Alan Gilzean

  • The Fighting Cock is a forum for fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Here you can discuss Spurs latest matches, our squad, tactics and any transfer news surrounding the club. Registration gives you access to all our forums (including 'Off Topic' discussion) and removes most of the adverts (you can remove them all via an account upgrade). You're here now, you might as well...

    Get involved!

Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports

Sort by date Sort by reaction score
Sorry to hear this news. I saw him play for Spurs against us many times back in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a classy player and a great header of the ball. I remember one goal he scored at Old Trafford at the start of the 1967/68 season (after the Charity Shield 3-3 draw) that was a cracker. It's sad to see those boyhood heroes passing on but I suppose it comes to us all in the end. RIP.
 
So sad to hear the news. Gilly was one of the first team I saw live. A truly unique player, and a club legend deserving of the name. So pleased the Club made contact with him, after all those years of radio silence. God bless you Gilly, you'll be an asset to His side in heaven. RIP
 
I had the pleasure to meet the man in person on one occasion, after show at a Spurs Show live event. He was gracious and seemed above all else to be thankful that we cared who he was and what he did. Humility is a lovely thing. Rest in Peace, the King of White Hart Lane.
 
A legend passes. A sad day.

Condolences to the Gilzean family.

R.I.P.
 
Last edited:
Just when you think things are good you're brought back down to earth by this very sad news. I was fortunate enough to see him play as an 11 year old kid and I still remember how good he was - how much would he be worth now?
A true Spurs legend and a very, very sad day - RIP Gilly and thank you for gracing WHL with your talent.
 
My first hero. I’m afraid I cried tonight when I heard.

He drank in the same pub as my parents and I met him a few times as a kid. Top-level striker until he was 37 while drinking like a fish and smoking 40 Rothmans a day.

If you didn’t see him play just imagine the best bits of Sheringham and Berbatov rolled into one man. Irreplaceable, we will never see his like again.
 

Tribute: How a leap of faith propelled Alan Gilzean to the heights of the game
James Morgan: Deputy Sports Editor
THE Coupar Angus scout hut echoes to a dull thud. It is the summer of 1953 and a young cub is springing repeatedly off a wooden floor to head a boxing glove attached to a rope lashed around a beam. When he is finished he will repeat the trick until it is time to go home.

This callow 14-year-old, a schoolboy during the day and berry picker in the Perthshire countryside during the evenings, is laying the groundwork for a career in professional football. He does not know this yet. But one day, for a time, he will be the most-feared centre-forward in Europe and arguably the best header of a football ever.

Today sports scientists would call this practice something highfalutin such as ‘marginal gains activity’ but Alan Gilzean was merely following the instructions of his dad, Willie, who had told him that to make it as a footballer he would have to put in the effort, and thereupon tied a ball to a rafter in his painter-and-decorator shop.

There was no stinting from the young Alan. When he had finished a set he would shorten the rope and start again. The other scouts would try it but none of them could reach the heights that Gilzean could. Of all the stories about Alan Gilzean that stood out for me when I first started writing a book about him in early 2009, it was this tale of self-sacrifice that appealed to me most.

Granted, I had decided to embark on the project upon hearing rumours that the former Dundee, Tottenham Hotspur and Scotland striker had fallen on hard times and was living as a down and out in England’s West Country, so there were more sensational tales to investigate, but it was this one that tickled me most.

It spoke of a different era – of more quaint, homespun times. I wanted to restore some of his faded lustre, to earn him recognition from the Scottish football hall of fame, to help him find a way back to White Hart Lane where he had not visited for the best part of four decades.

This snapshot of the past was a portent of things to come, too. The central defenders of Sporting Clube, Cologne, Anderlecht and AC Milan could all attest to that.

When Dundee marched to the semi-finals of the European Cup in 1962, Gilzean was chief tormentor, the main man, the striker the continent’s best feared. His nine goals during that run were second only to Altafini’s 14, yet the Milan striker had enjoyed the luxury of an eight-goal haul against no-hopers Union Luxembourg in the preliminary round.

Thumbing through my book I’m trying to find a suitable homily among a litany of tributes and the best I can come up with is this from Jimmy Greaves, his erstwhile strike partner at Spurs. “We became the G-Men, we read each other’s mind,” said Greaves. “He was the greatest I played with.”

And then this from the book’s conclusion: “He was ahead of his time and if he had not always received the credit for it when he was a player, there seemed to be a dawning realisation on a personal level that what he had given to football was worth remembering. But this was not confined just to Gillie. In the aftermath of [an STV programme on Scotland’s greatest team], numerous friends and colleagues approached me to say that they had had no real grasp of just how brilliant Gilzean had been. And that said everything one needed to know about whether his legacy had been restored or not.”

The King is dead but his name will echo for generations to come. Long live the King.

James Morgan is the author of In Search Of Alan Gilzean
 
RIP.

As reported in Dundee where Alan remains much loved.

Hopefully of interest to those who feel the same down your way.

Edit.....wont let me post links, if someone gives me a "like", I can do.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom