Whether it is to be a first trophy in 17 years or more heartbreak, what happens against Manchester United in Bilbao will define Tottenham Hotspur careers.
Moments like this do not come around too often. The last European legend born at this club was 41 years ago, when Keith Burkinshaw’s Tottenham triumphed over two legs against Anderlecht, culminating in a historic victory on penalties at White Hart Lane.
There was a split second between Tony Parks’ final save and the delirious celebrations that would become weaved into Spurs folklore. The roar of the old Shelf Side, a bundle of white shirts. Parks, in green, with his arms aloft.
“These are moments of instant joy,” Chris Hughton recalls. “My overriding joy was that ‘I am a European champion’. We’re all running at Parksy because Parksy saved it, but we could have been running to anybody.
“How euphoric the crowd were was a lot down to the fact this was a European trophy, so now, this is putting Tottenham Hotspur on the European stage. And that hadn’t happened for a long time. That’s why this game meant so, so much more because of what it meant to the club.”
For decades, the story has been told of Paul Miller’s opener in Belgium, the agony of the equaliser. Falling behind in the second leg, only for stand-in captain Graham Roberts to haul Spurs level. Parks stopping the final penalty from Arnor Gudjohnsen, whose son Eidur would go on to sign for Tottenham in 2010.
What is often lost in that retelling is that Parks was not destined to start, had Keith Burkinshaw not kept faith with his back-up goalkeeper after first choice Ray Clemence’s return from injury.
“That was quite a brave decision,” says Tony Galvin. “Glenn [Hoddle] wasn’t available, Ray had been injured but Keith decided to stick with Tony Parks because he had been playing well so he rewarded that.
“Ossie [Ardiles] wasn’t fit to start in the second leg, he was injured. He came on but he wasn’t anywhere near fit, probably wasn’t even fit enough to come off the bench but he was involved in the equalising goal.
“Stevie Perryman got booked [in the away leg]. Losing Stevie was a massive blow leg for the second leg, it really was. This was a man with lots of experience, played in finals before, so we definitely missed him. Graham stepped up very well and captained the team excellently but Stevie’s nous was missed.”
If Spurs are to be crowned Europa League champions on Wednesday, Ange Postecoglou will have to overcome a similar plight. He will be without Dejan Kulusevski, James Maddison and Lucas Bergvall. Perhaps that paves the way for another unexpected hero to emerge.
Yet even without so many of their key men, the real beauty of Spurs’ 1984 success was to be found in its roots.
“The team was made up not wholly of homegrown players but the majority of them were homegrown,” Perryman points out.
“And that is credit to [manager] Keith Burkinshaw. He encouraged youngsters that they had a chance to make our first team. When that youngster – Chris Hughton, [Mark] Falco or [Micky] Hazard, Tony Parks or whoever – walked in the door, they saw in the first team the captain was homegrown, i.e. me, and the most gifted player was homegrown in Glenn Hoddle. So they could see a route to the team.”
That, in essence, was the Burkinshaw way. From relegation in 1977 to promotion the following year and two FA Cups later, 1984 was the pinnacle of one of Tottenham’s most glorious eras.
Yet by the time Anderlecht arrived in town, it was all but over. The news that Burkinshaw was stepping down, announced in the April, a month before the final, sent shockwaves through the dressing room.
“I wasn’t one to get involved in what was going on off the field, but when I found out he was going to resign I just couldn’t get my head around it,” Galvin adds.
“I just thought ‘that’s ridiculous’. It didn’t make any sense at all but he had his issues with the new regime that was taking over the club.”
The full details of the disagreement between Spurs’ new owner Irving Scholar and Burkinshaw never emerged, only legend has it that the latter walked out with a nod to White Hart Lane and the famous line: “There used to be a football club over there.”
First, though, there was one more piece of silverware that would cement him as Tottenham’s second most successful manager, surpassed only by Double-winner Bill Nicholson.
“One thing I can tell you about Keith Burkinshaw: He wouldn’t have been any different to how he’d been the game before, and the game before,” Hughton says. “This was Keith’s personality.
“Keith left the club on a matter of principle. The modern-day manager does not do that. These were different times. This was Keith. An incredibly down-to-earth individual. Never too high, never got too low when things weren’t going so well.
“This was a Tottenham team that at times would have played with Glenn Hoddle, Ossie Ardiles, Ricky Villa in the same midfield – not too many teams would do that now. With the type of flair that they had, teams might look now and think ‘I want a different type of balance’. Keith would have spoke exactly the same way, lifted our confidence levels and wanted us to play how we saw the Tottenham way of playing.”
“It’s a shame that it was Keith’s last night,” Perryman says. He was an “old school manager,” with the highest of standards, and that extended to “everyone on the pitch with a white shirt on”.
Galvin has the same memory, much of it committed to history in his book, Galvinised.
“We weren’t the sort of team that would go and sit behind the ball and try and hit them on the break, that wasn’t what we did,” Galvin says. “We went for it. And to be fair, Anderlecht went for it as well.
“We played very well in the first leg had a few chances early on In the game and really should have come back with a lead. Maybe we were just a bit guilty of sitting back but in the first half we should have gone 2-0 up.”
In another life, that trip to Brussels might not have transpired at all. Anderlecht’s passage to the final had been contentious – Perryman suggests it was “karma” that Spurs beat them – and a decade later, it emerged that they had made a payment of £27,000 to the referee who oversaw two dubious decisions in the semi-final against Nottingham Forest.
But for that, Tottenham could have faced another all-English final like the one they are preparing for on Wednesday.
Instead, Anderlecht came to north London with the hope of silencing the old Lane. That was never going to happen, even after Danny Thomas missed his penalty in the shootout. “There’s only one Danny Thomas,” sang most of the 44,000-strong crowd.
“They cheered him all the way back to the halfway line,” Perryman remembers.
“They cared for him. It was a sign of the team and the supporters being one.”
Hughton remembers Thomas being “hugely popular, among the players and among the supporters”, who only felt sympathy that he should be the one not to score.
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“The place was absolutely rocking!” Galvin says.
“To have a European final in your own ground so all the supporters were there to see that happen, that transferred it to the players, made you realise what a responsibility it is.”
“The way it ended, with Parksy saving the penalty, everyone went mad. But we had those dreaded fences up, previously they [the fans] would have got onto the ground. When we were doing our lap of honour, which was fantastic, I’ve never seen a crowd so ecstatic.”
Nobody at Tottenham will be hoping for another shootout, even as Hughton points out, “it’s almost impossible to win the game in a better way”.
“To see the joy on people’s faces,” Galvin says.
“A lot of young people were pushed to the front so they could see us, not in a dangerous way, but it was good to see so many young people smiling, happy. And when you see people now, they still remember that night.”
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