Frank Lander Saul, 23 August 1943, Canvey Island, England.
PART ONE
Frank Saul turned professional with Tottenham Hotspur on his seventeenth birthday in August 1960. White Hart Lane boss Nicholson was overseeing one of the great sides in the club’s history that autumn, and the phrase walking into the first team undersells quite how tough that particular dressing room was to break into, stacked as it was with the likes of Danny Blanchflower, Dave Mackay, John White, Cliff Jones and the bull-necked Bobby Smith leading the line. His chance arrived on 7 September, however, against Bolton Wanderers at Burnden Park, where Tottenham won 2-1 with goals coming from John White and Les Allen, and Saul was handed his senior debut as cover for the injured Smith, the man whose number nine shirt he would wear for much of that opening campaign whenever the big centre-forward was unavailable.
Three days later, on 10 September 1960, Tottenham travelled across North London to Highbury to take on bitter rivals Arsenal, and in a match that finished 3-2 to the visitors, Saul got himself on the scoresheet alongside Allen and Terry Dyson. Nicholson’s side went on that year to become the first club of the twentieth century to complete the League and FA Cup Double, sealing the First Division title with a 2-1 victory over Sheffield Wednesday in April 1961 before defeating Leicester City 2-0 in the Cup Final, and Saul, still only seventeen, played his part in six of those league matches and scored three goals as deputy for Smith, even though the appearance threshold required for a formal winners’ medal in that era stood at fourteen games, meaning the teenager missed out on the recognition his goals arguably merited.
Yet for all the early promise, the seasons that immediately followed the Double were not kind to Saul’s prospects of regular first-team football, for Nicholson’s squad was groaning with attacking talent, and when Jimmy Greaves arrived from Italian Serie A giants Milan in December 1961 for a British record fee, followed a couple of years later by the Scottish international Alan Gilzean, the queue of forwards ahead of the young Canvey Islander only lengthened. Saul settled instead into the role of the versatile squad man, deployed wherever Nicholson needed him, sometimes at centre-forward, sometimes drifting out to the left wing, always ready but rarely guaranteed, and it is a mark of his professionalism that he neither sulked nor demanded away, choosing instead to bide his time and take whatever opportunities came his way, including outings in European competition when the first-choice forwards needed a rest.
There was, however, one afternoon in the middle of that quiet stretch when Saul made an altogether less welcome kind of history. On 4 December 1965, in a First Division encounter with Burnley at Turf Moor that finished 1-1, Saul was sent from the field, and in doing so became the first Tottenham player to be dismissed in a league fixture since October 1928, a gap of thirty-seven years that gives some sense of how rare a red card was for a Spurs man in that more forgiving disciplinary era, and how unfortunate it was that the distinction should have fallen to him.
It was at the start of the 1964-65 season that Saul’s fortunes genuinely began to turn, for Nicholson started giving him a more regular run in the side over the following three campaigns, and by the time the 1966-67 FA Cup campaign came around, Saul had established himself as a trusted and versatile presence in a Tottenham team still rich with talent but increasingly reliant on him to fill gaps left by injury and rotation. Spurs progressed through that season’s competition with a third-round replay win over Millwall after a goalless draw, a comfortable 3-1 victory over Portsmouth in the fourth round, and a 2-0 win against Bristol City in the fifth, before running into difficulty in the sixth round against Birmingham City, whom they could only draw 0-0 away from home.
It was for the replay at White Hart Lane on 12 April 1967 that Saul replaced the veteran Welsh winger Cliff Jones in the starting eleven, and he repaid Nicholson’s faith immediately, getting his name on the scoresheet as Tottenham thrashed Birmingham 6-0, with Greaves claiming two, Gilzean and Terry Venables also among the goals alongside Saul’s contribution, in a rout that sent Spurs into the semi-final in irresistible form. Saul, having seized his opportunity, was not about to relinquish his place, and he went on to feature in all four of the club’s remaining Cup games that spring, scoring three times along the way.
The semi-final took Tottenham to the neutral surroundings of Hillsborough on 29 April 1967 to lock horns with Nottingham Forest, who were themselves enjoying a fine season and pushing hard for the League title, and it proved a tense, absorbing match that the white shirts edged 2-1. Greaves opened the scoring with what observers of the day called a vintage finish before Saul doubled the advantage midway through the second half to put real daylight between the two sides, Nottingham Forest’s late reply coming too little and far too late to trouble Nicholson’s men. That victory sent the Lilywhites to Wembley Stadium to face Tommy Docherty´s Chelsea on 20 May 1967 in what was, remarkably, the first FA Cup Final ever to be contested between two clubs from London, a fixture the newspapers of the day gleefully dubbed the Cockney Cup Final, and it is here that Saul carved his name most indelibly into the history books.
