In Search of Alan Gilzean: The Lost Legacy of a Dundee and Spurs Legend

James Morgan

сент. 2010 г. · BackPage Press

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NOMINATED FOR BEST FOOTBALL BOOK OF 2010 IN THE BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 

True greatness does not feel the need to proclaim itself from the rooftops. It is happy to state its case quietly, yet with utter conviction. Alan Gilzean was a truly great footballer. Every observer of his talent confirms this as an indisputable fact: from the legendary Jimmy Greaves, who regards him as the best striker he ever played with, to Don Revie, the former Leeds United and England manager, who described the former Tottenham striker as the best touch player in Europe, and Spurs fans whose spine-tingling refrain, Gilzean, Gilzean, Born is the King of White Hart Lane, continues to echo down the generations. 

It is now 36 years since Gilzean retired from professional football and his life and times have become shrouded in mystery and rumour. All that exists are the memories of his greatness ... but how long before even those are forgotten forever? After fans on Tottenham Hotspur online forums claim that Gilzean is living as a down-and-out, James Morgan, a lifelong Spurs fan and sports journalist with The Herald, Scotland's leading quality newspaper, is filled with a fierce desire to separate fact from fiction and sets out on a journey In Search of Alan Gilzean. 

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James Morgan is a sports journalist with The Herald, Scotland's leading quality newspaper. Born in Northern Ireland in 1974, he grew up on stories of the great Spurs double-winning team of the 1960s and has been a Tottenham Hotspur supporter since waking one Christmas morning to discover a hair shirt of an Admiral kit waiting for him on the living-room settee. Thirty-two years on, he is still waiting for Spurs to repeat the feats that his late father, Jim, was so enamoured by.

He wrote In Search Of Alan Gilzean during the months after his first child was born; in the few short hours between nappy changes, bottle feeds and bath times. There were, of course, floods of tears along the way. Some of them were even his son's.