David Pleat: ‘The joy of beating a great team – that was a great happiness’

‘“No. I’m afraid it’s an addiction or an obsession – whatever you want to call it,” smiles David Pleat. We’re sitting in a hotel just off the M1 motorway where the 79-year-old recalled that he sold the defender Matt Jackson to the Everton manager Howard Kendall back in 1991 for £600,000. “He’d only played nine games for us … that was one of my best bits of business.”

Pleat, whose long association with Tottenham came to an end only a few weeks ago when he left his role as consultant scout, has just been asked whether he has any other interests outside football. It later emerges that the former Luton, Spurs, Leicester and Sheffield Wednesday manager has already attended an astonishing 14 games this season despite it only starting a month ago, including a National League fixture at Wealdstone and an academy match at Watford.

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“I will still be watching games,” says Pleat. “I’m not sure who I’m watching for and at what level. A couple of people have spoken to me and Tottenham won’t stop me because they know I want to work. I made that clear when I left.”

From becoming the youngest debutant in Football League history to score, in 1962, to leading unfashionable Luton to the old First Division, the story of his life has been dominated by what Pleat’s hero Bill Nicholson called “the greatest game of all”. Like the appropriate 90 minutes spent in his company, Just One Goal – a new book written by Pleat in conjunction with the journalist Tim Rich over the course of several years – is full of anecdotes from a long coaching career that began when he took his preliminary badges while still a teenager at Nottingham Forest.

Half the proceeds of the book will go to charities researching motor neurone disease after he was inspired by the work done by the rugby league stars Kevin Sinfield and Rob Burrow, the latter of whom died in June . “It’s so wonderful what they have done,” says Pleat, who lost his wife, Maureen, in 2020 to the disease. “It’s such a terrible thing when people aren’t able to communicate or do anything for themselves – it’s a sad deterioration.”

Peter Taylor, Brian Clough’s long-term assistant, took Pleat under his wing and arranged for him to take over at the non-league club Nuneaton Borough at 26 after he had suffered a broken leg following his move from Forest to Luton. That spell was ended after a 4-0 thrashing by a 34-year-old Ron Atkinson’s Kettering. Having spent three months selling lottery tickets while he waited for the role to become free, Luton’s Harry Haslam eventually made him an assistant at Kenilworth Road and the rest is history.

“I was certainly going in as a very young manager,” says Pleat of his appointment to the top job at the age of 33; only two years older than Brighton’s Fabian Hürzeler, who became the youngest permanent manager in Premier League history this season. “But they’d had me as a reserve coach for a few years so they knew what I was capable of. They obviously trusted me and hoped that I would do well. I might have been good, but I was so lucky.”

The ability to spot a player is a skill that Pleat mastered at Luton, plucking Brian Stein, Ricky Hill and Mal Donaghy from obscurity and turning them into stars. Our conversation is interrupted by a call from Paul Elliott – the former defender who is now vice-chairman of Charlton – who remembers being one of seven black players to feature for Luton in a League Cup tie against Leyton Orient in September 1984. “I just picked the team on merit – it really didn’t matter to me,” says Pleat, whose parents had been born in London’s East End after their families escaped the Jewish pogroms in Latvia and Poland. “Looking back, I’m very proud of that.”

Pleat recalls several instances of antisemitism throughout his career, including one occasion when he ignored a comment from one of his Luton players. “I let it go. You become a little bit immune to it over the years.”

But the memories of perhaps Pleat’s most famous day remain untarnished. He can still recall minute details about the buildup to the game against Manchester City in 1983 when Raddy Antic’s late winner led to his celebratory jig across the Maine Road turf.

“I ran on to the field like an Australian wallaby,” laughs Pleat. “It was really out of character because I never used to go crazy about a win. The wonderful thing about Man City was that we not only survived, we stayed up for eight more years on 10,000 gates.”

By the time Luton shocked Arsenal in the 1988 Littlewoods Cup final to win their first senior trophy – “a bittersweet moment for me” – Pleat’s career had taken several dramatic twists. He left Luton for Tottenham in 1986 to begin a long love affair with the north London club and guided them to third place in the league before losing to Coventry in the FA Cup final. But he resigned a few months later after unsubstantiated newspaper claims that he had been cautioned for kerb crawling, an allegation Pleat has always strenuously denied. Elton John, who was then owner of Luton’s biggest rivals, Watford, sent flowers to express his support.

“I didn’t know him well,” says Pleat. “But he really empathised with me, as did a lot of other people. They told me to get it out of my head and said: ‘Whatever they’ve paid someone to say about you, you have to keep going.’ I was advised that I could win the [libel] case but I just wanted to get on with my life. It was a difficult thing to do because I lost my self-esteem and confidence. I had to start again.”

After a spell at Leicester and a return to Luton, Pleat’s last managerial post was at Sheffield Wednesday before he went back to Tottenham as the club’s first director of football in 1998. He describes Alan Sugar as a “visionary” for introducing the role that has since been adopted by most top clubs. “I remember some of the journalists questioning why they were needed when I was appointed,” he says. “It’s really important that they have a good relationship with the manager but I don’t think they should know them too well because one day you might have to make a difficult decision.”

After three spells as caretaker manager and a brief departure before returning as consultant scout in 2010 to help discover the likes of Dele Alli and Son Heung-min, that day finally came for Pleat at the end of July. Tottenham now rely on a more data-driven approach under the new Danish technical director, Johan Lange, and he was deemed surplus to requirements.

“It’s something I’ve come to terms with – I understand stats and data and how they can be useful,” Pleat insists. “But data can only assist eyes and ears. The more people you know in the game, then the more they will talk. The analysts I see at games now are all bright boys who have done dissertations and they can tell you this player and that player from around the world. They’ve got everything at their fingertips – how many runs they make, how many goals they score. But they don’t see everything.”

Pleat admits he will always have doubts over whether he stepped away from frontline management too soon. But asked whether he would have been successful managing a big team for a significant length of time after achieving a win ratio of 54.9% while in charge of Tottenham, he is less convinced. “That’s a very good question – I don’t know how I would have coped with that. I may have been better at speaking to slightly lesser players, rather than people who were held in awe. I consider myself an underdog from the Luton days. The joy I got from beating a great team – that was a great happiness for me.”

• Just One More Goal : the autobiography of David Pleat is out on 12 September.