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Oh Teddy Teddy, He went to
Man U and won the lot.
Teddy Sheringham holds the distinction
of achieving the most of all ex-Lions, Winning League
Championships, The FA Cup, The ZDS Cup, The European Champions League and
winning over 50 England Caps and appearing in two World Cup
Finals Tournaments . He also has to go down as the most successful in a
Millwall shirt, being the club record goal scorer and having a
Second Division Championship medal and having played top
flight football.
Teddy, never blessed with pace developed
from a first rate target man to a stylish and Intelligent
playmaker who would bring out the best in his strike partners.
Teddy almost missed out on a career in
professional football, having had trials at Tottenham, Orient and Palace as a
youngster without being snapped up. Just before his 16th Birthday
he played for Isthmian League side Leyton and Ilford in a Youth
Team game v Millwall. Chief Scout Bob Pearson and Youth
Team Manager Roger Cross invited Teddy for a six game trial and he
impressed enough to be offered a two year apprenticeship. During
this apprenticeship, Teddy won 11 England Youth Caps and regularly
scored goals in the Midweek League and Football Combination.
Teddy was to get an early
taste of silverware when selected for The Millwall squad to take
part in London Evening Standard Five a Side tournament.
Although Roger Wynter and Andy Massey were the stars of the show
in wining Millwall team, Teddy played his part in all the games. As a
reward, Teddy, Roger Wynter and John Neal were named amongst the
five subs for the Football League Trophy Final against Lincoln,
which Millwall won 3-2. With Millwall battling against
relegation to the Fourth Division that season, there was no opportunity
to blood youngsters in league games, so Teddy had to bide his
time.
The
Victorious Millwall team celebrate their Wembley success with
England -manager Bobby Robson (back, second left) and Standard
editor Louis Kirby (back, second right). The Millwall Line
up: (left to right back row) Andy Massey-the skipper, Paul
Sansome, Alan McLeary, (front row) John Neal, Roger Wynter and
Teddy Sheringham. Standard
Picture: Stuart Robinson
After
being named as sub against Dartford in the FA Cup in November,
Teddy made his debut against Brentford at the Den on the 15th
January 1984. He scored his first senior goal the next weekend
away at Bournemouth. Teddy, describing the goal said, "I was
in the corner of the six yard box, controlled the ball, cut inside
with my right foot and shot low and hard from about 8
yards." Teddy was to make a total of 4 league starts
and 3 Sub appearances that season. It was in the AM Cup where Teddy scored his
other goal, an extra time winner in the 4-3 win over Gillingham at
the Den.
The next season, 1984/85,
where Millwall won Promotion to Division 2, was to see Teddy
restricted to just one appearance for the Millwall first team, as
sub against Chelsea in the Milk Cup. Clashes with First Team manager George
Graham threaten his Millwall career almost before it had started
with Graham trying to get Teddy to cut out the flash stuff.
"I was a flash kid in
those days, a real showboater with a repertoire of all flicks and
touches. I wasn't interested in scoring boring goals, they had to
come from benders into the top corner, or chipping the keeper or
something, when they came off, they looked great, but the trouble
was they didn't come off too often. George Graham soon got hold of
me and told me in no uncertain terms to cut out the fancy frills.
He used to drum it into me until I was sick of it. I'm ashamed to
say that I thought I knew best. But finally George reached the
limits of his patience and gave me a right roasting if I tried the
classy shots at goal even in training. The other players told me
the manager couldn't stand the sight of me. So conceited was I, I
didn't appreciate that he was trying to teach me a valuable
lesson."
After being offered to
Brentford for a transfer fee of £5,000, Teddy had an unsuccessful
loan spell at Fourth Division Aldershot. It was to be real low
point for Teddy who said: "It was good for me, I suppose, to
have gone to Aldershot for a couple of months. But it was a trying
interlude, in which I played six games, scored not a solitary goal
and got clattered from pillar to post in every one and I seriously
began to doubt if I was going to make it in football."
