'He had charm - and that rubbed off on you'

Albion legend Guy Butters speaks to Spencer Vignes about his time working with the former England and Tottenham manager Terry Venables, who died in November.

Spencer Vignes

2023-12-29T06:00:00Z

Former Tottenham and England manager Terry Venables.

Guy, we’re speaking a few weeks after the sad passing of Terry Venables, who you played under at White Hart Lane.

I knew he’d been ill for a number of years and moved out to Spain a while ago to be in the warm, to spend his last few years in comfort. He loved Spain, he really did. You could tell that when he came back from Barcelona to manage Spurs.

We used to go out there and play pre-season games. He bought into Spain and all that siesta stuff – you know, like encouraging the players to have a little nap in the afternoon to recover from training in the morning. He brought a lot of that back from Spain and we weren’t the only ones who benefitted, because the national team did as well once he took over as England manager.

Terry wasn’t in charge at Spurs when you first went there as a young hopeful in the 1980s, was he?

No. David Pleat was the manager then, who’d taken over from Peter Shreeves. He [Pleat] wasn’t there on my very first day. Instead it was a bloke called Trevor Hartley who was his assistant. This, I will never forget. All us apprentices were sat on the floor in front of the pros and he [Hartley] started talking to us about the importance of keeping your discipline on the pitch.

He stood me up and slapped me round the face! Then he went, ‘Brilliant. No retaliation. That’s an example of what we want!’ That’s what they did in those days, which is a bit different to today of course.

Guy Butters thanks the Albion fans after playing an FA Cup tie at White Hart Lane against his former club Spurs in 2005.

You can say that again…

Those methods wouldn’t work now, but they were acceptable then, which sounds weird when you try and explain it. It was like being a private in the army. They were preparing you for playing in the first team in front of 40,000 people against somebody like [centre-forward] John Fashanu, with arms flying everywhere and all that stuff.

They wanted to know if you were going to stand up to it or crumble. They wanted to know if they could count on you. You look back on it and think, ‘That’s a bit extreme’ but I do get it. It was to gear you up. It defined your character. It was certainly character building for me. Anyway, he [Pleat] did okay, but then we lost the FA Cup Final to Coventry in 1987, and it was after that that ‘Tel’ came in.

What were your impressions of Terry?

He was very charismatic, not only off the field – he used to do his singing and things like that – but also as a coach. I never heard him raise his voice once. As a side, we were drilled, drilled, drilled. At Barcelona, they’d played a sweeper system under him, and he introduced that to us over here.

Growing up, all the teams I played through with Tottenham, from the youth team up, whenever [opposition] wingers had the ball they used to get shown outside, so crosses would be coming in. He showed everyone inside, so you had a whole new way of playing. Every single day, drill, drill, drill on the back four with the midfielders in front. And it worked. It was really good.

In those days the offside rule was totally different so you could get away with it. Obviously people got it wrong, because they were learning a new style of play, but he’d never shout. He’d coach them through it – tell them where to go, body shape, etc. It was a good time to be there, and a good time to be under him, learning these new ideas.

What did you take most from working under Terry?

How to conduct yourself as a person. He dressed very smartly. It was about the way you carried yourself, how you acted off the pitch. He was very polite, yet very persuasive. He had a charm about him. And that all rubbed off on you. He was also very thorough – as I said, drill, drill, drill, know your stuff.

He used to get Allan Harris, his assistant manager, to take any young players aside ten minutes before kick-off to brief them – ‘You’re marking Mark Hughes, don’t let him pin you on the edge of the box because he’ll roll you, he’s very strong,’ all the pluses and minuses of who you were about to play against. That thoroughness certainly had a knock-on effect on me throughout my career.