In front of a crowd of 100,000 spectators at Wembley, Tottenham went into the lead in the fortieth minute of action through Jimmy Robertson, who struck low and hard from the edge of the eighteen-yard area after Alan Mullery’s blocked effort had spilled kindly into his path. Following the resumption, Spurs doubled their advantage seven minutes past the hour mark in a passage of play that began with a long throw from inspirational skipper Dave Mackay, which Robertson helped on with a flick, allowing Frank Saul to turn the ball home with his right foot beyond a completely helpless Peter Bonetti. The Stamford Bridge team pulled a goal back through Bobby Tambling’s headed effort in the eighty-fifth minute of proceedings, the cross drifting in from the right after the Tottenham goalkeeper had failed to deal with it, but by then the destination of the Cup was already beyond doubt, and Mackay lifted the famous old trophy as captain while Saul, the player who had once been considered merely a useful deputy, savoured the finest moment of his time in football.
There was one more piece of drama still to come that summer, for on 12 August 1967 Tottenham travelled to Old Trafford to face reigning Football League champions Manchester United in the Charity Shield, and what followed was one of the most extraordinary and fondly remembered curtain-raisers English football has ever produced. The White Hart Laners made the perfect start, Robertson beating Alex Stepney in the United goal from close range inside the opening two minutes, and six minutes later the match produced one of the great oddities of the fixture’s long history when Spurs shot stopper Pat Jennings launched a routine clearance downfield that bounced awkwardly in front of the home goalkeeper, sailed clean over his head, and nestled in the net, doubling the Londoners’ lead before Matt Busby´s boys had even settled into the contest.
Manchester United hit back through two goals from Bobby Charlton inside the space of a couple of minutes either side of the quarter-hour mark, the second an unstoppable long-range effort, and the game was level at the half-time break. Tottenham regained the initiative early in the second half when Saul headed home in the forty-ninth minute, restoring Spurs’ lead for a third time, but Denis Law levelled matters from close range with fifteen minutes remaining on the referee´s watch after Jennings had parried yet another thunderous effort from Charlton, and the sides finished level at 3-3, sharing the trophy between them for the season that followed. It was, in its way, a fitting final flourish for Saul in a Tottenham shirt, contributing a crucial goal in a match remembered for its drama and for his goalkeeper’s unlikely piece of history rather than for his own.
PART TWO
The end, when it came, arrived with brutal swiftness and very little sentiment attached to it, for in January 1968 Spurs completed the transfer of England U23 international striker Martin Chivers from Southampton for a transfer fee that set a new British record at £125,000, and as part of that deal Frank Saul made the reverse journey down to the south coast, his value set at £45,000 as the makeweight in an exchange that would ultimately prove one of the most significant pieces of business in the long history of Tottenham Hotspur.
Over eight years at White Hart Lane, from his debut in September 1960 through to that January transfer, Saul made 129 appearances across all competitions, scoring 46 goals, a tally that included 116 outings and 37 hits in the Football League, figures that stand as testimony to a player who, whatever his reputation as a squad man, delivered when it mattered most. Tottenham’s own programme notes at the time paid tribute to a player they were reluctant to lose, acknowledging that the decision had been taken purely in the club’s best long-term interests, and thanking Saul for the good service he had given during his years on the staff.
At Southampton, Saul found regular first-team football harder to come by than he might have hoped, serving as a versatile forward and occasional replacement for the Saints across two seasons between 1968 and 1970, and while his all-round contribution was valued in the dressing room, his scoring touch largely deserted him on the south coast, where he managed just two goals in fifty league appearances. Seeking the sort of regular football that had begun to elude him at The Dell, Saul moved on again in May 1970, this time to Second Division Queens Park Rangers, and his period at Loftus Road underlined once more the adaptability that had characterised his entire time in the game, with 43 league appearances and four goals recorded before he left the west London club toward the end of the 1971-72 season.
From there Saul dropped into non-league football only briefly before returning to the Football League proper in March 1972, when he signed for Millwall, and it was at the Den that he enjoyed one of the longer and steadier spells of his later years, spending four seasons at the club and accumulating 96 league appearances while scoring four goals, a period that included the 1973-74 campaign in which he played alongside Republic of Ireland international Eamon Dunphy. The Irishman who would later chronicle that very season in his celebrated diary of life inside a struggling Second Division dressing room, in which he described Saul as a man who never stopped trying and never once considered giving up the fight. Saul finally waved goodbye to the Lions in 1976, bringing to a close four seasons at the Den, and rounded off his time in the game with a short spell at non-league Dagenham before hanging up his footballing boots for good.
Taken together, across his years with Tottenham, Southampton, Queens Park Rangers and Millwall, Frank Saul amassed a total of 305 appearances in the Football League and scored 47 goals, numbers that, while modest set against the achievements of the superstars who so often crowded him out of a starting eleven, tell only part of the story of a player who could turn up on the biggest stage in the English game and deliver exactly when it counted. Once his playing days were behind him, Saul settled into a very different sort of working life, establishing himself in the construction industry and running a building and decorating business based around the Essex county area where he had grown up, a world away from the roar of Wembley but one that suited a man who, by every account left behind by those who knew him, remained down-to-earth and unassuming despite having scored the goal that helped bring the FA Cup home to White Hart Lane in 1967.