On his return to Millwall,
Teddy confided in reserve team boss Roger Cross his despair:
"I didn't know where I was going wrong, people were playing
me offside and I wasn't getting involved in games. He said not to
worry, I was doing all right. There would be games I wouldn't get
involved in; that was the way of the world for strikers. If I kept
plugging away I would be OK. I listened to what Roger said and
realised that it made a lot of sense. I began to think that
perhaps there was a future for me after all, even if I was playing
for a Manager who disliked me intensely."
Teddy was soon packed off by
Graham on a further loan spell to Stockholm club Djurgarden
in the Swedish Second Division. The Swedish season ran from April
to October and Djurgarden played in the Olympic Stadium. It turned
out to be a great move for Teddy, helping him to grow up and
for some of the lessons that George Graham had been drumming into him to
finally sink in. "On the field, I quickly came to
understand that in being paid to win games for my team, I was
playing not only for my livelihood but those of my team-mates as
well. You must never, ever forget that when you are a professional
footballer. You have a responsibility to yourself, of course, but
you also owe something to the lads you play alongside. When you're
playing for money that can make a difference to people's lives, we
got £40 for draw and £80 for a win, you really try to win every
time you set foot on the pitch. For the first time, the importance
of what George Graham had been telling me began to dawn on me. It
truly didn't matter how you got the ball in the back of the
net."
Teddy was top scorer with 13
goals in 21 games and helped Djurgarden win the Division 2 North
title which got them into a two legged playoff with GAIS from
Gothenburg. The first leg ended 0-0 and Teddy scored in the second
leg to take the game into extra time and eventually to a penalty
shoot out. Teddy scored one of the spot kicks that helped
Djurgarden win promotion.
On his return to Millwall,
George Graham must of liked the change in Teddy's attitude and
game and used him more often, mainly as sub, but towards the end
of the season gave him a good run in the team. His season totals
were Nine League starts, Nine sub appearances and Four goals, including a
brace against Bradford and a 'classy' curler against Palace.
Season 1986/87 was a
one of change for
Millwall, Chairman Alan Thorne sold out in the summer to a consortium led by Reg
Burr and Manager George Graham left for the Arsenal. The new
board was only installed in July and appointed Brentford Assistant Manager John
Docherty as Manger, who admitted that by then all the good players available
had been snapped up. The squad
had been weakened with the departure of Fashanu, Lowndes, Wilson
and injury to Lovell. This left Teddy and Michael Marks, recalled
on the recommendation of Bob Pearson after being released on a
free transfer, as the
first choice strike pairing, with John Leslie as competition.
Docherty was able to bring in a few new faces, Danis Salman from
Brentford for £20,000. Dave Mehmet for £25,000 and David Byrne
for £5,000 both from Gillingham.
After a poor start which saw
Millwall in the bottom three after nine games with a defeat at Palace
in October, Millwall's form improved with Michael Marks notably
becoming the youngest Millwall player to score a hattrick in a
League game, coming against Shrewsbury at the Den. For a while Millwall
flirted with the newly introduced playoff zone, however they fell
away late in the season and were only assured of safety after a
1-1 draw against Sunderland, courtesy of a Michael Marks goal in
the penultimate game. Teddy blossomed that season, scoring 16 goals in an ever present season, which included an hattrick
at home to Huddersfield in December, followed by a three
month drought broken at Shrewsbury in March. After spending
£400,000 to bring the ground up GLC's safety regulations, in February
the board
started spending money on the team, bringing in Terry Hurlock from
Reading for £95,000, Jimmy Carter for £15,000 from QPR and Gerry
Armstrong on loan from Brighton.
"I established myself as
a first choice player in my first season under Docherty and it was
a pretty steep learning curve. The club was a bit strapped for
cash, I think. It must have been, because otherwise we would never
have persisted with our main strike pairing. I spent that season
playing up front with Michael Marks who was only Eighteen. I had
played fewer than a dozen first team games myself and I was the
experienced one, for goodness' sake, trying to bring this boy
along. It was a peculiar feeling. It was a real dogfight against
relegation all season. We had to battle like fury to save
ourselves from going back down to Division Three after only two
seasons. I scored Thirteen goals in the league and Michael scored
Ten. Talk about boys doing men's jobs. It worked, though -
just. We stayed up, if only by the skin of our teeth."
| For Season 87/88 the Board showed
ambition and brought in top notch players in an all out effort for
promotion. Millwall splashed out on Kevin O'Callaghan (£80,000
from Portsmouth), Steve Wood (Tribunal assessed £80,000
from Reading) Tony Cascarino (£225,000 from Gillingham) and
George Lawrence (£160,000 from Southampton).
