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Danny Blanchflower
| Category: | Male Player |
| Year Inducted: | 2002 |
Profile by Robert Galvin, the author of The Football Football Hall of Fame, the official book of the National Football Museum Hall of Fame:
‘Mind you, football is not really about winning, or goals, or saves or supporters. It's about glory. It's about doing things in style, doing them with a flourish. It's about going out to beat the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom. It's about dreaming of the glory of the Double.'
Danny Blanchflower made Tottenham Hotspur believe it was their destiny to win the Double, a feat considered by many to be beyond any football team. In 1960-61, under his captaincy, Spurs became the first club that century to win the League championship and the FA Cup in the same season.
‘You cannot lead from the middle of a pack,' Blanchflower argued, on the subject of captaincy. ‘Danny was so far ahead of his team that when people let him get on with things that might seem a bit odd, they generally worked out,' Cliff Jones, the Spurs winger, said.
As skipper, Blanchflower lifted the FA Cup in successive years - 1961 and 1962 - and the following season, his inspirational speech lifted the team before the European Cup-winners' Cup final against Atletico Madrid, a game Spurs won 5-1. 'Danny made us all feel ten feet tall,' Jimmy Greaves said.
Blanchflower played in all 42 League games in the Double-winning season. At the age of 34, he was voted the best player in the country by one newspaper. When the title had been won, the Tottenham supporters poured onto the pitch at White Hart Lane and began chanting: ‘We want Danny! We want Danny!'
For four years he had insisted that it was possible, and that Spurs were the team to prove it. By July 1960, he was convinced. At training he addressed his team-mates. This, he told them, would be ‘a season of destiny for Tottenham Hotspur'.
‘At pre-season training I was impressed with the team: its individual ability, its teamwork and its whole personality,' he said. ‘But I knew that it couldn't be done with a weak heart. The team would really have to believe.'
Bill Nicholson formed a strong alliance with his captain, giving him the power to make tactical adjustments during a game, in partnership with the dynamic Dave Mackay in midfield.
Danny Blanchflower made Spurs tick as an attacking force. Greaves attributed much of his success as a goalscorer in the early 1960s to the creative talent of the team's right-half.
‘Danny's play suits me right down to the ground,' Greaves said at the time. ‘When we have possession he is constantly looking for the gap for a 30-yard pass down the middle. That is just the kind of pass I like, the one that gives me the chance of a quick dash on goal.'
After stints at Barnsley and Aston Villa, Blanchflower was voted Footballer of the Year as a Spurs player in 1958. That same year, he reached a pinnacle in his international career, leading Northern Ireland, as captain, to the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Sweden after, remarkably, eliminating Italy at the qualifying stage.
In April 1964, at the age of 37, Blanchflower finally announced his retirement. ‘A light has gone out at White Hart Lane,' Greaves said.