Danny Blanchflower

Danny Blanchflower
Blanchflower (left) and George Best
Personnel
Surname	Robert Dennis Blanchflower
birthday	February 10, 1926
place of birth	Belfast ,  Northern Ireland
date of death	December 9, 1993
Place of death	London ,  England
position	midfield
Juniors
Years	station
1945-1949	Glentoran Belfast
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1949-1951	Barnsley FC	68 0(2)
1951-1954	Aston Villa	148 (10)
1954-1964	Tottenham Hotspur	337 (15)
1961	→  Toronto City  (loan)
1965	Durban City
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1949-1963	Northern Ireland	56 0(2)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1976-1979	Northern Ireland
1978-1979	Chelsea FC
1 Only league games are given.

Robert Dennis "Danny" Blanchflower (born February 10, 1926 in Belfast , † December 9, 1993 ) was a Northern Irish football player , coach and sports journalist . He was best known as the central player of Tottenham Hotspur , with whom he won the double of the English championship and the FA Cup in 1961 as team captain . Due to his tactical understanding , which was far above average for this time, and his strengths in passing, he was one of the best footballers of his generation in the right half position in midfield .

The youth

Danny Blanchflower was born in Dunraven Park in east Belfast (Bloomfield Borough) to a working-class Presbyterian home, one of five children . He attended the "Ravenscroft Public Elementary School" and appeared for the first time in 1937 in a youth selection of Belfast against a team from Dublin as a young football player in public. His early role model was Peter Doherty , who began his career at Glentoran Belfast and would later work successfully in England for Blackpool FC and Manchester City as well as in the Northern Irish national team . Blanchflower developed an ever greater passion for football and, in addition to school sports and street football, he also began his club career. From 1941 he played in the “Bloomfield United” club, which he helped to establish in the “East Belfast Summer League”. Despite this passion for the sport, his academic performance did not suffer and he received a scholarship to attend the "Belfast College of Technology".

He finally began an apprenticeship as an electrician in a cigarette factory, joined the ARP ("air-raid precautions") organization to protect the population from air raids and joined the Royal Air Force in 1943 - he had previously given false information about his age. As part of his military training, he attended the University of St Andrews in Scotland between December 1943 and April 1944 . He played there at the same time in the soccer team and the foundation stone for his later passion for golf was laid during this time . In the spring of 1945 he went to Canada for a short time, but returned to Europe in August after the end of the Second World War . In his home town of Belfast he then played briefly for the four years later disbanded club Belfast Celtic and given his obvious talent, he received an offer to be part of the team of Glentoran Belfast. To do this, he turned his back on the Royal Air Force.

Belfast via Barnsley to Birmingham

Blanchflower played for Glentoran Belfast until 1949. Due to the limited opportunities in Northern Irish football, he finally asked the club management for clearance for a change and the English second division club FC Barnsley was awarded the contract for 6,000 British pounds. Since his future club had already exceeded the deadline for this transfer , Blanchflower was only eligible to play for Barnsley FC at the beginning of the 1949/50 season. On October 1, 1949, he also played for the Northern Irish national team against Scotland in Windsor Park, his first international match and finally launched his 14-year national team career with a disappointing 8-2 defeat.

After two years in Barnsley, he moved to Birmingham in 1951 for £ 15,000 to the first division club Aston Villa , who built up a completely new team after the war, which was to build on the early successes from the turn of the century and generally as the "sleeping giant" in England Football was viewed. Although Blanchflower played 155 games after its debut on March 17, 1951 in its three-year period in Birmingham until 1954 and even led the team as captain at times , the team did not get beyond a certain mediocrity and Blanchflower developed steadily growing doubts about that Training concept in which, from his point of view, playing with the ball was neglected too much in favor of pure strength and endurance exercises. Especially at a time when innovative game systems from the European continent - preferably performed by the " Golden Elf " from Hungary - were beginning to dominate the "old" English football, the ambitious Blanchflower, in view of his hitherto untitled career, urged another club change.

Shortly after the official announcement that Blanchflower would leave Aston Villa, two London clubs competed for his favor, Arsenal FC and Tottenham Hotspur . In the bidding process, the clubs submitted their offers as part of a “Dutch auction ” and the “Spurs” were awarded the contract for 30,000 pounds after their local rivals only wanted to invest a maximum of 28,500 pounds.

Tottenham Hotspur

A week before Blanchflower's London debut, Bill Nicholson had retired as a player. He would later return as a successful coach and play an important role in Blanchflower's final career. In the first season 1954/55 Blanchflower initially fought at the Spurs only against relegation from the English elite class and health problems ensured that the coach Arthur Rowe resigned from his position. He was followed by Jimmy Anderson , who was promoted as a former Kotrainer and got involved in a competence dispute with Blanchflower. Although Anderson conducted the line-up, the Northern Irish demanded the right to "adapt" tactics to changing game situations on the field. This conflict escalated when Tottenham lost the 1956 FA Cup semi-finals to Manchester City 1-0. When the team threatened to run out of time to make up the 0-1 deficit, Blanchflower ordered defensive player Maurice Norman to support the attacking formation. After the game was lost, there was a heated argument between the captain and the coach in the team dressing room. Anderson removed his team captain from office and waived Blanchflower in the important game for relegation at Cardiff City . The club's official announcement that Blanchflower had sustained an injury was publicly contradicted, citing his demotion as the reason.

