THE preachings of a prophet can be mistaken for heresy.
Robert Dennis Blanchflower famously lived and played by one article of faith: ''The game's about glory. It's about doing things in style, with a flourish. It's about going out and beating the other lot. Not waiting for them to die of boredom.''
It is a message which often falls on stony ground. But as Dave Bowler reveals in his superb Danny Blanchflower: A Biography of a Visionary (Vista, #6.99) it is also a seed of thought that produces spectacular fruit.
Blanchflower had more than his share of winning with the Tottenham Hotspur side that captured the first English double this century and won the first European trophy for England. He also had his failures, but he was enhanced rather than diminished by his flaws.
He was a man who seemed both to create and be condemned by time. He had that mysterious art of the great. He always seemed to have that extra moment, that yard of space to complete a pass.
Blanchflower saw football as not just a physical pastime but an intellectual pursuit. His speed of thought carried him when his lack of pace was exposed. He played to his strength but his invention was born of necessity. He could never outpace but he learned to outthink.
His fate was to be born a self-reliant and independent man when footballers were seen as merely vassals in the feudal system of the fifties. The maximum wage and the contract system conspired to enslave the free spirit both financially and emotionally.
Blanchflower, playing in his native Belfast with Glentoran, was to receive an early lesson in the duplicitous dealings that seemed designed merely to keep footballers in their place. This experience was repeated at Barnsley and Aston Villa where blinkered ignorance sought to blind a visionary.
Blanchflower always talked a good game but his words were derided, and even worse, ignored. Fascinated by the tactical formations of the great Hungarian side and the pass-and-move style of their players, Blanchflower found it impossible to induce clubs to introduce a ball to training sessions.
His message of tactical knowledge coupled with technical ability was drowned out by the roars of trainers who advocated interminable laps of the track.
The prophet finally found his promised land in the Spurs' sides of Arthur Rowe and Bill Nicholson. But Bowler leaves the unmistakable feeling that this was a man born in the wrong time. In diet, technical ability, and awareness he was the very epitome of the modern player but he was constrained by the prevailing belief that footballers should let their feet do the talking.
This, remember, was a time when sides lined up in 2-3-5, when forming a wall at a free kick was considered an act worthy of note, and set plays merely the mortar to be shovelled quickly into the mixer of the penalty area.
Blanchflower, articulate and possessed of an enviable conviction in his own ideas, was a powerful advocate of change. He hoped to alter the face of the beautiful game but it was a surgery which was, at best, only skin deep.
The one-dimensional attitude of victory above all soon re-asserted itself notably, and ironically, in the England side of his former team-mate Alf Ramsey.
Blanchflower retreated to, but never hid behind, the written word. He hung up his boots and took up his pen. His romantic love letters to the game that obsessed him were published in The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, and New Statesman. But he fell into the embrace of football management and it almost crushed him. Time, again, was his enemy.
He had been 15 years away from the front line and when battle formations were formed at Northern Ireland and Chelsea, Blanchflower's idealism was no match for the big guns of pragmatism and cynicism.
His retreat from the fray was not marked with bitterness, although he was dogged by the illness that was to kill him.
Bowler's marvellous book sheds a penetrating light on the contradictions of a singular man. Blanchflower was egocentric but a team player, vocal but shy, personable but distant, arrogant but capable of humility, outspoken in criticisms but always ready to offer the kind word.
There was, however, an unshakeable constancy.
Blanchflower once said: ''What better for a boy than a romance with the great game?''
This love affair had its tempestuous moments when Blanchflower may have felt misunderstood and under-appreciated. But he believed in himself. He believed in football.
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