"For me the
strengthening of the side was great for two reasons: First
it meant that I would be playing alongside better players
and secondly, their arrival would take a bit of the burden
off my shoulders ." |
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After a slow start Sheringham and Cascarino formed a
lethal partnership that won Millwall the Division Two Championship
and brought Millwall First Division football for
the first time in their history. After a dip in form, Teddy had become, for a short
while, the target of the Millwall Boo Boys, his name being booed
when the team line up was announced but he turned it around to pip Cascarino
for top scorer with 24 to 23 goals. Teddy was then called up into
The England B squad and won a cap alongside teammate Alan McLeary
v Switzerland in Lausanne in May 1988.
In his Autobiography, Teddy
talks how his game started develop. "I probably started to
become the player I am today at quite a young age. For Instance,
in our successful days at Millwall, the guys used to play long
balls to me or Tony Cascarino - We both had the ability to win the
ball in the air. The bigger of the centre halves used to pick up
Cas and the smaller one used to pick me up. It was a pretty direct
route, but even then, I used to like to come off my marker by 10
or 15 yards, link thinks up and go on from there. It was natural
for me to do that; certainly no manager ever told me to play that
way. They didn't tell not to either, which is just as well seeing
how my career and my role in various teams developed." |
| "It
was a terrific team for the level we were playing at.
Tony played alongside me, we had some quality on the
left wing in O'Callaghan and Lawrence was an
experienced hand coming in on the right flank. We also
had Terry Hurlock and Les Briley in the middle -
perfect performers for our style of football. Steve
Wood and Alan McLeary were an effective pairing at
centre back, two clever, thinking players who were
great readers situations. They were never
eye-catching, but they did a fine job for us. Right
back Keith Stevens was very solid - nobody used to get
past him while Nicky Coleman at left back, who had
come through the youth ranks with me, was a highly
competent player. Brian Horne in goal completed a team
that was perfectly balanced for the job it was
employed to do."
"I think the
moment we finally convinced ourselves that promotion
was just round the corner was on a cold Tuesday night
at Elland Road at the beginning of April. We knew we
had to win and it was a daunting prospect. Leeds were
a First Division club which had come down and we were a
little team that dragged ourselves up from the lower
reaches of the Second Division. We beat them 2-1 and
there was an amazing feeling in the dressing room
after the game. We'd had to defend like fury, but we
had all stuck together with a feeling of common
purpose, the sort of feeling that comes only from
playing a lot with the same group of people and
wanting to do it for each other." |
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Millwall
stuck by the squad that won promotion for their first season
in the top flight. The only addition was old boy Neil
Ruddock signed from Spurs. Millwall got off to a great start
and topped the table at the beginning of October after
beating QPR 3-2 at the Den.
"It was a crazy
exhilarating time. There we were, little Millwall, in our
first season in the First Division and topping the table
until about March. Everybody said it couldn't last and of
course it couldn't and it didn't, but we gave them all a
good run for their money. We were beating the best teams
when we shouldn't and getting away draws to which we had no
right."
"Our average wage
was about £450 a week, which the club couldn't increase in
case we went straight back down again, a big wage bill in
the Second Division would have sent the club to the wall. So
the management compensated us by putting us on a fantastic
bonus scheme. Our appearance amounted to £200 and we had
crowd bonus, branded according to the attendance. The
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ground
at that time held 23,000 and if we filled it we got
another £450. After our good start at home to Derby,
the ground was full for the next home game and with
the appearance money, win bonus and crowd bonus on top
of my basic wage, I took home nearly £1,650 that
week. I had never know such riches before. Two years
earlier I had been on £110 a week. We needed to go on
playing well if we were going to earn good money. We
did too and we kept the crowds coming for most of the
season."
