EXCLUSIVE: Relegated Tottenham player fires warning to club with Harry Kane theory
EXCLUSIVE: Former Tottenham player Micky Stead has opened up on experiencing the club's last relegation from the top-flight as the current side look to avoid the same fate
Few can offer a first-hand account of Tottenham Hotspur's last relegation from the top-flight. Not since the late 1970s have Spurs played in English football's second tier.
But just like the 1976/77 campaign - Tottenham are facing the drop. Spurs finished rock bottom of the old First Division that season - two points from safety.
And now, 49 years later, Thursday's 3-1 defeat to Crystal Palace leaves the north London club facing another unthinkable relegation. A so-called Premier League 'big six' club, the ninth-richest on the planet, are now staring down the prospect of falling into the EFL Championship. It would have been unimaginable when club legend Harry Kane was firing in goal after goal or when they reached the Champions League final under Mauricio Pochettino in 2019.
Micky Stead is one former player who featured for the last relegated Spurs team - a side which included stars such as Glenn Hoddle, Pat Jennings and Peter Taylor. Just 20 years old at the time, he made eight appearances in that fateful season.
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Now a cab driver, he speaks exclusively to football.london on what a relegation at Tottenham looked like.
"I wasn't good enough to play in that Spurs team, perhaps that's the answer," he admitted. "When you go and tell me you're a young lad, you need to play a few games, and I wasn't good enough to hold my place down.
"I'd say for me to play, Spurs must have been struggling. That's a fair assessment, I reckon.
"I was trying to do the best for Tottenham, and experience-wise, we had quite a lot of experience in that team, and I don't think we should have gone down, actually.
"But when you're going through a hard time, it's difficult to get the breaks, so everything breaks against you.
"Look at Liverpool this season. They go to Wolves on a bit of a bad run and they get beat. But then look at West Ham. They've had a few good results, and all of a sudden they look like they could get out of it."
Relegation for any team is a sucker-punch. For Stead, that reality transformed how he felt on the pitch.
The 69-year-old said: "You feel sick to your stomach, I tell you. If you make a mistake, you're absolutely sick.
"No matter how your teammates try and help you out and tell you 'don't worry,' and 'keep going', you're absolutely gutted.
"You're a young boy, playing in that team. If you're playing with a lot of confidence, you're a better player than when you ain't.
"You can see that even in really top-class players. Once they get affected by a bit of pressure and they're not confident, they're not the same."
Stead also offers his view on how Kane's departure to Bayern Munich in 2023 signalled the current team's dramatic decline.
"I'm gutted for them really," he said. "The players will be disappointed. Everyone's disappointed.
"I don't think we've had the vision to grow the club. We've got everything. We've got the stadium, we've got the training facilities, we've got the scouting but you look at what happened with Harry Kane.
"He's gone to Germany, and this is his third season there. Why couldn't Spurs keep him? Because he wanted to win something, so he must have known.
"He's scoring goals for fun there and could have been doing that in the Premier League. It's just a lot of changes at Spurs."