Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Roy Plomley
Northern Irish footballer who captained Ireland and played for Tottenham Hotspur.
Eight records
The keepsakes
The luxury
In conversation
Presenter asks
How early did your interest in football start, you remember?
my mother tells a story of how when I was two years of age she beat me rather soundly for something and banished me to my little room. And not hearing a sound she was very uh worried about this. She thought perhaps she'd caned me too much and she crept up the stairs to find out and apparently I was perched on the windowsill watching a football match beyond.
Presenter asks
What was the first team you played for [as a boy]?
the first official team I played for was an organized team was the 19th Belfast Wolf Club team.
Presenter asks
Is the player consulted about whether he wants to go to the other club that's bid for him?
Sometimes it's a mixture of both. Very often a club will come to another club and want one of the players and say, now look, we'll give you twenty or thirty thousand pounds for this player and the club maybe a little badly off will agree to it. Then they will ask the player does he want to go.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Danny Blanchflower
This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.
Presenter
Whereabouts in Ireland were you born, Danny? I was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. How early did your interest in football start, you remember?
Danny Blanchflower
Well, uh it's very difficult to start one's memory, but my mother tells a story of how when I was two years of age she beat me rather soundly for something and banished me to my little room. And not hearing a sound she was very uh worried about this. She thought perhaps she'd caned me too much and she crept up the stairs to find out and apparently I was perched on the windowsill watching a football match beyond.
Danny Blanchflower
Probably was started there. What was the first team you played for?
Danny Blanchflower
Well, of course, I grew up in a working class family and in and in a working class area and the world of wonder lay at our doorstep. We went out each morning, we met the other children of a similar age, and we played games all the time. This was the world of wonder that lay at our doorstep. And we played matches in the street.
Danny Blanchflower
We mimicked our idols and, you know, played the games that the teams they played for and all the cup finals and everything. We played these in the street. Who was your idol? My idol was Peter Doherty, a very great Irishman. Mm-hmm. But the first official team I played for was an organized team was the 19th Belfast Wolf Club team. Yes. As a boy, you formed a club of your own, didn't you? Yes. I also played for the school later and then I joined the Brogues Brigade. But then there was a time when I left school when the war was just beginning, in the early stages of the war. It was very difficult to find uh games and teams for that.
Danny Blanchflower
for boys of that age because many of the the good characters who had organized such things had gone off to the war and there was a a lack there. So I bought a set of jerseys by for ten shillings of someone. They were trying to sell them. It wasn't that I went looking for them and that's how we started a team. And by seeking and and inviting other teams to play us we found that there was a number of teams like ourselves. So eventually we all got together and formed a league of our own.
Presenter
Well they enter.
Danny Blanchflower
It was very enjoyable too, yes. And the next step after that?
Danny Blanchflower
The next step after that, playing for one of these teams, one of the eager Beavers who look for players for professional clubs saw me and he invited me to join a local club, Glen Torn, which was a local professional club. I went along there as an amateur, of course, because I was only about fifteen at the time.
Danny Blanchflower
I trained with the second team, the reserve team, and travelled with them, but I got fed up watching and I went and played for other teams and other things. Then I joined the RAF and I won a scholarship to university at at the same time and I went off to St Andrews University in Scotland and then I went into the RAF for a period.
Danny Blanchflower
And the war finished uh before we had finished our training as navigators.
Danny Blanchflower
And because of that we became redundant noise.
Danny Blanchflower
Coming from Northern Ireland where there was no conscription,
Danny Blanchflower
I couldn't be remustered into grand jury, so I was demobbed earlier than my age group.
Danny Blanchflower
Because of that I couldn't go back to university. It would have been unfair to the other boys of my age group. So I went back to Ireland and took up other pursuits. I started following a career of electrical engineering and playing part-time professional football as well for Glen Torn.
Danny Blanchflower
And the next step? Uh the next step after that was in nineteen forty-nine the Barnsley Football Club came to Ireland and
Danny Blanchflower
transferred me from Glenthorn to Barnsley for a fee of six thousand five hundred pounds.
Danny Blanchflower
Barnsley were then a second divisional club and I played there for about two years and then I was transferred to Aston Villa, the Birmingham Club. What was your transfer fee this time? The transfer fee was fifteen thousand pounds.
Presenter
And a few years later, when you were transferred to Tottenham Hotspurs, your your present club, the fee was
Danny Blanchflower
Thirty thousand
Presenter
And ponds, yes, as well.
Danny Blanchflower
Does the player get a percentage of a transfer?
Presenter
No, he doesn't.
Danny Blanchflower
There has been in in the last few years there can be a fee paid to'em, which is three hundred pounds. That's the limit. Uh but it's very reluctantly paid. They almost uh can find good reasons not to give it to you. I'm not being unfair about that. Sometimes it is given, but there's all sorts of restrictions tied round it.
Presenter
I'm not sure
Danny Blanchflower
Yeah.
Presenter
Uh
Danny Blanchflower
Uh
Presenter
Is the player consulted about whether he wants to go to the other club that's that's bid for him?
Danny Blanchflower
Sometimes it's a mixture of both. Very often a club will come to another club and want one of the players and say, now look, we'll give you twenty or thirty thousand pounds for this player and the club maybe a little badly off will agree to it. Then they will ask the player does he want to go. How long do you have to sign for with a club? Well when you sign a for a club you are tied to that club until that club no longer wants you or until they agree to release you in some other way. You're entirely at the mercy of the club.
Danny Blanchflower
I've had great pains. I've been fighting about this contract a long time. I don't like it. But it exists and it's what there is and possession is nine points of the law and there it shall remain until there's a great crusade to change it.
Presenter
With a great procession.
