferdinand.
“This job is not what was advertised in the brochure,” Venables said as an acrimonious nine months drew to a close with Venables still astute enough to quit literally two games before he would have been sacked.
An hour once spent one-on-one in his office early on his his Leeds tenure gave me great insight into his astute assessment of situations and skill at building rapport and developing loyalty. Although this was never Terry Venables at his best.
That, most say, used to come when he was holding court at his club, Scribes West – a venue I was taken to just once as a student when a day’s work experience on a national sports desk inevitably ended there.
“Is Terry in?” the sports editor enquired at the bar. “You’ve just missed him,” came the reply. Now we all do. RIP Terry.
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