When pressure from fans and hacks drove Gerry Francis to resign as Tottenham boss in October 1997, his disappointed chairman Alan Sugar bitterly quipped that, what with fancy-dan foreign technicians suddenly being all the rage, his manager would have had a much fairer public hearing if he’d changed his name to Geraldo Francisco. That theory, alas, was rapidly disproved. For though Francis faced flak, it was never as fierce as that fired at his Swiss replacement, Christian Gross, who from the moment he arrived at White Hart Lane – ten years ago to the day – was targeted for more abuse than an imprisoned policeman.
Perhaps this was because his surname lent itself so easily to offensive puns, or maybe it was spawned by some scribes’ embarrassed anger at being exposed as know-nothing loudmouths by ARSENE WHO?!?. Either way, the sneer campaign was so sustained throughout his 10-month tenure that “Christian Gross” entered the footballing lexicon as shorthand for “clueless continental clown who couldn’t guide goats to grass let alone a football team to glory”. Even now if an English club hires an unheralded coach from overseas, fans will mutter with a shudder: “let’s hope he doesn’t turn out to be another Christian Gross”.
That’s – and here’s a headline you won’t have seen after his dismissal in September 1998 – GROSSLY UNFAIR. He may not be a Wengeresque genius, but Gross did a respectable job at Spurs – despite being regularly undermined.
Francis had jumped ship and left Spurs in, as captain Sol Campbell admitted, “really dire straits”. They were 16th in the table after 14 matches, just one point off the relegation zone. Everton and Bolton, the two teams directly beneath them, each had a game in hand. For his first match in charge, Gross took a Spurs side that had lost four in a row to Goodison Park and won 2-0, though even this ultimately counted against him, thickening the ever-intoxicating fumes of past glories as fans feverishly recalled that double mastermind Bill Nicholson had also opened his Spurs career with a win over Everton (by 10-4, no less).
Despite that win and fans’ ever-fantastical ambitions, Gross had not come up with a miracle cure for the chronic lack of confidence that had afflicted Spurs under Francis. That much was made plain in the next game, Gross’ first at White Hart Lane. Chelsea won 6-1. The scoreline does not tell the full story: Spurs were uncharacteristically vigorous and coherent in the first half and would have been two goals up had David Ginola not squandered two sitters – instead they went in 1-1 at the break and as soon as they conceded in the 47th minute, they imploded like, well, a bunch of losers. Which is essentially what Gross had inherited.
A fit body is a fit mind and Gross believed the first step to healing Spurs’ mental fragility was increasing their physical solidity. But he was more than the mad army sergeant the press liked to portray him as. Yes, he imposed dietary restrictions and shocked White Hart Lane by introducing the heretical notion of training the day after matches, but his football philosophy was about more than put-’em-under-pressure physicality. Ultimately he knew he couldn’t develop the high-tempo, offensive style that had brought his Grasshoppers Zurich side two Swiss titles in the previous three years and to the brink of the 1997 Champions League quarter-finals (notably winning away to Ajax, who’d reached the two previous finals) so long as Spurs remained the frailest side in the league, saddled with a habit of conceding late goals and a treatment room more loaded than a Pete Doherty on a Saturday night.
Gross was particularly alarmed that full-backs and mid fielders seemed unable to backtrack fast enough after attacking – he diagnosed this as the reason for which they either didn’t bother going forward and thus invited pressure, or went forward and found themselves stranded and panting as the opposition scored on the counter. Though his effort to remedy the problem was foiled at first by the decision of Her Majesty’s bureaucrats to deny a work permit to Fritz Schmid, the fitness coach with whom he’d always worked, he eventually succeeded in instilling a semblance of dynamism into Spurs.
This first became really apparent in the north London derby on December 28, when, after being dominated by an Arsenal’s clearly superior players, Spurs rallied and finished far stronger. Allan Nielsen’s goal in the 1-1 draw could have come straight from Gross’ style guide: Nielsen robustly dispossessed Patrick Vieira in the middle and slipped a neat ball through to Ginola, who twinkled his way past two before feeding Ruel Fox on the wing. When Fox crossed, Nielsen arrived at speed to bang it into the net. Power and precision had laid the platform for a stylish finish.
That Ginola was instrumental in the goal was unsurprising: during his brief tenure at Tottenham, Gross transformed the Frenchman into the player that would eventually be voted the best in the country. Though he sometimes played him on the wing, usually when the opposition fielded three center-backs, Gross mostly deployed Ginola in an advanced free role akin to the one in which he’d previously thrived at Paris St Germain. This pivotal position permitted Ginola’s creativity to flourish and also pulled off the elusive trick of pandering to the Frenchman’s ego while benefiting the collective. While contributing the magic and goals that would make him the team’s most dangerous performer (and top scorer), Ginola also cranked up his work rate, backtracking and tackling to such an extent that he became unrecognisable to Newcastle fans.
