Since the fates so clearly had it in for Leeds’s players, they might have been expected to benefit from a tide of public sympathy. Yet most football supporters outside Yorkshire loathed them. Even in an age of brutal tackling and posturing hard-men, Don Revie’s side were regarded as ruthlessly unsporting, their sheer will to win often taking them over the boundaries recognized by fellow professionals. ‘Don Revie’s so-called family had more in keeping with the Mafia than Mothercare,’ his rival Brian Clough once remarked. The veteran forward Jimmy Greaves recalled that he had ‘the bruises on my memory’ to remind him that playing Leeds was like trying to cross a minefield, and in the summer of 1973 the Football Association threatened them with a suspended £3,000 fine for ‘persistent misconduct on the field of play’. Clough even claimed that Leeds should be relegated as a punishment for being the ‘dirtiest club in Britain’, a remark that would return to haunt him when he briefly succeeded Revie at Elland Road a year later. And although Revie’s players cleaned up their act and played with greater freedom in their 1973–4 title-winning campaign, they never captured the neutrals’ hearts. Even Revie admitted that his early success had been based on ‘a rather defensive, physical style which made us probably the hardest team to beat in the League … Once we got a goal I would light a cigar, sit back on the trainers’ bench and enjoy the rest of the game, secure in the knowledge that it would need a minor miracle for the other side to equalise.’ Perhaps, he went on, ‘we did not exactly endear ourselves to the soccer purists … but I had to be realistic’.12
Revie called it realism; others, however, saw it as a kind of neurotic insecurity, rooted in the Leeds manager’s introverted psyche. In his classic book The Football Man (1968), Arthur Hopcraft described Revie as ‘a big, flat-fronted man with an outdoors face as though he lives permanently in a keen wind’. It was a face that seemed to be wearing a permanent frown, as if Revie were constantly contemplating his own misfortune. When television pictures caught the Leeds manager glowering from the dugout in his supposedly lucky blue suit and sheepskin jacket, he looked like a man out of time, crippled by self-doubt, unable to shake off the fear of defeat. His superstitions were legendary. Not only did he pray on his knees every night, he arranged for a minister from Knaresborough to visit the players every week, carried a little statue of St John of the Cross in his blue suit pocket, took a rabbit’s foot into the dugout, and made exactly the same walk to a nearby set of traffic lights before every home game, convinced that this would guarantee good luck. On the other hand, he regarded all feathered creatures as unlucky, banishing the club’s peacock emblem from his players’ shirts. Even as manager of England in the mid-1970s, he took football’s spiritual side – such as it was – painfully seriously. ‘I believe it will help you if you pray every night before you go to sleep,’ he told his charges during an early meeting, ‘and ask God to help you become better players.’13
Revie’s fear of failure was rooted in the difficult circumstances of his boyhood. To the young footballers plying their trade in the mid-1970s, with their expensive cars parked outside their neat suburban homes, the Hungry Thirties seemed like ancient history. For Revie, however, they had left a mark that would never fade. Born in 1927 and brought up in a little terraced house in working-class Middlesbrough, he vividly remembered the privations of the Depression, when his father, a joiner, had spent years out of work. Middlesbrough in the 1930s was not a particularly happy place to grow up: J. B. Priestley memorably called it ‘a dismal town, even with beer and football’, the twin obsessions of many local men. And Revie’s childhood was hardly the warm working-class upbringing of nostalgic stereotypes. When he was 12, his mother died of cancer, and four years later he moved to Leicester as an apprentice footballer. There he was known as a reserved, serious lad who never drank, never smoked and worked tirelessly to better himself. As a teenager, he had effectively missed out on family life; as a manager decades later, he was obsessed with turning Leeds into a surrogate family, where his players could feel loved. The players ‘were his children … and their children his grandchildren’, one friend said later. ‘Junior players are taught carefully about bank accounts, table manners and sex,’ reported Arthur Hopcraft. ‘There are regular homilies about keeping their hair short and their clothes smart and not getting caught up with loose girls.’ Many other managers did the same thing; none, however, did it more passionately than Revie. He even called himself ‘the head of the family’, inadvertently earning the nickname ‘The Godfather’.14