Although Cascarino got most of
plaudits for goal scoring in Millwall's first Division One
campaign, Teddy finished as Joint top scorer on 15 Goals. Teddy
was sent off for the first time in his professional Career when he
mistimed a challenge on Terry Phelan of Wimbledon, who went down
like the proverbial sack of spuds and all those nice chaps of
Wimbledon buzzed around like flies around shit intimidating the
ref into a harsh straight red Card. Manager John Docherty
complained that afterwards Phelan then limped around at 100 mph.
The 1-0 Easter Monday defeat at Home to Wimbledon following a 1-1
draw at Everton, where the Lions were denied a win due to the
usual Merkyside penalty effectively ended Millwall's Championship
challenge that had seen Millwall pretty much a feature in the top
three since mid September. With the last 10 games yielding just 4
points, Millwall slipped to a disappointing 10th in the final
table.
"Gradually,
the feeling that perhaps we had gone as far as we
could that year permeated the team. Perhaps the
adrenaline had faded a bit; perhaps we were simply
exhausted. It would have been great to finish in the
top three or four, but in the closing weeks of the
seasons we were losing games we would have won earlier
on. And once we started to struggle, there was no
stopping the rot. It wasn't a bad season by any means,
but we were disappointed nonetheless. After the way we
had played through the dark days of mid-winter, we
honestly felt we were capable of finishing in at least
the top three."
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"I must have
been reasonably successful at the Millwall style,
because I remember Terry Hurlock coming back from an
England B game and over a couple of beers one night,
telling me, 'Ted, none of them have got what you've
got. You can do it if you want to, you know.'
I really
admired Terry - he was a superb, clever player and had
a great character - and it meant a lot to me that he'd
taken the trouble to tell me that. He didn't have to
say it and he wasn't the sort to butter you up for the
sake of it, so I felt I should take his words
seriously and really go for it." |
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After being the surprise package of
the First Division the previous season, Millwall were to find it
harder going in the second season. Millwall started well and twice
topped the table briefly after drawing at Wimbledon and beating
Coventry 4-1 at the Den. It was a to be a disappointing
season for Teddy who was to suffer injury, relegation and find
goals hard to come by. The Injury, damaged ankle ligaments, came in the game against QPR in
November, keeping Teddy on the sidelines till a
dramatic return with a goal as Sub at Forest then a one man
demolition job on Man City in the FA Cup third round second
replay.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm
not saying that my absence was the reason we had done badly over
Christmas and the New Year, because after I came back we went
seventeen league games without a win. I scored a couple of goals
in a 3-1 victory over Manchester City in the FA Cup, but we kept
getting beaten in the league and my ankle was still not quite
right. I had to miss another five games in all, which didn't help.
We had a couple of injuries to key players in that disastrous
spell, but we couldn't honestly blame our poor record on that. If
you're going to survive at the highest level in English football
you have to have a squad that is strong enough in depth to take
you through the lean times. Ours wasn't. We just didn't have the
back up. The slide, when it came, was awful and irrevocable. Once
we were into it there seemed nothing we could do to get ourselves
out of it."
By this time Docherty had bought Paul
Goddard for a club record £800,000 to halt Millwall's decline to
the bottom of the Division, but this meant Cascarino playing on
the left wing accommodate him. Following Millwall's cup exit to
Fourth Division Cambridge Utd and a home defeat to Man Utd, Docherty
was sacked and Bob Pearson appointed as Caretaker to the end of
the season. This did not halt the decline and with Cascarino's
departure to Aston Villa in March, for £1.5m, Millwall's goal scoring
problems worsened. Teddy added only one more to his tally to
finish as top scorer with 12 Goals in all competitions and in the
last 20 league games Millwall scored only 13 Goals, and never more
than 1 in any game, failing to win any of them.
Pearson brought in Malcolm
Allen (£400,000 from Norwich) and Mick McCarthy (loan from Lyon) in March
but could not halt the slide. Bruce Rioch was appointed manager after relegation was confirmed
after a defeat at Derby and he set about restoring
the squads shattered confidence to attempt to bounce straight back
to the First Division.