Danny Blanchflower
When did you play in your first international? That was 1949 when I was a Barnsley player. I played for Ireland against Scotland at Windsor Park, Belfast. How long have you captained the Irish team?
Danny Blanchflower
I think I started captaining the Irish team in nineteen fifty four. I I I don't want to appear conceited by appearing uh vague about all this, but uh it's very hard to remember these things when you're looking forward.
Presenter
You're looking forward. Anyway, that that includes the time when Ireland beat England for the first time in thirty years. Yes. You better not do that again.
Danny Blanchflower
No, well that uh we've we've all our success has been built on failures really. We're the greatest moral victors in the world. When we get defeated it's a moral victory for us, so we're trying to change it into one. This was one of the black spots when we sort of defeated ourselves by winning.
Presenter
Try to change it into one.
Danny Blanchflower
Uh Danny, how long before the season starts do you go into training?
Danny Blanchflower
It's usually about four or five weeks. Uh this season, for instance, we started about the twenty first of July. It's pretty rigorous, isn't it? Oh, it's very rigorous. It's let me explain it to you this way, for those that haven't experienced it.
Danny Blanchflower
It's like joining the army when you go through that six weeks square of bashing and getting fit. You feel stiff and we murder ourselves out there and we go out to the hills from ten o'clock in the morning until about four o'clock or five in the afternoon.
Presenter
It eases off as the season gets going.
Danny Blanchflower
Well, yes, naturally uh as you push yourself your your limbs and muscles and bones uh can take the punishment and and slowly it wears off.
Presenter
The life of a professional footballer must be much more exciting than it used to be nowadays, with w with the World Cup, the European Cup, all the overseas matches.
Danny Blanchflower
Yes, it's a greater panorama now. I I wouldn't say it was more exciting because the old players in their own way had had the full excitement. I suppose as
Danny Blanchflower
As the scene narrows, for instance, the England Scotland game was probably considered more important ten or fifteen years ago than what it is now in the light of so much intensive foreign competition.
Presenter
Why is it we don't show up very well overseas? I mean these islands, the the mother country of soccer and so on, and we get beaten by the most surprising country.
Danny Blanchflower
Well, I think we're very presumptuous in this country. We think we should win everything all the time. Uh this is a an area of great competition and uh you see in nineteen fifty four the Hungarians were ruling the roost.
Danny Blanchflower
1958, Brazil won the World Cup.
Danny Blanchflower
It's very difficult for us because our
Danny Blanchflower
Domestic competition doesn't quite suit international competition. And there's many of these players in other countries are far better players than us. Uh they're more suited to the game. Uh this is a very complex question which would take days to answer.
Presenter
Are you interested in managing a team yourself? When your playing days are over, a long time to come, would you like to do that?
Danny Blanchflower
I think it's inherent in everyone who loves the game to want to be able to manage a team and produce a team that's better than everybody else's. And I might some day be driven to manage in a team.
Danny Blanchflower
But as conditions are now, I want to avoid it, because the things I want to do, I want to do big. That doesn't mean I'm able to do them big, but I'd like the opportunity to do them big.
Danny Blanchflower
I'd like to have the best team in the world. You can't do that in England because there's too many restrictive rules and practices, like limit on the player's wages. If I'm going to get the best player in the world, I've got to pay him the highest money. That's the way I look at it.
Presenter
It's difficult to build big personalities under the present system.
Danny Blanchflower
I just
Danny Blanchflower
Yes, we have a mass system which pays everybody the same, trains everybody the same, so in the end it's bureaucratic, it produces everybody the same.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter asks
How long do you have to sign for with a club?
when you sign a for a club you are tied to that club until that club no longer wants you or until they agree to release you in some other way. You're entirely at the mercy of the club. I've had great pains. I've been fighting about this contract a long time. I don't like it. But it exists and it's what there is and possession is nine points of the law and there it shall remain until there's a great crusade to change it.
Presenter asks
Why is it we don't show up very well overseas? I mean these islands, the mother country of soccer and so on, and we get beaten by the most surprising country.
I think we're very presumptuous in this country. We think we should win everything all the time. Uh this is a an area of great competition and uh you see in nineteen fifty four the Hungarians were ruling the roost… 1958, Brazil won the World Cup. It's very difficult for us because our domestic competition doesn't quite suit international competition. And there's many of these players in other countries are far better players than us. Uh they're more suited to the game. Uh this is a very complex question which would take days to answer.
Presenter asks
Are you interested in managing a team yourself? When your playing days are over, a long time to come, would you like to do that?
I think it's inherent in everyone who loves the game to want to be able to manage a team and produce a team that's better than everybody else's. And I might some day be driven to manage in a team. But as conditions are now, I want to avoid it, because the things I want to do, I want to do big. That doesn't mean I'm able to do them big, but I'd like the opportunity to do them big. I'd like to have the best team in the world. You can't do that in England because there's too many restrictive rules and practices, like limit on the player's wages. If I'm going to get the best player in the world, I've got to pay him the highest money. That's the way I look at it. It's difficult to build big personalities under the present system.
“my mother tells a story of how when I was two years of age she beat me rather soundly for something and banished me to my little room. And not hearing a sound she was very uh worried about this. She thought perhaps she'd caned me too much and she crept up the stairs to find out and apparently I was perched on the windowsill watching a football match beyond.”
“I've had great pains. I've been fighting about this contract a long time. I don't like it. But it exists and it's what there is and possession is nine points of the law and there it shall remain until there's a great crusade to change it.”
“We're the greatest moral victors in the world. When we get defeated it's a moral victory for us, so we're trying to change it into one. This was one of the black spots when we sort of defeated ourselves by winning.”
“I'd like to have the best team in the world. You can't do that in England because there's too many restrictive rules and practices, like limit on the player's wages.”