NORMAN GILLER'S SPURS ODYSSEY BLOG No 500
Submitted by Norman Giller

You poor souls! This is the 500th time you have had to put up with my meandering thoughts on all things Tottenham, and as we enter 2025, I am like Spurs running on empty after that agonising defeat by Newcastle. I have always done my best to bang the Lilywhite drum with a positive beat since my tenure started eleven years ago this month, but the marching support is starting to dwindle.

For those of you who have kindly been with me every step of the way, thank you for your loyalty and patience. It's been a long and winding road (I'm older than any of The Beatles) and the fact that lethal Liverpool are our visitors in a first leg League Cup semi-final on Wednesday guarantees a hard day's night.

Our Spurs Odyssey guru Paul H. Smith, responsible for generously allowing me this platform, wondered how best to mark the milestone (or did he say millstone?). We settled for a repeat of this tribute I wrote here to my old pal Jimmy Greaves the week he left us on September 19 2021...

"I struggled to handle the passing yesterday of Jimmy Greaves, though I had been expecting it - even wishing for it - for several years, ever since his paralysing stroke of 2015 robbed him of any decent quality of life.

It was torture watching my close pal of nearly 65 years become the prisoner of a wheelchair, and when I used to visit him in his elegant Essex bungalow it got to the point where our conversations centred on how I could assist him in leaving this mortal coil.

I say conversations. He was reduced to strangled comments as one of the wittiest men ever to cross my path struggled to express himself. It was like watching a great classical pianist trying to play with the lid closed.

What a cruel way for him to end what had been a glorious life during which he brought sunshine into the lives of millions, first with his football and then his televised wit on Saint and Greavsie.

In between he had five lost years when alcohol got the better of him, but he had the character and discipline to beat it and then reinvent himself as a TV celebrity and national treasure. Jim and I wrote 20 books together and after we had finished his first one - "This One's On Me,' the story of his struggle with alcoholism - I suggested a toast drunk with black coffee: "Let's go and get sober out of our minds.' This was on Jim's 38th birthday, February 20, 1978, and neither of us touched a drop from then on. This was his greatest victory.

It was the woman behind the man who must take all the credit for rescuing Jimmy from the clutches of the bottle - his wonderful wife, Irene, who divorced him to bring him to his senses and then took him back and eventually remarried him once he had proved he could lead a sober existence. A great film there, folks, for any producers looking in. You couldn't make it up.

"He was the love of my life for 63 years," Irene told me yesterday. "To be honest, his passing is a blessing because he was in very poor health after his stroke. I'm just glad he died in his own bed and close to me. He would have wanted it that way, not somewhere with strangers."

I don't have to repeat Jimmy's footballing achievements here on friendly territory where you will know his records better than he did. What I will do for those too young to have seen him play - it is more than 50 years since he wore a Tottenham shirt - is point out that when you are watching Lionel Messi, it is like an action replay of Jimmy at his best.

The way Messi runs at defences (cunning running, I call it), the way he changes pace and direction, and above all the way he finishes - passing the ball into the net - is pure Greavsie.

The close control is identical, the sudden acceleration, the ability to shoot with either foot, the same low gravity and perfect balance. It's all a flashback for me to "Our Jim", who scored a record 357 goals in the old First Division, 220 of them for Tottenham and 266 counting cup goals. Messi has been even more prolific, but he has never had to experience the violent interruption from defenders like "Chopper" Harris, Norman "Bites Yer Legs" Hunter and "Anfield Iron" Tommy Smith, hard men who were encouraged by the laws of the time to hit and hurt.

And could he have done it on the mudheap pitches on which Jimmy's generation played? Jim often told me that the major difference between then and now was the surfaces on which they slogged for much of each season ... "and I wouldn't mind coming back for just one week's hundred-grand wages, more than I earned in my career."

If you think my memory is deceiving me about the Greaves ability, take yourself to YouTube and enjoy the feast, particularly watching him on the way to a goal against Man United that opened the Match of the Day titles until the dawn of colour television.

Spurs fans may not like me saying this but it's a fact that his most dazzling goals came when he was wearing a Chelsea shirt and playing with the gay abandonment of youth ("gay" had an innocent connotation in those black and white days). Sadly, few of his Chelsea crackers were captured on film or tape, but ask anybody who was around at the time and they will confirm that many of them were magical. His more mature performances came with the golden Spurs side of the "60s", and his G-Men partnership with Alan Gilzean was from the footballing heavens.

Jimmy scored the little matter of a then club record 124 league goals for Chelsea (including three five-goal hauls) before he was 21. He endured a nightmare four months in Milan, mourning the loss to a cot death of "Baby Jim" before manager Bill Nicholson bought him for Spurs for £99,999, so saving him from the pressure of being football's first six-figure player. To think Spurs could have had him straight from school for a £10 signing-on fee if Chelsea had not poached him from under Tottenham's noses.

He helped himself to 220 league goals for Tottenham and had hung up his shooting boots by the time he was 31 after a miserable move to West Ham. He finished with an all-time record haul of 357 First Division goals. Figuratively speaking, he was unbeatable.

When television decided his face no longer fitted (the idiots) he then went back to the drawing board and turned himself into a brilliant stand-up comedian and raconteur in a series of road shows with his long-time agent Terry Baker. He was an astonishing man, who refused to allow chronic dyslexia to handicap him. The Great Entertainer, whether with a ball at his feet or a microphone in his hand.

Most of all, the nation will remember Jimmy for goals rarely bettered on the playing fields of England, and it was at the old, much-loved White Hart Lane that he conjured some of the best in his collection.

It seems trivial talking about Jimmy's goals at a time when Irene and her family are mourning the loss of a husband, father, granddad and great granddad, and my thoughts and sympathy are with sons Danny and Andy and daughters Lyn and Mitzi and their multi-tude of grand and great grandchildren. Jimmy had a very full life.

And to think that the Establishment could not stretch to a knighthood.

He was quite simply the King of goal scorers."

Back to the present, and I remember with pride that I had the privilege of delivering Jimmy's eulogy on behalf of his army of fans, TV colleagues and old team-mates. You can read my words HERE- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjVI3se8rOE.

We will not see his like again.

Meantime, an extremely productive and happy New Year to you and yours from me and my child bride Joyce, who has just been awarded an MBE. She has won much more recently than Spurs!

Happy New Year! COYS, Unc

Week 20 of our eleventh season of the Spurs Odyssey Quiz League, and the question is:

Which Antwerp-born midfielder won 82 international caps and from which London club did he join Spurs in 2012?

Please email your answer to me at soqleague@gmail.com and make the subject heading Quiz Week 20. Deadline: midnight this Friday. I will do my best to respond to all who take part.

The rules are the same as in the previous ten seasons. I ask a two-pronged question with three points at stake - two for identifying the player and one for the supplementary question. In the closing weeks of the competition I break the logjam of all-knowing Spurs-history experts with a real stinker of a tie-breaking poser that is based on opinion rather than fact.

This year's main prize will be a framed certificate announcing the winner as SOQL champion 2025, plus three signed books to be revealed at a later date.

Last week's question:- Which gentleman from Verona has played nine times for Italy, joined Spurs from Udinese and which number Spurs shirt does he wear?

Answer:- Destiny Udogie/shirt number 13

See you back here on Monday. Happy 2025. COYS!

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