Spurs legend John Lacy recalls early days playing for Marine

Like Spurs, Marine memorably won the Double in the 1960s – and our former defender John Lacy was in the team that did it!

A towering centre-back who played 132 games for us between 1978 and 1983, John famously signed at White Hart Lane at the same time as Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa.

But back in 1969, when he arrived at Marine as a 17-year-old answering an advert for trials, all he found was a Russian-speaking manager and a bathtub that had to be shared with the opposition!

Born in nearby Liverpool, John had only ever played schools football before arriving at Rossett Park, now known as the Marine Travel Arena. But club bosses swiftly realised his potential and snapped him up, with the defender thrust into the team towards the end of the 1968/69 season, where he helped them lift the Liverpool Senior Non-League Cup and the Lancashire Combination League Cup.

Even after he came down to the capital to study at the London School of Economics later that year, John would occasionally journey back to the north west to turn out for Sunday’s FA Cup opponents, before eventually calling time on his tenure, with the travel becoming too much. He signed for London-based non-league side Kingstonian before, in 1971, Fulham legend George Cohen spotted him playing for London Universities and secured him a move to the Cottagers, where he spent seven happy years before transferring to the Lane.

Now 69 and still closely attached to us, the man known as ‘Blakey’ – after his perceived likeness to the character of that name in TV’s On The Buses – takes up the story…

“It was a long time ago when I played there – I was 17, so it was 52 years ago, before I came down to London!” he smiled. “They’d put an advert out for trials. I think I was 17, I went for the trial and they saw me and that was it. The manager was a man called George Scanlan, who was quite interesting – he was very good at languages and worked as an interpreter. He helped with Andrei Kanchelskis coming to Manchester United, Eric Cantona too. He used to work for a lot of the clubs when they went abroad. He went to Cambridge and studied Russian and all different languages. He once told me that in most countries in the world he could make himself understood.

“He was the manager of Marine for three years (1967-1970) – he put me in the team and I played about 10 or 20 games. I can’t really remember the exact number because it’s so long ago. They were one of the top amateur teams in the north west at the time and they played in the old Lancashire Combination. I played for Merseyside Schoolboys and Lancashire Schoolboys when I was 15 or 16, then when I saw the trial advertised for Marine, I thought I’d go for it, went along and it all sort of followed on from there. It was my first men’s team – before that, I’d just played schools football.”

Does John remember much about his appearances for Marine – or his team-mates, for that matter?

“As I said, I didn’t play that many games for them, but I know that we won two cup competitions – the Liverpool Senior Non-League Cup and the Lancashire Combination League Cup. It was near the end of that 1968/69 season when I signed, I played those two finals and luckily we won them. I played a few games at the end of that first season and a few more at the beginning of the next season, then I came down to London to go to university in the September (1969), but I went back up a couple of times to play games for them, although in the end it was too much messing around so we stopped the arrangement. I looked at an old team photo recently and there were only two of my team-mates that I could remember! I recall the right-back, he was the captain, and I remember one of the lads who used to play alongside me, his name was Hughes, but I can’t even remember his first name – it’s such a long time ago!”

During his time at Spurs, Blakey played three games in the early rounds of our 1981 FA Cup success. Unsurprisingly, he’s thrilled at the prospect of two of his former teams doing battle in that age-old competition this weekend.

“I was chuffed when I saw the draw,” he beamed. “Marine play at the same stadium as they did when I was there, but it’s changed a bit now. It’s fairly similar but obviously updated a lot. I actually remember something really quite funny… the changing rooms were behind the goal and you came out from there and the clubhouse was there too. There were two dressing rooms, home and away, but after the game, both teams shared the same bath! It’s unheard of now. That was one thing that was very unusual. It was quite a good standard of football, but the facilities weren’t like what they are now.

“When I saw that Spurs had drawn Marine I really couldn’t believe it. It’s a dream for them, it’s just a pity that they can’t have a full house up there because it’d be a great atmosphere for a non-league club to play against one of the top teams in the country. If there was a little bit of an atmosphere, just maybe they might have a chance of pulling off an upset, but it’s very difficult times everywhere. They’ll remember the game forever though – it’s wonderful for them.”