Jimmy Anderson (footballer)
Encyclopedia
Jimmy Anderson was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 football manager for Tottenham Hotspur
Tottenham Hotspur F.C.
Tottenham Hotspur Football Club , commonly referred to as Spurs, is an English Premier League football club based in Tottenham, north London. The club's home stadium is White Hart Lane....

 between 1955 and 1958.

Career

Jimmy Anderson had been a lifelong member of the ground staff at Tottenham Hotspur having joined the club in 1908 when he took over as manager from Arthur Rowe
Arthur Rowe
Arthur Sydney Rowe was the first manager to lead Tottenham Hotspur football club to the First Division Championship title in 1951...

 who retired on 18 April 1955. In fact, during the latter period of Rowe’s reign he had been appointed as acting manager due to his predecessor’s ill-health.

Spurs reached a FA Cup
FA Cup
The Football Association Challenge Cup, commonly known as the FA Cup, is a knockout cup competition in English football and is the oldest association football competition in the world. The "FA Cup" is run by and named after The Football Association and usually refers to the English men's...

 semi-final in 1956 and after a poor season in 1955 finished in successive years second and then third in the Football League First Division
Football League First Division
The First Division was a division of The Football League between 1888 and 2004 and the highest division in English football until the creation of the Premier League in 1992. The secondary tier in English football has since become known as the Championship....

 Champions. However, under Anderson the team’s overall performance (played 153, won 72 drew 32 and lost 49) was not considered good enough for the ambitious directors and supporters of the club who were wanting nothing short of a First Division Championship
English football champions
The English football champions are the winners of the highest league in English football, which is currently the Premier League. Teams in bold are those who won the double of League Championship and FA Cup, or the European Double of League Championship and European Cup in that season.Following the...

 Title.

This expectation put considerable pressure on Jimmy who was already in his mid-sixties and also suffering ill-health by then. Added to this a very public falling out with his captain, Danny Blanchflower
Danny Blanchflower
Robert Dennis "Danny" Blanchflower was a former Northern Ireland international footballer and football manager, and journalist who captained Tottenham Hotspur F.C. during its double-winning season of 1961. He was ranked as the greatest player in Spurs history by The Times in 2009...

 who had not always seen eye-to-eye with each other, led ultimately led to his retirement on 11 October 1958.

In truth, many associated with the club saw Anderson as a ‘stop-gap’ manager to give time for Bill Nicholson
Bill Nicholson (footballer)
William Edward "Bill" Nicholson OBE was an English football player, coach, manager and scout who devoted his life to Tottenham Hotspur in North London.-Early life:...

who had always been seen as Rowe’s chosen successor to progress from player to manager. Indeed during most of the time Anderson was a manager, Nicholson had been developing his skills in the capacity of first team coach and in many contemporaries eyes was the main influence both on and off the field.
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