The significant departure was
Terry Hurlock to Rangers for £375,000 on the eve of the season
and arrivals were Coach Steve Harrison and midfielder Alex Rae
(£100,000 from Falkirk) and striker Jon Goodman (£30,000 from
Bromley)
"Steve proved he was a
very good coach, he had an uncanny knack of getting inside
people's minds. There is a lot of applied psychology in football
and Steve was brilliant at building up peoples confidence. He
laughed and joked with the best of them, but when he got down to
work, he was one of the finest coaches I've ever had for getting
situations and people right. Although he had been a left back
himself, he obviously had a soft spot for strikers, because he put
on some of the best shooting practices I've ever seen, so good
that a lot of us would go back in the afternoons for another
shooting session."
"We started that first
season back in the hurly-burly of Second Division football playing
in a completely different style from the one that seen us
relegated. We had always been used to smashing the ball up long,
but Bruce wanted quality balls so that the front players could get
hold of it and control it. It was a total change, one that we all
responded to."
"If I had moved on after
we were relegated. I might have ended playing the Docherty way for
the rest of my career. Instead Bruce insisted that we had enough
good players to get the ball down, enjoy the game and play it how
it should be played at the top level. He was a Second Division
manager with First Division ideas and that was no bad thing for
every player on Millwall's books. All of a sudden I was enjoying
my football again, Bruce and Steve had been a real shot in the arm
for my own game. Bruce was so committed to football, so
straight-down-the-line and so intense, you couldn't help but be
affected by it. Yet again I had a good manager at the right
time."
"Talk about lucky
Sheringham. Under almost every manger I've had I became a better
player. To find now that the whole approach of the team was going
to be geared around me was absolutely marvelous and it was to be
the best season I've ever had in term of goal scoring. I think
left to my own devices, once I beat my pervious best tally of 24,
I might have eased off a bit, content to have set a new personal
record. But Steve wasn't prepared to let me stop there. He coached
me using a very subtle technique that didn't fall far short of
brain washing. He would sit along side me in the dressing room
muttering, urging, cajoling drilling his words into me quietly but
insistently, repetitively, into my ear. 'Come one, I want another
goal from you and once you got one I want two, come on don't let
it slip now'. I couldn't have done it without Steve Harrison's
help. The way he worked on me verged on the masterly."
Teddy and Malcolm were to terrorise Second Division defences
in the first half of the season. Rookie Striker Jon Goodman was
drafted into the first team to partner Teddy in the new year and
with his pace to worry the opposition defence Teddy went on a real scoring spree, scoring 20 in 23 League games to bring his tally to 33 League
Goals and 38 in total, breaking Possee's league scoring record of
79 goals, Possee's record of 87 League and Cup Goals and Carver's
all time record of 99 Senior Goals. Millwall could only finish
fifth in the table and lost out to Brighton in the Playoffs. Teddy
had won the Player of the Year Trophy and Golden Boot and named in
the PFA Division Two X1.
"In the end we fell just
short, but we had made the playoffs and we were so confident that
we thought we must prevail. We finished fifth in the League, but
we reckoned we got the best of the lot in Brighton. If we were
guilty of anything it was perhaps being a bit overconfident. We
thought we would walk it. We were wrong."
"Although we had fallen
at the final hurdle, part of me still wanted to have another crack
at the job in 1991-92. I felt that if I spent another season at
Millwall it would not be time wasted if we achieved our ambitions.
On the other hand I knew that If my career was going progress, I
should not spend another season in Division Two. Steve Harrison
had been working with Graham Taylor, the England Manager and had
told me that I was close to an England call-up. I agonised over my
decision for ages. My heart was telling me one thing and my head
another, but in the end I knew that, sadly there was no choice. I
had just turned twenty-five, I needed a higher standard of
football if my career was to progress. I felt that the time had
come for me to part company with the club that had given me my
chance in professional football."
Teddy turned down the new
contract offered to him at Millwall, stating he needed to play
in the Top Division to pursue his International ambitions, he also
turned down a
move to Second Division Blackburn to join Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest
for a club record fee of £2,000,000 in July 1991.
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