It was sad to learn of the death of one of English football’s great personalities, Terry Venables, last week at the age of 80.
Venables was a fine player particularly with Chelsea and Tottenham and went on to be an even more effective manager for Barcelona, Spurs and England. He was blessed with a good footballing brain.
As a student, I was fortunate enough to see Venables in action regularly playing for Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the early-to-mid 1960s.
I still have programmes from that era with Venables playing at No.10 which in those days was known as “inside left”.
Chelsea had an exciting forward line.
For the match against AC Milan in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup on Feb 16, 1966, the Blues forward line was Barry Bridges, George Graham, Peter Osgood, Venables and Bobby Tambling. That was quite a line-up by any standards.
From what I can recall of…
