State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  ‘To travel to and from matches’, lamented The Times two days later, ‘is to run the gauntlet with these packs of marauding fiends as they terrorize the community at large.’ Some observers called for drastic measures, emulating Brentford’s chairman, who had carried out a citizen’s arrest on one troublemaker during one of his team’s home matches. British Rail scrapped their ‘football specials’ and withdrew their cheap long-distance tickets for Saturday travel, the Police Superintendents’ Association suggested that fans under the age of 16 be banned from ‘X-rated’ games unless they were accompanied by an adult, and a judge told a dock full of QPR hooligans that he wished he could put them in the stocks. Meanwhile the government, as usual, announced its determination to beat the ‘pathological thugs’; and, as usual, the disorder continued. In September, London’s Tube and bus drivers even staged an unofficial strike merely to avoid carrying Manchester United fans to their game at QPR. And by the end of the following season, nobody was surprised by the violent pitch invasion that greeted Tottenham’s relegation to the Second Division, the ‘screaming young mob, several thousand strong, swarming like bees’ into the main stand, the press room and the directors’ box. By now, the movement towards caging fans like wild animals was irresistible. Officials had been talking of installing steel fences for years, but hesitated because of safety, cost and image concerns. Manchester United, though, had been ordered to install fences in the summer of 1974, and where they led others followed.36

  As a purely domestic problem, hooliganism was bad enough. But what was even more disturbing was that it was beginning to spill over into Europe. The potential for trouble had been obvious since 1967, when thousands of good-natured Celtic fans had descended on Lisbon for the European Cup final. As it happened, the match was a joyous occasion (although the Portuguese police were taken aback by the Scottish supporters’ pitch invasion), but what it showed was that thousands of working-class fans now had the money and the means to follow their teams abroad. Five years later, when Rangers won their first European trophy against Dynamo Moscow in Barcelona, the scenes were rather less festive. Three times drunken fans invaded the field, and at the final whistle a pitched battle broke out between the Rangers supporters, wielding bottles and pieces of wood torn from the stadium, and the baton-wielding Spanish police, with 150 people being injured and one killed. The Rangers fans claimed they had been provoked; the president of UEFA, however, described them as ‘savages’, and the Lord Provost of Glasgow called them a disgrace to the city.37

  But Scottish supporters certainly did not have a monopoly on violence overseas. When Tottenham arrived in Rotterdam for the second leg of their UEFA Cup final against Feyenoord in May 1974, some of the city’s residents claimed they had seen nothing like it since the German occupation. The afternoon before the match, twenty-one English fans were arrested for looting a clothing shop and an off-licence, and even before kick-off the Tottenham chairman made a public appeal for supporters to behave. But it did no good. As soon as Feyenoord scored, the English fans ‘erupted in hideous battle’, ripping out their wooden seats and throwing them onto the field. The ensuing riot went on for some twenty minutes, quelled only by the intervention of more than 100 Dutch policemen, while over the public address system Tottenham’s manager Bill Nicholson vainly appealed for calm. Afterwards, the scene was like some medieval battlefield; reports estimated that 200 people had been hurt, fifty were treated for wounds, several were in hospital with serious injuries, and one policeman was in a critical condition after being beaten with an iron bar. ‘We were ashamed of our fans,’ said Mike England, the Spurs captain, calling them ‘disgraceful and disgusting’. The entire nation, said The Times, ‘cannot but feel a sense of shame that the Dutch hosts were given such a bad example of British youth. It calls for something more than an apology.’ The paper suggested that a group of Tottenham supporters might like to ‘go over to Rotterdam to help clear up some of the mess at the stadium’. But of course that never happened.38

  And so the awful saga went on. A year later, when Leeds controversially lost the European Cup final in Paris, their fans greeted each Bayern Munich goal with a hail of missiles. Before the game, German supporters had been attacked in the streets and a supermarket looted; now, as metal seats cascaded onto the field, a French policeman and a ball-boy were knocked unconscious, a photographer had his arm broken, and a German cameraman was blinded in one eye. The final whistle was the cue for more carnage; one of the troublemakers turned out to be a junior official at the British Embassy, who was sent home for throwing a moped through a chemist’s window. In the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that UEFA banned Leeds from European competition for four years. It was ‘the end of a decade of glory and greatness’, said the Sun sententiously.39

