Aaron Lennon saw it all across 10 years at Tottenham Hotspur but one man in particular immediately makes him smile when he thinks of his former managers.
The England winger joined Spurs from Leeds as an 18-year-old, the West Yorkshire club’s financial struggles meaning he arrived for a cut-price £1million in the summer of 2005. The youngster had needed to be persuaded to make the move because he was happy at his boyhood club and only agreed to the switch because it would help out Leeds.
Moving so young, Lennon quickly became homesick for his friend, family and life back up north. It took a big Dutchman in the shape of Martin Jol to help him settle and become a Premier League star in north London.
“He was unbelievable. I absolutely loved working for Martin Jol. Honestly, he’s some man,” Lennon told football.london . “The moment I got there, I was really homesick and he was fantastic with me. He was giving me extra days off to try and get me to adapt to London.
“Just the confidence he gave me as a young player coming into a new big club, a new environment, and literally put his arm around me and let me flourish to be the player that I became. He was so important for me.
“He was tactically very good, man management even better, and all around a genuinely lovely, lovely man, one of the nicest guys you’ll meet in football. He actually cared about you as a human being, not just you as a football player, and I couldn’t speak highly enough of him, honestly, he’s still to this day one of my actual favourites.”
Lennon will return to Tottenham this month as Spurs Legends take on their AC Milan counterparts in N17 on Sunday March 23 in aid of the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation.
Having played for a decade at the club, few are better placed than the 37-year-old to explain what it was like to play for some of the club’s varied managers during that period, with the quirks each had as well as the highs and lows on and off the pitch.
Juande Ramos would replace Jol in 2007 and there was no exaggerating those stories about the Spaniard banning various items in the club canteen.
“In the food department, Ramos was by far the strictest. I remember the first day he came in, he tipped the butter into the bin!” remembered Lennon. “Back then you’d have your toast with butter and he went to the bin and it was like ‘what’s happening here? I’ve just seen him putting the butter in the bin’.
“But as an actual man and a tactician, tactically he was unbelievable. Like really, really good and really clever, but the food stuff that’s where he was really strict on the diet. Body fat testing, it was every Tuesday. You couldn’t go up. If you did go up, you’d be doing extra running.
“So he was really strict in that sense, but when it came to actually being around the place he was quite laid back with everything else. It was mainly the diet stuff and I would say he did push things a little bit too far, and he upset a lot of players, especially senior players, they’d got away with what they want to eat.
“You’ve got a lot of players with a lot of superstitions. You might want some tomato sauce on your pasta and you’ve had it for maybe five or six years of your career, which has worked completely fine, then a manager comes in and says ‘no, you’re not allowed this any more’. So it’s always going to create that problem.
“I actually really liked Juande Ramos. I thought he was a good manager. I just think he went a little bit too far with the nutrition stuff, but each to their own.”
While Ramos was gone the following year after the team’s struggles in the Premier League, he did deliver Tottenham their last trophy with the 2008 League Cup thanks to an extra-time win against Chelsea in the final. It’s something that Lennon remembers fondly and he lays the credit at the door of the Spaniard.
“It was magical, honestly, the whole build up to it that year, it felt like it was going to be our year,” he said. “I remember when we beat Arsenal in the semis, it felt like something special was happening. Like I said about Juande, he tactically was unbelievable. He prepared things really, really well.
“His in-game tweaking of things that he could change was what he was brilliant at. He did that throughout a lot of big games. He’s really, really clever, and I think that definitely was one of the reasons we managed to win that game, and also the quality. We had some good players as well in that squad.”
The next five years brought two very different managers at the helm in the form of Harry Redknapp and Andre Villas-Boas and Lennon was one of the fortunate few who flourished under both men.
“I actually got along with both. They’re both really good man managers. Very different in the sense that Redknapp was more old school in the fact that if there’s a game on Tuesday, you’re off Wednesday,” explained the former England man. “Andre came in and you trained throughout the week. There’s no days off in the week anymore, but as both man managers, they were probably two of the best in getting the players, speaking with them individually.
“I was quite fortunate with those two, I had a really decent relationship with both of them, but I’ve seen other players who said the opposite. For me it wasn’t a difficult transition between those two.”
This month’s Legends game will bring Lennon full circle from one of the biggest nights in his career, just over 14 years ago at the San Siro. On February 15, 2011, with just 10 minutes of normal time remaining against a Milan side full of stars in the Champions League, Lennon raced up the pitch from his own half, hurdled a challenge and pulled the ball across to Peter Crouch to stroke home the winner in the first leg of the round of 16 tie.
“When the [upcoming] game got mentioned, it was just like, wow, because that obviously is an amazing memory for me. I absolutely loved it. All the Champions League nights were special under the lights, but obviously the AC Milan game and the Inter games were really special,” he said.
“So to go full circle and be saying ‘look, I’m going back to the Spurs stadium now to play against Milan again’ is quite funny. I’m really looking forward to it.”
One of the most thrilling combinations Tottenham fans have seen over recent decades was the wing duo of Lennon and Gareth Bale, who would terrorise defences with their lightening pace and dribbling, as well as their ability to dovetail to each other’s flanks. It was a one-two punch that would leave opposition sides dizzy, not knowing where the next blow was coming from.
