Winter Sports
Audere est
Facere
Not so much a training ground, more an expression of a football club’s business and playing philosophy, that’s the new Tottenham Hotspur
Training Centre at Bulls Cross in Hertfordshire. When the club’s Grounds Manager Darren Baldwin invited Neville Johnson there, just a year after it first began operation, it was an intriguing insight into this aspect of the game at the very highest level, and a reflection of the club’s motto, Audere est Facere - To Dare Is To Do
50 PC OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013
cropping up is ‘aspiration’. He points out the skillfully re-instated natural hedging, a legacy of the land before its redevelopment. “We call this one Bechers Brook,” he says.
A
The delightful natural barrier, mainly of hawthorn, berry-laden at this time of year, runs the length of the main driveway into the Centre. It provides a pleasing and distinctive dividing line between the club’s schoolboy training area (for the under-8s and upwards) and the senior academy area, where life as a professional footballer begins to take shape. “You can see a little of what’s going on over the hedge, but you can’t touch,” said Darren. “It’s very much part of encouraging each level of play to strive
s Tottenham Hotspur’s Grounds Manager, Darren Baldwin, gives me a guided tour of the breathtakingly impressive new training centre, a word that keeps
for the next one. The layout here was specifically designed with that in mind.” Between the Academy area and the pinnacle of the Centre, where the Spurs’ first team squad train, is another natural barrier of hedging. Darren says they refer to it as another of Aintree’s legendary jumps, The Chair. The three specific areas are quite distinctive yet, in one regard, indistinguishable - the inviting, unblemished greenness of the playing surface.
The elites of the first team squad had done their day’s work and left for other things before I arrived at Bulls Cross; not so Darren’s team. They were hard at work keeping everywhere immaculate, and as Darren describes “to nothing less than 5- star standard”. I saw exactly what he meant as we continued the UTV tour of the whole of the new complex. “Attention to detail is everything,” Darren says, as we stop on one of the
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