  But this was by no means the end of the cycle of violence. Disorder had now become an inevitable part of the fabric of the game, no longer making the headlines unless it was particularly brutal. When Liverpool reached the European Cup final in Rome in 1977, for example, it was as though the Vandals had returned to the Eternal City. ‘Noisy, aggressive, arrogant and drunk, swarming all day through the streets of the city centre, the Liverpool fans stopped cars, molested girls, commandeered the Trevi Fountain and the Piazza di Spagna, swept through the city with bottles of wine or beer glued to their lips, defecated in the gardens, urinated in the streets,’ reported La Repubblica. But the British press barely seemed to notice, and the disorder had no major consequences. In an age when attendances were falling and the middle classes remained wary of the self-styled people’s game, there was little scope for the kind of radical modernization that eliminated hooliganism twenty years later.40

  No doubt very few of the French and Dutch shopkeepers who suffered at the hands of British hooligans would have agreed that they represented a radical subculture, a healthy challenge to the bourgeois order, or the latest flowering of a hilariously mischievous Hogarthian tradition. Instead, they represented perhaps the darkest blot on the national escutcheon in a decade when Britain’s image abroad had rarely been worse, and yet another symbol of the growing coarseness, disorder and violence that many felt had overtaken everyday national life. To horrified observers both at home and abroad, it was as though some corruption had infected the very soul of the national game – a disease from which, it turned out, not even England’s football figurehead was immune.

  When Sir Alf Ramsey was sacked as manager of England in April 1974, The Times predicted that his replacement would be found among the younger managers ‘of the modern track suit set’. But on the fourth day of July the front pages broke the astonishing news that Don Revie – unquestionably the most qualified manager in the land – had been lured from Leeds by a record salary of £20,000 a year, more than twice Ramsey’s earnings. In a statement, Revie characteristically remarked that he had ‘tried to build the club into a family, and there must be sadness when anybody leaves a family’. The allure of managing his country, though, was impossible to resist, and like Edward Heath, Revie presented himself as a dynamic new broom, bringing the bracing smack of modernity after years of stagnation. In typical fashion, the first thing he did as England’s manager was to negotiate improved bonuses for the players. Next, he announced that the rousing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ would replace ‘God Save the Queen’ as the team’s anthem, a populist touch designed to inspire the gloomy Wembley crowd. And in his first match against Czechoslovakia in October 1974 – football’s equivalent of Heath’s ‘quiet revolution’ – the fans duly responded, roaring out the words from their printed song-sheets as Revie’s boys recorded a 3–0 victory.41

  Revie’s innovations did not end there. Reporters were wooed with drinks and sandwiches, a padded trainers’ bench was installed at Wembley, and the FA arranged a groundbreaking new kit deal with Admiral, which later, quite unfairly, became a symbol of Revie’s obsession with money. Yet within just a few months the clouds had begun to gather. Revie had set out to turn England into a club side, re-c
reating the family atmosphere that had worked so well at Leeds. But the enforced sessions of bingo and carpet bowls, as well as the ten o’clock curfew and detailed dossiers on forthcoming opponents, went down badly with established players used to more permissive regimes. Crucially, he could not decide on a settled side, partly because of his restless insistence on tinkering with the line-up, but also because key players such as Roy McFarland, Colin Bell and Gerry Francis suffered horrendous luck with injuries. In just twenty-nine games Revie used no fewer than fifty-two different players, some of whom – Phil Boyer, Tony Towers, Ian Gillard, Steve Whitworth – were decidedly obscure. He could not even decide on a captain, switching almost at random between Emlyn Hughes, Alan Ball, Gerry Francis, Kevin Keegan and Mick Channon. Yet the truth was that his indecision was largely forced on him. He dispensed with Ball, for example, only after the player’s club, Arsenal, had already dropped him as punishment for insubordination – a sadly typical story of the mid-1970s.42