“It worked unbelievably with me and Gaz out wide because before Gaz got there, there were games when I could get man-marked, I could get doubled up on, sometimes two or three players would come over to my side and they would literally block the ball coming my way,” he said.
“But when you had Gareth on the other side, you can’t cover both sides. So it just allowed us to play with a lot more freedom because if you block one side, we shift the ball out to the other side and he’s one vs one, and vice versa. It was one of the most exciting teams that ever I played in with me and Gareth down the wings.
“Obviously we had Luka Modric in the middle of the park, Scott Parker and Rafa van der Vaart. The team was so exciting. To play in that team honestly it brought some of the best nights of my life. To play in that team was a joy, even training was a joy, but some of the games, with that front four, front six, we could blow teams away within 30 minutes. So a really, really strong team.”
Lennon’s time at Tottenham would ultimately come to an end with the arrival of Mauricio Pochettino. He would only play in half of the Argentine’s first season in 2014 before leaving for Everton on loan after it became clear that he was not wanted as part of the new regime.
“I picked up that quite early, to be honest. I played in the first few games, but there were some early warning signs. I think it was the same, not just for me, but a few of the older lads,” said the winger. “They’d decided to go along a lot younger route and I was 27 at the time. I wasn’t that old, but I did get that feeling.
“You do as a player, you get that feeling and you could tell. There were games where I thought I should have been playing and I wasn’t playing, and he wasn’t really giving me much reason for why I wasn’t playing.
“So sometimes you know the writing’s on the wall and after a little while, I did get that feeling. Look, there were no hard feelings with him and I enjoyed his stuff. I learned quite a bit off him in a short period of time, especially on the physical aspect. Especially during a couple of his pre-seasons, I ended up taking a lot of his runs into my future career which I used off-season, which I thought were really good runs he did.
“He is a good man. It was funny because I bumped into him a few times after and we always had a chat, had a little catch-up. I really didn’t mind it. I was in the game long enough to realise that some managers you’re not for them, and they’ve got a different way of playing, a different style, and you have to accept it.”
There were reports at the time that Lennon was part of an older clique with the likes of Younes Kaboul and Emmanuel Adebayor that Pochettino wanted to remove from the club. The former England international admitted that he was devastated to leave the Lilywhites in the end.
“There was speculation about this little cliquey thing around us, but there wasn’t really any cliques at Tottenham to fair. Everyone got along. It was more like one big group, but it just felt like the senior lads, I think Daws was on his way out just before that also,” said Lennon.
“We had a group of us who were slightly older, I don’t know if it was that he felt that way he would just get a better response out of the younger lads, but you just never know from a manager, you don’t really get real answers. I did pull him up a few times on it and asked him ‘why am I not playing’ and he didn’t give me much back and it was all ‘it’s tactical, it’s tactical’.
“I’ve been in the game long enough to know this is not tactical, but that’s your choice. There were no hard feelings, you accept it. Not easily, I was gutted, absolutely gutted when I was leaving Spurs. I absolutely loved the place and like I said at the time, I still felt I was the right person and I should be playing.
“But he picked the team and in the end, after a few months of not playing, I was knocking on his door saying ‘I think it’s best if we go our separate ways if we can find a solution’.”
Lennon would join Everton permanently in 2015 and go on to have two spells at Burnley, sandwiching a year spent in Turkey at Kayserispor. He would also speak out in 2019 about his mental health struggles and the stress-related illness he dealt with while at the Toffees, a period that brought an outpouring of support from supporters at Tottenham.
Nowadays at 37, Lennon is a family man who has studied for his coaching badges and he worked within Leeds’ academy last season, while using his status to help others with mental health struggles.
“At the back end of last season I started coaching with Leeds for the under-18s. I did four or five months with them and I really loved it,” he said. “Then I had a new-born child and decided the commute and the hours would just kill me. I’ve got two kids now, but my little boy was coming home and I wasn’t even seeing him. He was already in bed and then I’d get up the next morning and I was leaving before he’d even got up.
“So I told Leeds that I loved the coaching, I love that aspect of it, but until my little girl is in nursery at least, then I’ve just got to put it on hold. So yeah, I’ve been just doing a little bit more media, and I’ve been working with a mental health platform also.”
On that platform, called imatta, explained: “I’m massively into it, and I’ve spoken to a lot of players and when I retired, realising that it’s still a big issue especially in football, with players needing help or players not knowing how to look after themselves in certain situations.
“So this opportunity came around for me to work with this platform, and that’s only recently that we’ve got that going, and we should be hopefully seeing it in a lot of places really soon.
“It’s called imatta and is already running and we’re also going to make a separate platform with imatta of sports. So it’s a really good platform, and we’re doing a lot of work. We’re speaking with a lot of people who are really interested. It’s basically giving people, not just players but everyone the tools to understand the mind, and to learn how to deal with it.”
Lennon has taken to his post-playing days with aplomb and he looks in exactly the physical shape he was when he played. Those Milan players he raced past in the San Siro 14 years ago who are brave enough to take him on again this month might just regret their decision once that first whistle blows.
Aaron Lennon will be playing for Spurs Legends vs. AC Milan Glorie at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday March 23rd in aid of the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation. Tickets are available at http://tottenhamhotspur.com/legendstickets
- Source: NEWHD MEDIA