The Arsenal match was, of course, also memorable for another reason: Jurgen Klinsmann made his second coming in a Spurs shirt. It was Klinsmann who, when an Sampdoria player, had first recommended Gross to Alan Sugar, not merely because the German knew that Borussia Mönchengladbach and former European champions Hamburg had tried to hire him, nor simply because the two had the same lawyer, but mainly because Klinsmann had been impressed by the vibrancy of Gross’s Grasshoppers and his innovative psychological strengthening techniques (including visualization, which apparently justified capers such as taking the team to visit medieval castles so they could better picture a fortress). But when he made that recommendation, just as when Gross accepted Sugar’s subsequent offer, neither man knew they would end up at Tottenham together. When Klinsmann arrived, it was to further undermine Gross.
At first Gross was in favour of Klinsmann coming – after all, with the previous season’s top scorer, Teddy Sheringham, having been sold and Les Ferdinand, Chris Armstrong and Steffen Iversen continually injured, Spurs needed a striker. And the prospect also held an obvious appeal to Klinsmann, who was a 33-year-old pariah at Sampdoria after falling out with manager Vujadin Boskov (just as he’d previously fallen out with Wenger at Monaco). Not only did Spurs offer him enough playing time to justify a call-up to Germany’s 1998 World Cup squad – reportedly agreeing to include a clause in his contract stipulating that he’d never be dropped – but, he later claimed, Sugar also guaranteed him a significant say over tactics and selection. This particular detail hadn’t been shared with Gross.
Having been deprived of Schmid and seen David Pleat drafted in over his head as director of football in charge of scouting and youth policy, Gross wasn’t about to accept any further constrictions and, predictably, he rejected Klinsmann’s meddling. Not only did an embittered Klinsmann then become the main conduit through which dropped players vented their grievances over Gross’ training regime to an ever-bilious press, but, ridiculously, he also tried to deflect attention from his own shoddy performances by whining about the role given to Ginola, who was clearly the side’s most effective player.
Klinsmann broke his nose in February’s FA Cup elimination by Barnsley (a defeat precipitated by Stephen Clemence getting sent off for diving) but no sooner had he regained fitness in early March than he threatened to walk out of the club if Gross didn’t start heeding his tactical advice. Gross remained strong, and effectively told him he’d no right to play the diva until his performances on the pitch improved. For Klinsmann’s comeback game against Bolton, Ginola seemed to express his support for the boss by regularly refusing to pass to Klinsmann, though maybe this was just because the German had previously spurned so many Ginola-hewn chances. Either way, Spurs won 1-0, with Ginola instead combining with Clive Wilson to tee up Nielsen for a winner that lifted Spurs five points clear of the drop zone.
By Spurs’s next game, the visit of title-chasing Liverpool, Klinsmann had got the message. He opened the scoring and produced his finest performance to date (though was still eclipsed by the brilliant Ginola) as Spurs sparkled in a 3-3 thriller. Forceful, fluent and flamboyant, the home side were only denied victory by the crossbar that repelled Nielsen’s 89th-minute overhead kick. Spurs further eased their relegation worries in their next outing, winning 3-1 at Palace without the suspended Ginola but with Moussa Saib, the elegant Algerian schemer who, as a £2.3m recruit from Valencia, was the most expensive of the three players for whom Gross was allowed to pay a transfer fee during his time at Tottenham (compare that to Francis, who had been splurged £30m on a slew of flops during his three-year stint).
Saib was one of the stars of the match that finally completed Gross’ rescue operation, putting a deft touch to a wonderful move that completed a 6-2 win at Wimbledon, who until then had boasted the third best defensive record in the division. Klinsmann scored four.
A team that had been in free fall thus finished the season on a high, losing only one of their last nine. But that wasn’t enough for Spurs fans, whose delusions of grandeur were aggravated by the frustration of watching Arsenal do the double. Sugar should have known better, but didn’t: and just three games into the new season, after a summer in which Gross had been allowed to buy just one player, the Swiss was shown the door. Sugar weakly wibbled that his ongoing mauling in the media made his position untenable – the very excuse at which Sugar had snorted when Francis used it 10 months previously.
Wishing him good riddance on his Tube trip out of Tottenham, the press concluded that the Swiss had been way out of his depth. It’s not just his record at Grasshoppers and his subsequent success at Basel – where he’s won three Swiss titles and masterminded European defeats of Liverpool, Celtic, Deportivo and Juventus – that make that judgement seem biased, but also a fair appraisal of his record at White Hart Lane. The fact is that despite inheriting losers, he lost only 12 of his 30 matches in charge. That doesn’t make him Wenger, but it does at least make him proportionally better than Glenn Hoddle and far from the loolaa he’s remembered as.
While not entirely dousing the flair Spurs fans’ cherish, Gross was gradually instilling the vigor and rigor with which his eventual successor, George Graham, would bring the only sort of success Spurs could realistically aim for.