  By the autumn of 1976 Revie’s dream of modernization, like those of Wilson and Heath before him, was turning sour. With England’s participation in the next World Cup hanging on a good result against Italy in Rome, he horrified commentators by making six changes to his team, including playing the defenders Brian Greenhoff and Trevor Cherry in central midfield. They promptly lost 2–0, making qualification highly unlikely. Revie’s players were ‘the worst England side I have ever seen,’ said the Italian captain Giacinto Facchetti, noting that ‘most surprising of all for a team for England, they seemed to have little heart for the battle’. As was becoming traditional on these occasions, the tabloids took the opportunity to lament the decline of the national game: the debacle was a ‘failure of English football as a whole’, said the Mirror, explaining that ‘we have men who can run and chase, battle and work … but the Italians have men who can PLAY’. It was an impression confirmed by England’s next game in February 1977, a friendly against Holland, who won even more comfortably than the 2–0 score suggested. More debacles followed: in May, England lost at home to Wales; in June, they lost at home to Scotland. With the pressure building, Revie seemed almost paralysed with indecision. ‘You sensed his frustration,’ Channon recalled. ‘He would sweat through nerves. I don’t think he could trust anyone … he thought everybody was going to do him.’43

  As Henry Kissinger once remarked of Richard Nixon – whom Revie increasingly resembled – even the paranoid do have enemies. Like Ramsey before him, the England manager had incurred the displeasure of the acerbic FA chairman Sir Harold Thompson, who regarded him as little more than a jumped-up lackey. ‘When I get to know you better, Revie, I shall call you Don,’ Thompson once remarked at a dinner. ‘And when I get to know you better, Thompson, I shall call you Sir Harold,’ Revie replied, a rare flash of wit that was neither forgotten nor forgiven. Even before the defeats to Wales and Scotland, his head was on the block. On 30 May 1977, the day before England played Wales, Bernard Donoughue, a keen amateur footballer, had drinks with Ted Croker, the secretary of the Football Association. ‘They are clearly thinking of sacking Don Revie,’ Donoughue recorded afterwards. But Revie was no fool. A few weeks later, on tour with England in South America, he told Dick Wragg, the head of the FA international committee, that the job was bringing ‘heartache’ to his wife, and that he was certain he was about to be sacked. If the FA paid up the last two years on his contract, Revie said, he would quietly walk away. Stunned, Wragg insisted that there were no plans to sack him, while Ted Croker promised that he would be allowed to see out his contract. But Revie had long since lost faith in his employers. Unknown to them, he had made other plans.44

  ‘Revie Quits Over “Aggro” ’, screamed an enormous headline on the front page of the Daily Mail on 12 July, unveiling the most sensational sporting exclusive of the decade. Inside, Revie announced that he was resigning as England’s manager, a decision he had not yet shared with his employers at the FA. ‘I sat down with Elsie one night and we agreed that the job was no longer worth the aggravation,’ he explained. ‘It was bringing too much heartache to those nearest to us … Nearly everyone in the country seems to want me out. So I am giving them what they want. I know people will accuse me of running away and it does sicken me that I cannot finish the job by taking England to the World Cup finals in Argentina next year. But the situation has become impossible.’

  That Revie had chosen to reveal his decision through the Daily Mail, which paid a rumoured £20,000 for the exclusive, was shocking enough. But it was as nothing compared with the news that broke the following day. Revie was not walking away to join Manchester United, as some had suspected. Instead, he had already signed a gigantic £340,000 tax-free four-year contract to manage the United Arab Emirates. What was worse, he had negotiated the deal weeks before. Supposed to be watching Italy and Finland play in Helsinki, he had actually flown to Dubai, accompanied by the Mail’s Jeff Powell, to agree the new contract. The symbolism was unmistakable: just four years after the OPEC oil shock, the grainy photographs of the England manager, smiling awkwardly in his powder-blue suit beside the sheikhs in their dishdashas, hammered home the stunning reality of Arab wealth and British humiliation. Perhaps only if the Prime Minister had packed his bags, scribbled out his resignation and flown off to run the Saudi economy would the shock have been greater. ‘It is impossible to escape the irony’, said The Times, ‘of the man who encouraged crowds to sing Land of Hope and Glory turning to seek his deserts in the desert.’45