In his cultural conservatism, his fear of poverty, his respect for family values and his obsession with providing for his ‘children’, Revie reflected the values of a generation who could never quite bring themselves to trust in the abundance of the affluent society. Determined to re-create the family life he had never had, he invited his wife’s mother, uncles and aunts to live in their large house, Three Chimneys, in middle-class north Leeds, while his son Duncan was sent to boarding school at Repton, something that would have seemed impossible when Revie was growing up. At the time, his obsession with money earned him the nickname ‘Don Readies’, while wags pointed out that his name was an anagram of the phrase envie d’or, the love of gold. Even when Revie was a player, friends had remarked on his financial ambition: the sign of success, he allegedly told one teammate, was ‘how much you have got in the bank’. In the late 1970s, old enemies condemned him as greedy. But the key factor was surely not avarice but anxiety. Like many people who had known genuine poverty, Revie never felt satisfied, even once he had become a relatively rich man. And in many ways, despite his obvious conservatism, he was a pioneer. In the early 1970s his innovations at Leeds, from the players’ choreographed salute to their personalized tracksuits and numbered sock-tags, were derided as mercenary gimmicks. Thirty years later, however, it was clear that they were simply ahead of their time.15
By an uncanny coincidence, Revie’s fiercest rival and successor as Leeds manager was another Middlesbrough boy, born a few streets away in a nondescript council house in 1935, who had also played for Sunderland and England. Brian Clough’s confidant Duncan Hamilton recorded that he ‘hated Revie’, and their animosity lit up television screens and tabloid back pages throughout the first half of the 1970s. Yet although they were often seen as direct opposites – Clough the flamboyant manager of upstart Derby, Revie the grim mastermind behind ruthless Leeds – they had a great deal in common. Clough was just eight years younger than Revie, although his rebellious temperament, such a stark contrast with the older man’s conservatism, made the gap seem much wider. Like Revie, he had grown up in poverty. Like Revie, he was constantly agitating for pay rises. Like Revie, he was ultimately accused of crossing the line between financial shrewdness and outright corruption. Clough ‘was obsessed with money’, Duncan Hamilton wrote, ‘as if he feared he might wake up one morning and find himself a pauper again … He would read out to me the salaries of other people – players, managers, pop and film stars, politicians – if he came across them in a newspaper.’ This was not ‘purely greed’, Hamilton thought, but ‘a form of self-protection’. For as Clough once told him, ‘the only people who aren’t obsessed with money are those who have got more than enough of it’. These were the values not only of football managers born in the 1920s and 1930s, but of millions of newly affluent Britons who had broken out of working-class poverty in the decades after the war. They were values that helped to drive the new conservatism from the mid-1970s onwards, but they also inspired much of the trade union militancy of the period: the desperate desire to fight off the encroaching forces of inflation and unemployment, to cling on to the hard-won indicators of status, in a never-ending struggle against social and economic insecurity.16
In many ways, Clough’s public persona, like Revie’s, was a way of banishing the anxieties rooted in their shared background. The difference was that Clough’s personality – boastful, bombastic, witty and loquacious – was far better suited to the populist cultural climate of the 1970s, wh
ich is why he became such a star on television. At the time, many chose to overlook his more conservative opinions: his highly autocratic approach to management, his obsession with players’ discipline, even his contempt for long hair, sportswomen and foreigners. What shone through was his sheer rebelliousness, from his outspoken attack on Juventus after they fraudulently knocked Derby out of Europe in 1973 (‘cheating fucking Italian bastards’) to his impulsive resignation later that year – a mistake, he later admitted, provoked by Derby’s efforts to stop him hurling opinions around on television.17
In this respect, Clough was the managerial equivalent of that other football folk hero of the early 1970s, Manchester United’s Northern Irish winger George Best, loved as much for his impish misbehaviour as for his good looks and stunning skill. Best, however, was clearly past his prime, having spectacularly failed to handle his sudden ascent to stardom. In 1968, Arthur Hopcraft had acutely observed that he was ‘not fundamentally ostentatious; he is merely young, popular and rich by lower-middle-class standards’. It was only because footballers had until recently been paid like ‘factory helots’, Hopcraft thought, ‘that Best and his contemporaries look so excessively and immodestly affluent’. But when he revised his book three years later, his verdict had changed. Best’s name, he wrote in the updated edition, was now synonymous with ‘contempt for authority and heedless petulance’. His problem was not money; it was a terrible combination of celebrity, alcoholism and sheer self-indulgence, through which Best had ‘come to represent almost every extreme in the modern footballer’s lifestyle’.18