In the two following seasons, however, the events initially turned. The former relegation candidate from Tottenham won the runner-up under coach Anderson in the 1956/57 season and finished third again a year later. In the national team , too , Blanchflower was able to record a respectable success by participating in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden and led the Northern Irish team as captain to the quarter-finals, where they had to pay tribute to the exhausting performance in the 4-0 defeat against France and out of the tournament retired. When the Spurs started extremely weak in the 1958/59 season, Anderson resigned as a coach and made way for former Tottenham player Bill Nicholson. This initially turned out to be disadvantageous for Blanchflower, as the new coach sorted him out of the team - Nicholson favored the younger Jim Iley in Blanchflower's attacking midfield position and was also of the opinion that if the two players played together, there would be too large gaps in the defense system could. Blanchflower then asked for his immediate approval for a move, as he did not like the prospect of having to play in the reserve selection. The team, however, continued the sporting decline and Blanchflower was given the opportunity to return as a substitute for Tommy Harmer . When the entire team sat up on the former captain and so the fortunes of the team could be turned into positive in the short term, Nicholson Blanchflower gave back his old position and even the captaincy. Together with the new signing Dave Mackay , who was able to contribute directly to the team, the Spurs left the relegation zone and were able to secure the class.

Just a year later, almost the same team - apart from the new goalkeeper Bill Brown and the later commitments John White and Les Allen - intervened in the competition for the English championship and finished in third place.

The 1960/61 season was to be the most successful season in the career of Danny Blanchflower and in the club history of Tottenham Hotspur. The team led by Blanchflower won the first eleven games in a row, which is a record in English top division football to this day. In the end, the club won the championship by eight points and then beat Leicester City 2-0 in the FA Cup final . This made the club after Aston Villa in 1897 the first club of the 20th century to win the double from the championship and the English cup. In the following year, winning this double success seemed possible and with a 3-1 win over Burnley FC Tottenham defended their cup title. In the championship, on the other hand, the team lost both games against eventual champions Ipswich Town , but would have arithmetically won the second league title in a row with only one success against this team - so the club finished four points behind Ipswich only third place. At the same time, the Spurs had reached the semi-finals in the European Cup and lost there against the eventual winner Benfica Lisbon .

Blanchflower finally won the first - and only - European title a year later, when he led his team to victory in the European Cup Winners' Cup , surprisingly beating Spanish club Atlético Madrid 5-1 in the final . During this season, however, the captain had to contend with serious injury concerns and the end of the career of the now 37-year-old Blanchflower became increasingly apparent. The double burden became a bigger problem for him and the signs of the future replacement intensified when Nicholson put Phil Beal in Blanchflower's position at the beginning of the 1963/64 season . In the 1: 4 defeat against Manchester United , Blanchflower's weaknesses came to the fore when Denis Law in particular showed him the limits of his advanced age. With the decision to resign Blanchflower took some time, but then announced in April 1964 after ten years at White Hart Lane and 337 championship games as part of his newspaper column, the withdrawal as a player. For the Northern Irish national team, he had completed 56 international matches between 1949 and 1963 and was often in the selection of his home country with his brother Jackie .

Coaching career

After retiring as a player, he retired from the football business over a period of many years and briefly returned as a coach in the second half of the 1970s, to work for the Northern Irish national team and between 1978 and 1979 for Chelsea FC to work. In Chelsea, however, he won only five of 32 games, rose in the 1978/79 season with the club and announced his retirement after less than a year in September 1979.

Away from the football field

Blanchflower was one of only a few players to win the journalists' award for England's Footballer of the Year twice - in 1958 and 1961. On February 6, 1961, he was the first person to turn down an offer that would see him for the well-known TV -Documentary series " This Is Your Life " to portray. He countered the show master Eamonn Andrews on a direct broadcast that he saw the program as an "invasion of privacy".

Blanchflower presented games of the National Professional Soccer League ("NPSL") for the US television station CBS in 1967 , but fell out with the TV officials there when he openly criticized the shortcomings and undesirable developments in this league - especially in one of them wrote articles for him in the weekly sports magazine " Sports Illustrated ".

In the last years of his life, Blanchflower suffered from Alzheimer's disease and died at the age of 67 in December 1993. Almost ten years later he was posthumously honored with admission to the English "Football Hall of Fame".

successes

• European Cup Winner: 1963
• English champion: 1961
• FA Cup winners: 1961, 1962
• England's Footballer of the Year: 1958, 1961
• Inclusion in the English Football Hall of Fame: 2003

Web links

• "The Double Years - Profiling Danny Blanchflower"