Old boy in league with old enemy

George Graham insists that he is not a hostage to the nostalgia which imprisons the rest of us against our will when our senses are invaded by the sight, sounds, and smells of Alma Maters, old work places and former stamping grounds.

So when the coach carrying the Tottenham team turns to negotiate the final few yards to Arsenal's main entrance today, Graham will not mistake Avenell Road for Memory Lane.

"I'm a great believer in living in the present," he says. "The past is lovely, wonderful, and it's tucked away in my head. But I will not have any emotional pangs returning to Arsenal."

This is not to say that he will ignore old friends. He will exchange a word or two with the commissionaire on the front steps, be happy to bump into former players like Tony Adams and Steve Bould in the corridors of Highbury, and expects to share a cup of tea with the staff of the box office.

"There are a lot of nice people at Arsenal," he says. "A lot."

The inference from Graham is that there are a lot of less than nice people, most of them inhabiting the boardroom. He still believes that he was prematurely removed from the manager's office after receiving a bung and the olive branch offered by the chairman Peter Hill-Wood, unlike the cash, will remain untouched.

Hill-Wood, who has invited Graham to bury the hatchet over a stiff drink in the boardroom, says: "I would like to see George come in with his head held high and proud and his hand outstretched."

Given the nature of Graham's departure, that final image is unfortunately ambiguous, although there is nothing so ironic as the fact that a man convicted of taking a bung now has a public image as the setter and upholder of standards.

Graham is portrayed as the man who has put the Harry Hotspur back into Tottenham, fighting for decency by issuing a new rule book which bans earrings and gambling at cards and restores blazers, shirts and tie as de rigueur clothing on match days.

Old-fashioned values from a man who succumbed to one of the original vices - greed. But in football, the lines between villainy and heroism are often either imperceptible or blurred. His old pal Terry Venables, who still has courtiers praising the emperor's fine ermine, despite two High Court judges dismissing him as a liar, is a case in point.

Graham is far sharper in the arts of both football management and public relations. Max Clifford could teach him nothing about PR and if Graham announced he was taking lessons in spin, one would assume he was apprenticed not to Alastair Campbell but to Shane Warne.

He even attempts to persuade one that today's match is less important than the League Cup tie at Liverpool this week.

"There are only three Premiership points at stake against Arsenal, whereas at Liverpool we won a game that put us into the quarter-finals of a cup competition."

Graham has carefully cultivated his image as a disciplinarian, which will have put his Tottenham charges instantly on the back foot. Tony Adams, in his autobiography, Addicted, says: "People who had known George said he changed the moment he got the Arsenal job. He changed all his drinking pals and set out to get rid of the prima donnas one by one.

"There was a mixture of feelings about George, but the dominant one was fear because of the power you knew he had. His body language, what with that Scottish mask of his, was definitely `I'm the boss, be careful'. We poked fun as far as we could at his stiffness, but there was also an admiration for what he was doing for us."

Adams, Steve Bould, Martin Keown and the full-backs Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn are the back five which Graham left as a gratefully-received legacy by first Bruce Rioch and now Arsene Wenger.

Although Graham suggested earlier this week that this unit may soon be as outdated as the other Famous Five, he believes they can still help Arsenal to a final dollop of success this season.

"At other clubs, those players might be finished. But Arsenal have got that winning mentality. They have not played particularly well this season, but they are second in the Premiership and the mental strength of their players is what drives them on. I always looked for players with that mental strength."

As he begins his plans to rebuild Tottenham with men of quality on and off the park, he knows he will no longer be able to pluck them from obscurity with loose change.

Wenger, he points out, was able to smuggle unknowns like Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit to Highbury because of an intimate knowledge of French football which put him at an advantage over everyone else.

Graham will politely reject that invitation to the boardroom after today's match, though he will, as is his weekly custom, spend the first half in the directors' box, just feet from the men who sacked him.

By the second half, however, he will be installed in that funny little greenhouse which passes as the dugout at Arsenal, looking out through glass which was perennially rose-tinted when he was manager.

Whatever contradictory message may be sent by his unchanging facial expression, nostalgia might just catch his emotions unawares.

George Graham will not enjoy his reception at Highbury today, according to the former Arsenal forward Paul Merson. "George will get stick," he said. "The depth of feeling between the fans is unbelievable. It will hurt him. He has this image of being hard and cold, but it will hurt because of the years he spent there." The match, a sell-out, will also be shown on giant screens at White Hart Lane.