by Rob Bagchi
In May 1972 Paul Rogerson, aged five, was a Liverpool supporter when Leeds United won the FA Cup for the one and only time. He switched allegiance just in time to see Leeds lose to Sunderland the following year. An award-winning business journalist, he is currently Editor-in-Chief of the weekly legal magazine the Law Society Gazette.
Rob Bagchi lasted almost as long at Sportspages bookshop as Don Revie spent at Elland Road. He works for the Guardian, for whom he writes a weekly sports column, and is the author of four books.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Without the contribution of so many people, it is doubtful that this book would ever have reached publication. First and foremost we must thank Graham Coster, our editor, for his patience, guidance and expertise.
Secondly, Malcolm Rogerson’s many hours of research in Leeds Central Library proved invaluable, as was Andrew Bagchi’s fervent grasp of Leeds United’s history.
David Luxton’s enthusiasm for the project not only contributed the title but also spurred the authors on when stuck down numerous cul-de-sacs. Heartfelt thanks must also go to John Gaustad, without whom the whole idea might never have left the pub, and to James Brown and Neil Jeffries at IFG, who helped get the book moving in its earliest days.
We are extremely grateful to Ben Clissitt, who asked the difficult questions and managed to put us in touch with the right people, and to Richard Lewis, Matt Mankelow, Liam Doyle and Chris Bradshaw for their intelligent and often provocative suggestions.
Thanks to Eddie Gray (and his remarkable secretary Karen Bouldy) for agreeing to speak to us and for ironing out several flights of fancy.
Finally, thanks to the families: to Sue Rogerson, Angela and Saral Bagchi for tireless support, to Joseph Rogerson, the next generation of Leeds supporter, to Lindsey Rogerson for enduring many lost weekends and to Alison Kirby for her encouragement, optimism and the sound advice given in her role as the first critical audience for the early parts of the book.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Foreword to the 2009 Edition
Introduction The Leeds United Family
Yorkshire’s Republican Army
When You’re Young
High Hopes
The Kids are Alright?
Anything Goes
A Stone’s Throw Away
Running on the Spot
White Riot
High and Dry
No Love Lost
Catching the Butterfly
Yesterday’s Men?
Second Coming
Suspicious Minds
Postscript In the End
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
FOREWORD TO THE 2009 EDITION
‘Don Revie made Leeds United, plank by careful plank, ushering boys towards greatness, buying with brilliant judgment and always building to last – welding talent to talent, spirit to spirit, to attain tremendous collective strength.’ Hugh McIlvanney, 1975
Don Revie OBE, the first Footballer of the Year to graduate as Manager of the Year, is the black sheep in the game’s hall of fame. No manager of his calibre and record has a smaller constituency of advocates and yet the evidence in this book stakes out a claim for greatness on his and his team’s behalf despite thirty years of muckraking and innuendo about their venality.
The role he played in engendering the modern game is also largely forgotten. He boiled down his approach to being the father of the Leeds United family, saying time and again that ‘I look on every one of them at this club as my own son’. But there was more to him than his modest job description. He turned a provincial Second Division side from what was then still a parochial city into arguably the best team in England for a decade from 1965. For a time he even made the city synonymous with his football club. He achieved this by training the players, devising the on-field strategy, scouting the best prospects in Britain, persuading them to join his crusade, designing the kit they played in, sorting out their finances and vetting their girlfriends. On any given day he was consigliere, masseur, dietician, transport manager and coach.
In essence he was the alpha and omega of Leeds United. He built a great team but he may be said to have failed to create a great club because the system and structure he developed depended entirely on him. United’s rise as England’s finest squad could not have happened without him. Great teams, however, grow old. Great clubs have stronger foundations, but by doing almost everything himself, Revie had become indispensable, as the Leeds board found to their cost when they repaid his service by giving Revie’s job to the man in football who hated him most.
These authors’ first encounter with Brian Clough was fleeting but instructive. It came on 11 September 1974, outside Leeds Road, the then home of Huddersfield Town. It was Paul Rogerson’s first away match – a League Cup tie. He was just seven years old.
