More than 13 years have passed since the 68th and previous staging of a fixture which is 123 years old but on Saturday has only a fourth edition since 1972: Preston North End v Tottenham Hotspur.
The last time the northern and southern Lilywhites clashed came on 23 September 2009 at Deepdale when Alan Irvine’s Preston suffered a 5-1 loss to the Spurs of Harry Redknapp in a League Cup tie decorated by Peter Crouch’s hat-trick and strikes from Robbie Keane and Jermain Defoe, the visitors also fielding Jermaine Jenas, Wilson Palacios and a youthful Gareth Bale.
Preston’s scorer was Chris Brown, whose 83rd-minute strike offered only a consolation. He believes the locals will offer the Premier League millionaires a rousing “Welcome to Deepdale” at 6pm on Saturday when Spurs take on Ryan Lowe’s 11th-placed Championship side for an FA Cup fifth-round berth.
Brown says: “When Premier League teams come to Deepdale the fans seem to raise their noise levels – it’s brilliant. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a full house. It’s a great place to play. I remember when we played Liverpool [the previous season] and Tottenham they came out in their droves and got behind their team.
“Against Tottenham I came on as a sub and my lasting memory of that game is this: if you think back, Gareth Bale wasn’t really firing on all cylinders, there was talk about him never being on the winning Spurs team, he was having a really rough time.
“I came on around the same time that Defoe was going off and as he was walking off he was saying to Harry Redknapp that Bale ‘needs to buck his ideas up’, basically. That he wasn’t passing the ball to his feet. It was just mad to be standing there listening to that conversation, especially knowing where Gareth Bale soon went to in terms of his level of performance.
“Crouch played, Wilson Palacios too – so it was great to come on and play against those type of lads.”
Preston beat Huddersfield 3-1 in this season’s third round, while Spurs dispatched Portsmouth 1-0, Harry Kane’s winner a 265th goal for the club. After a 266th in Monday’s league win over Fulham, he will eclipse Jimmy Greaves and become Spurs’s outright record scorer if he registers today.
That would be another page in the tale of the clubs’ intertwined histories. Preston are the 1888-89 Invincibles and Double winners, achieving the FA Cup part without conceding. Tottenham’s 1960-61 vintage were the first team of the last century to secure the Double.
The XIs of Lowe and Antonio Conte will contest a 12th FA Cup clash between the teams. The first was on 27 January 1900: Preston were 1-0 winners at Deepdale in a first-round tie. Spurs were Southern League champions that season and then, next term, came the glory of a Cup triumph as the only non-league side to win it, after facing Preston in the opening round once again, dispatching them 4-1 in a replay following a 1-1 draw at White Hart Lane.
The relationship between the clubs had first deepened when Tottenham adopted the lilywhite jerseys of the Lancashire team in homage to William Sudell’s Invincibles side. Preston’s major trophy haul paused after the 1938 FA Cup final, the reverse to West Ham in the 1964 final a last taste of the big time.
The decline started three years before with relegation from the old First Division. Preston have twice lost playoff finals to enter the top flight – under David Moyes in 2001 and Billy Davies in 2005 – and reached the semi-final the season before Spurs last visited Deepdale. “A disappointment,” says Brown, who was in the team eliminated by Sheffield United.
The next year – 2010 – this famous name of the English game avoided a winding-up order after the intervention of Trevor Hemmings, who took over, but still plunged into the third tier the following term.
Last season Hemmings died and his son Craig oversees a club that last week announced a £16.8m loss in 2021-22 – an increase of £3.4m from the previous 12 months. Hemmings said: “2021-22 was difficult – it was the first full season back with crowds following Covid restrictions, and in the first half we changed managers [from Frankie McAvoy to Lowe]. And it was the season we lost our owner, my father. All at the club hope to further his legacy.”
Peter Ridsdale, a former Leeds chairman, is a director at Preston, where Lowe has constructed a team that blend the loanees Liam Delap (a Manchester City striker) and Álvaro Fernández (Manchester United defender) with the experience of Robbie Brady, a former Burnley winger, and Ched Evans, who after scoring six goals in seven games has signed a contract extension.
Evans will hope to do what Brown did and score, though this time for a winning Preston side that would make another piece of history. “My goal was a tap-in, like most were,” Brown jokes. “But you know what? Tottenham are a good team to play at the moment as there seems to be a bit of unrest there. I know Ryan Lowe is very positive and will put out the team to do exactly that.”
• This article was amended on 30 January 2023. Tottenham won the Double in 1960-61, not 1961-62 as an earlier version said.
