“Some people think maybe he doesn’t want to play for Tottenham, maybe he doesn’t want to play at all. So maybe that’s why he’s getting me to take a back seat, to get me fully fit which is fair enough. I am getting fitter and stronger all the time.”Given Anderton’s injury record, and the fact that he played in Euro ‘96 without any obvious discomfort, inevitably there have been grumblings of discontent in the media and among the Tottenham faithful.Anderton is aware of it, but is happy enough at White Hart Lane to have signed a contract that will tie him to Tottenham until 2000. Before the Everton game he just said my time will come, so I guess I’ll have to wait. I haven’t really spoken to him about it, all I really know is what he said about me in the papers, that he wanted to know why I’d been out for so long.

Today comes a match third-from-bottom Spurs must win – home to Barnsley.”I’m definitely not fully match-fit,”Anderton said “If I was then I would ask the manager why I wasn’t playing. But after three games I did my knee at Bolton in the Cup when we lost 6-1 and I was out for three months with knee ligaments.”Finally, he tore his hamstring in his second game back from that, against Leeds United in March, and despite a couple of comeback attempts that is what Anderton is now trying to recover from. So far, under the new Spurs coach, Christian Gross, he has played the last 30 minutes of the Premiership games at Everton (won 2-0) and home to Chelsea (lost 6-1), and the first 52 minutes of last Saturday’s 4-0 defeat at Coventry City. “It turned out to be five months.”Following Euro ‘96, at the start of last season, the pain in his groin grew worse. “The specialist who originally did the left side said the second hernia operation probably hadn’t been done properly, so he did it himself this time and four weeks later I came back and felt great. His problems started when his groin began to trouble him after playing all three games in the Umbro Cup in 1995, England’s dress rehearsal for Euro ‘96.Later that summer he had a hernia operation on his right side, to match the one on his left side two years earlier, but the keyhole surgery failed to solve the problem. Three months into the new season he had played just a handful of games before the scar tissue was removed and a cyst was found.”After that I was hoping to play within four to six weeks,” he said.

The Wolves manager’s crime was to forsake the Berkshire club for Leicester, although he left them in far better shape than when he arrived, adding the Second Division title to their modest honours list in 1994. As if McGhee’s presence were not enough to rile Royals fans, he brings with him several former Elm Park men. His assistants Colin Lee and Mike Hickman for starters, plus two ex-Reading players in Keith Curle and Simon Osborn. But for injury there would have been two more, Adrian Williams and Michael Gilkes.
The links between the clubs pre-date all the hot air over McGhee. Billy Beats, an early prototype for Steve Bull who was England’s centre-forward on the day of the Ibrox disaster in 1902, had two spells as player-trainer of Reading.