Although Best lived in a house worth £30,000 and made at least £25,000 a year, stratospheric earnings even by professional sportsmen’s standards, his effectiveness and application were in rapid decline. In January 1972, after he had disappeared from Manchester United’s training ground for an entire week, he was dropped from the team for the first time anyone could remember. The fact that the news made the front page of The Times spoke volumes about Best’s celebrity status; a few days later, when the club ordered him to move back into digs with his boyhood landlady, the story again made the front page. With grim inevitability the decline continued. In May 1972, dropped by Northern Ireland after missing training (front-page news again), Best fled to Marbella and sold the story of his ‘retirement’ to the Mirror for £5,000, which he promptly invested in brandy-and-cokes for himself and his cronies. Although he subsequently returned to Old Trafford, he was manifestly out of control, and on New Year’s Day 1974 he played his final game for Manchester United. When he turned up for the next game, said the club’s manager Tommy Docherty, ‘he was standing there pissed out of his mind and with a young lady’. That was the end: told he was no longer wanted, Best remained in the players’ lounge, drinking tea and watching the horseracing on television. At the end of the season, United were relegated. England’s most famous club would recover, but for the man once known as the Fifth Beatle, an embodiment of the youth and swagger of the 1960s, there remained only the sad decline into drunkenness, disease and degradation.19
The extraordinarily public nature of Best’s collapse would have been inconceivable a few years before, when the game was still governed by the maximum wage and footballers were not yet treated like teenage pop idols. But while Best’s talent and fame set him apart from his contemporaries, his was not an especially unusual story. Footballers had always drunk heavily, reflecting broader working-class habits. What was different in the early 1970s was not just the obsessive interest of the media, but the opportunities open to footballers thanks to their vastly increased spending power. To young men brought up in a world of increasing affluence, irreverence and individualism, the cautious, deferential values of Alf Ramsey and Don Revie seemed laughably old-fashioned. Attempting to motivate the talented but inconsistent Rodney Marsh before an England game in 1973, Ramsey warned him that he had ‘to work harder’, and that ‘if you don’t, I’m going to pull you off at half-time’. ‘Christ,’ Marsh replied under his breath. ‘At Manchester City all we get at half-time is a cup of tea and an orange.’ It was a story he told and retold in later years with deepening relish, but as the critic D. J. Taylor remarks, it marked a wide ‘symbolic divide’ between the serious-minded, intensely patriotic Ramsey ‘and a new breed of mavericks more interested in soccer’s rewards than some of its obligations’. It is almost impossible to imagine any of the players of the 1950s and 1960s speaking to Ramsey in such a way. But then it is also impossible to imagine them earning £15,000 a year in wages and another £15,000 in boot endorsements, deodorant adverts and personal appearance fees, as Marsh did in the early 1970s, or driving a Lotus Europa whose number plate appropriately contained the letters E, G and O.20
Best and Marsh were typical examples of a new breed of football stars in the early 1970s, self-styled entertainers who seemed more interested in making money and modelling clothes than in knuckling down, playing for their country and winning trophies. It is a myth that they were persistently overlooked by the England management: Sheffield United’s playmaker Tony Currie, for example, won seventeen caps, played in the dramatic draw with Poland in October 1973, and might have won more caps had he not been crippled by injuries. But the careers of other talented players – not just Marsh, but Stan Bowles, Peter Osgood, Alan Hudson, Charlie George and Frank Worthington – were conspicuous for their sense of waste and disappointment. In an era when young men were much less likely to take orders from their seniors, they were unable to cope with the temptations of affluence and the pressures of celebrity. Alan Hudson, for example, broke into the England team in March 1975, played superbly against West Germany, and then pressed the self-destruct button by drinking heavily after an Under-23 game in