  As it happened, The Times was one of the few papers to show any sympathy for Revie. His task had been made impossible by a ‘mediocre’ crop of players and incredibly bad luck with injuries, wrote Gerald Sinstadt, while his apparent indecision ‘in reality reflected the paucity of really outstanding individuals’. At a time of ‘mounting disenchantment among critics, paid and unpaid’, Revie had been offered ‘a job which would guarantee in four years security for life. Which of us can say that, in that position, we would have made a different decision?’ For a man who had known poverty on the streets of Middlesbrough and was obsessed with providing for his wife and children, the chance to become extremely rich almost overnight was simply too good to resist. The sheikhs’ offer was ‘an unbelievable opportunity to secure my family’s future’, Revie told the Mail, adding that the British ‘tax structure, let alone the salaries available, makes it impossible to earn this kind of money at home’. These were not necessarily base or sordid motives. In any case, the FA were merely reaping what they had sown. Barely three years before, they had discarded Sir Alf Ramsey, the man who had won the World Cup, with the haughty cruelty of aristocrats dismissing a disgraced parlourmaid. They could hardly complain when his successor drew the obvious lesson.46

  What Revie did not expect, however, was a chorus of execration based on the notion that he had ‘betrayed’ his country for ‘a handful of shekels’, as the tabloids insisted on putting it. ‘Don Revie’s decision doesn’t surprise me in the slightest,’ said his old enemy Alan Hardaker, the secretary of the Football League. ‘I only hope he can quickly learn to call out bingo numbers in Arabic.’ His defection was ‘a pathetic capitulation to Mammon’, wrote the Daily Express’s David Miller, while Revie’s old rival Bob Stokoe, once the manager of Sunderland, claimed that he ‘should have been castrated for the way he left England’. Above all, Sir Harold Thompson was furious at having been humiliated by a man so far beneath him that he did not even merit being addressed by his Christian name. On 28 July, the FA formally charged Revie with bringing the game into disrepute.

  The case dragged on until December 1978 but was grotesquely biased, with Thompson, who had already savaged Revie in the press, serving simultaneously as witness, judge and prosecuting counsel. His de-cision – a ten-year suspension from English football – was predictably absurd, and Revie’s solicitors promptly applied for justice to the High Court, the case being settled by Mr Justice Cantley in December 1979. But although Cantley had no choice but to throw out Thompson’s verdict,
he missed no opportunity to besmirch Revie’s reputation. Ludicrously, he insisted that Thompson had showed himself an ‘honourable man’ (a view that even the FA’s Ted Croker thought was ‘very wrong’) while Revie had ‘presented to the public a sensational and notorious example of disloyalty, breach of duty, discourtesy and selfishness’. It was a verdict that chimed with the views of many tabloid commentators, but Revie’s friends thought it spectacularly unfair. Cantley’s opinion was ‘one of the craziest things I have ever read’, said Lord Harewood, the president of Leeds United and former president of the FA, who had testified on Revie’s behalf. ‘If he really thought that Sir Harold had behaved admirably and Don hadn’t, then he is a very, very poor judge of character … He plainly disbelieved every word I said, but I don’t give a bugger what he thought.’47

  By this time, however, Revie’s reputation had suffered a blow from which it never recovered. In September 1977, two months after he had walked out to join the UAE, the Mirror alleged that he had been fixing matches for years. It was not the first time there had been rumours of underhand dealings: in 1972, the Sunday People had claimed that Revie had offered three Wolves players £1,000 each to ‘take it easy’ in their title decider against Leeds. At the time, neither the FA nor the police had found any evidence of corruption, but the Mirror now claimed that Revie had used Mike O’Grady, a former Leeds player on Wolves’ books, as a go-between. And there was more: the Wolves match, the Mirror insisted, was merely part of a broader pattern. ‘Don Revie planned and schemed and offered bribes, leaving as little as possible to chance,’ wrote the paper’s chief reporter, Richard Stott. ‘He relied on the loyalty of those he took into his confidence not to talk, and it nearly worked.’