"It was Twenty Years ago today!"
article published January, 2018, but first written in 1998 by the late Brian Judson

Previous FA Cup ties with Fulham have been :

1908-09 FAC2   Spurs  1 Fulham 0  Minter  33,008
1983-84 FAC3   Fulham 0 Spurs  0          23,398
1983-84 FAC3R  Spurs  2 Fulham 0  Roberts 32,898
                                  Archibald

There will be very few people present on Monday night who will have any recollection of the first cup tie between the two clubs. Spurs were in their first season as a Football League club and were fighting for promotion. Fulham were in their second season as a League club. They had just failed to gain promotion to the old First Division in their first campaign, finishing 4th behind Bradford City (champions), Leicester Fosse (runners-up) and Oldham Athletic (who had also joined the Football League at the same time as Fulham. Fulham were to have a very long wait before they finally secured promotion to the old First Division, when they finished Champions of the old Division 2 in 1948-49.

Many will, however, remember the tie against Fulham in 1983-84. As I recall, Ray Clemence was injured during the match and Graham Roberts went in goal. Yet, despite that set back, Roberts actually prevented Fulham from scoring and dragged the tie back to Tottenham. Tony Parks played in the replay and retained his place for the rest of the season, as Clemence found it difficult to shake off the injury. Roberts, having kept Fulham at bay at Craven Cottage, scored one of the two goals that dispatched them from the cup. Archibald scored the other.

Very few of the younger element on the Spurs-List will remember seeing Spurs play Fulham regularly in the League. Indeed, Spurs have not played Fulham for League points since the season of 1977-78 when we were last in the old Second Division.

By and large, I have pleasant memories of Spurs playing Fulham in the '60s. My most abiding memory of those games was an incident in the match played at Tottenham in February 1967. Spurs won the match 4-2 but the incident had nothing to do with the football. It was generally a dull game and would not otherwise have been remembered had it not been for the incident.

Harry New was a very pompous, fussy referee. It was New who, acting as a linesman in the 1961 FA Cup final who was responsible for the disallowing of a 'goal' scored by Cliff Jones early on when both teams were showing signs of nerves. The replays were not convincing that Jones was offside but, of course, it was too late.

Meanwhile, Terry Venables, then in his first full season with Tottenham as a player and, incidentally, highly unpopular with the Tottenham fans, decided to liven things up with his mate, Fred Callaghan, playing for Fulham. They pretended to have a boxing match, lightly cuffing each other. No one was more surprised than Venables when the referee blew his whistle, pointed to Callagan and Venables, and then to the dressing room, dismissing them for fighting. Manager Nicholson, of course, was thoroughly annoyed with Venables for his horseplay and fined him for succeeding in getting himself sent off. The irony of it all was that Venables, who had been looking forward to playing for Tottenham against Chelsea, was suspended for that match.

But there was one occasion when Tottenham were thoroughly displeased with Fulham and angrily condemned them in the match programme. Fulham played Tottenham at Craven Cottage one season (I forget which one it is now). The match line-ups were on one page of the programme with notes about the Tottenham players. On the opposite page was an advertisement on how to deal with venereal disease. In this context, one has to bear in mind the fact that the Tottenham board were mostly in their late 60s, early 70s, so could remember a time when it was not a matter for public discussion!

Over the years, there have not been many transfers between the two clubs. Cliff Jones and Terry Dyson left Tottenham at the end of their careers to play for Fulham but did not stay with them for very long. Spurs bought Alan Mullery from Fulham in April 1964 and allowed him to return to Fulham in the summer of 1972. Spurs also harboured hopes of signing Johnny Haynes from Fulham but Haynes was happy to remain at Craven Cottage. In any case, I don't think Haynes was as good a player after being involved in a terrific pile-up of cars in Blackpool in 1963. He'd lost that indefiniable something that marks a great player ....

Spurs have two other connections with Fulham. One, of course, is that after retiring as a player early in the 1949-50 season, Vic Buckingham later managed Fulham in a career that also saw him manage Ajax and Barcelona among various other clubs.

The other connection with Fulham is that of Ernie Payne. Payne was an amateur with Fulham who could not get a game with them in the autumn of 1895. In desperation, he asked Tottenham for a game but said he had lost his boots. Tottenham gave him ten shillings (50p in today's coinage) to buy a new pair of boots. Fulham heard about it and complained to the London Football Association that Tottenham had acted as a professional club and induced Payne to play for them. The upshot was that Tottenham were banned for two weeks and the club decided to adopt professional status as a result.

In Fulham's heyday in the old Division 1, one of their stalwarts was a certain chinned wonder called Jimmy Hill. He was nothing special as a player but he had even then, 'the gift of the gab' and, as Chairman of the Players Football Association, threatened a strike unless clubs were permitted to pay footballers what they were worth. In a sense, then, it was Fulham who started the revolution whose fruit we see today in a Premiership where the rich clubs get richer and the rest are reduced to scrambling for crumbs from the rich clubs. Ironical therefore that the club who were the first to pay a footballer (Johnny Haynes) 100 ukp a week should have been reduced to scrambling about for the left overs before the club was recently bought by Mohamed Al-Fayed.

And the likely outcome of Monday's match? Spurs ought to win because their players should be able to beat Fulham, who are still in the early days of their plans to revamp the club and gain promotion to, ultimately, the Premier. However, Tottenham's confidence is brittle and anything could happen! But I think Spurs will win, 3-1, even though I think that Spurs ought to concentrate on winning their battle against the drop!

Cheers, Brian

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