Hungary, defying a direct warning from the England manager. But Hudson’s intake of vodka, brandy and beer was just as illustrative of football’s new affluence as was Frank Worthington’s Jason King-style outfit when he arrived for his first trip abroad with England: a lime-green velvet jacket, a red silk shirt, leather trousers and high-heeled cowboy boots. When Ramsey caught sight of him, he turned pale with shock. His assistant Harold Shepherdson insisted that the young man walking towards them could not possibly be Worthington, because no young England player would ever turn up in such garish attire. But Shepherdson had been born during the First World War. Like many of his generation, he no longer understood how affluent young men thought and behaved.21
During the 1960s, Manchester United had been the most glamorous sporting institution in the country, its romantic appeal strengthened by the terrible Munich air disaster and the heart-warming story of Sir Matt Busby’s long march from the brink of death to capture the European Cup. By the summer of 1974, however, Britain’s best-supported club found itself in desperate straits. Since Busby’s retirement, United had already sacked two promising young managers, and although the voluble Scot Tommy Docherty promised to restore the club’s fortunes, George Best’s outrageous misbehaviour had left a devastating hole in the team’s morale. With two games of the season left, United teetered on the brink of the unthinkable: relegation to the Second Division. And as luck would have it, their last home game, on 27 April, was against their high-flying neighbours, Manchester City – their attack now led by the Scottish striker Denis Law, formerly the embodiment of United’s attacking flair during the Busby years.
That it was Law who effectively condemned United to relegation, his back-heeled finish trickling into the net with only minutes remaining, seemed almost predictable. But it was what happened next that crowned Old Trafford’s day of shame. ‘Immediately the crowd were on the pitch,’ wrote Tom Freeman in The Times, ‘not from the Stretford End, where the United supporters were tightly packed, but from the more thinly populated opposite end. Seconds later they were joined by the crowds flooding on from the Stretford End.’ With the players dashing for the safety of the tunnel, the game was halted; then, a few minutes later, after the pitch had been cleared, it restarted. But within moments the referee stopped it again,
‘with the crowds once more surging onto the field, fights breaking out all over the terraces, and one goal partly obscured by smoke from a fire’.
Then came what Freeman described as ‘the saddest moment’ of the debacle, as the amplified voice of Sir Matt Busby echoed across the pitch, begging the invaders to disperse. ‘For the sake of the club,’ he said desperately, but they took no notice. ‘Here was a man who had made Manchester United one of the greatest club sides in the world, and who had led them to a series of unprecedented triumphs’, Freeman wrote sadly. ‘Now, his team already doomed to second division football, he was faced with the additional ignominy of appealing to thousands of hooligans to avoid the disgrace of having the match abandoned and the ground closed for a long period next season.’ But it was no good; in the end, the match was abandoned. ‘Most of us left Old Trafford’, Freeman concluded, ‘with a feeling of despair, not only for the future of Manchester United, but the future of football itself. For let us face it. The abandonment at Old Trafford was just another example of the way the mobs can influence the outcome of matches these days.’22
One of the most depressing things about what had happened at Old Trafford was that nobody was surprised. Unlike many clubs, Manchester United commanded a considerable travelling following, nicknamed the ‘Red Army’ or ‘Stretford Enders’, including hundreds of young working-class fans from small towns and suburbs whose own local teams could not compete with United’s prestige. ‘They are mainly unskilled or unemployed and migrant young workers, social misfits, and plain soccer fanatics,’ two academics wrote rather dismissively in the early 1970s, noting that they were ‘as proud of the image they have foisted on the rest of youth as being “the best fighters in the land” as they are of following a famous team’. By this point the Red Army already had an unenviable reputation for causing trouble, especially when they visited the capital. When United played Arsenal in the spring of 1972, a thousand fans with red scarves marched north from Kings Cross and ‘broke windows, smashed up cars, threw rocks and swore at passers-by’. By nightfall, the academics wrote, ‘the Stretford End had not only “taken” the North Bank, but the whole of this part of North London’, an achievement that won them yet more admiration from disaffected youngsters on London’s estates.23
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 73