Four months earlier Leeds United, under Don Revie, had ascended a peak of excellence then unprecedented in English football, remaining unbeaten for twenty-nine consecutive league matches on the way to the First Division Championship. But even then the team had appeared uneasily conscious of what was already a cliché – that when it really mattered, when the summit was in sight, Leeds would stumble and fall. Reverting to type, a string of late-season defeats saw Leeds come close to handing the title to Bill Shankly’s Liverpool, who would soon assume the mantle of the nation’s best team.
Not that this was apparent to the young Paul Rogerson on that particular day. The Elland Road board, renowned even in Leeds for their provincial circumspection, had acted completely out of character by recruiting as Revie’s replacement a man who loathed both Revie and Leeds. But that man was also brilliant, precocious and careless of reputations; the mirror image of the team he had taken over. If anyone could replace a group of players who were growing old together, it was surely he: Brian Howard Clough.
That it was not to be should have been apparent even to a seven-year-old, poised as he was with his autograph book by the door of the Wallace Arnold coach (it had to be Wallace Arnold), from which Clough disembarked. Private Eye coined the ever-present appendage ‘ashen-faced’ for its managerial stereotype Ron Knee and it was an apt description of Clough at that moment. He appeared so out of sorts he might have been ill. Pallid and tight-lipped, he swept into the stadium without looking anyone in the eye. Not what we had been led to expect at all. Revie’s players trooped in behind him, equally sullen and impassive. There was clearly trouble at t’mill.
Paul recalls the moment so clearly now only because of what came later. In the early evening of 30 May 1979, the authors of this book, both now twelve, were crouched in a chilly caravan on the East Yorkshire coast watching a small black-and-white television with mounting alarm. Nottingham Forest, even less fashionable than United had been (though never so hated), were about to become only the third English club to win the European Cup.
It was the bitterest moment of their lives as football supporters. Four years earlier a performance of scandalous refereeing had stolen that same trophy from Leeds, as surely as if Franz Beckenbauer had slipped it into his Adidas holdall before the whistle went at the Parc des Princes in Paris. But this time we only had ourselves to blame. It really should have been us.
David Peace’s recent novel, The Damned United, which re-imagines Clough’s infamous forty-four day debacle at Elland Road, essentially taps into the same vein of anger, blame and recrimination that this book did when it was first published. To this day Leeds United are indeed ‘damned’; unforgiven by the footballing fates for the sins of Don Revie and
his team, whether real or imagined. The image that adorns the original cover of Peace’s book, that of Clough leading out Revie’s team before the 1974 Charity Shield, seems in retrospect to presage so much that was to come: hands clasped behind his back, Clough looks like the chief undertaker at the head of a funeral cortege.
Before you dismiss this contention as fanciful, even pretentious, consider the facts. Howard Wilkinson’s first act on becoming manager in 1988, when the club was foundering at the wrong end of the Second Division, was to order the removal of all pictures of Revie and his players from Elland Road. What was this but a public exorcism? Three decades before Gypsy Rose Lee, a promenade fortune teller who had appropriated the famous stripper’s name, came to Elland Road at Revie’s invitation. She asked everyone apart from the manager to leave the ground, stood in the centre circle and scratched the grass, scattered some seeds and visited all four corners of the pitch before informing Revie over a cup of tea that the jinx he felt had caused his team’s bad luck had been lifted. In the same office that Revie talked of hoodoos and hexes that had to be banished, Wilkinson clearly saw his predecessor’s legacy and the club’s tendency to seek solace in nostalgia as the curse he himself had to purge.
What’s more it seemed to work, at least for a while, as Wilkinson delivered promotion and then the First Division Championship. To some it no doubt seemed fitting that he had replaced Revie’s beloved captain, Billy Bremner – that coiled and crabby personification of his managerial style on the field of play.
It was a false dawn. The 1992 title remains Leeds United’s sole meaningful achievement of the last 35 years, an extraordinary record of failure for a club with such a large and diffuse support. If you doubt the latter, consider that even today leedsunited.com is the third most-visited club website in English football, after those of Manchester United and Liverpool. Even in Division Three, a lot of people still care.
It is not so much that those same footballing fates put in the knife, but also that they twist it. Forest won the European Cup with two players at the heart of the team who Brian Clough had previously signed for Leeds – only for them to be derided as markedly inferior to Bremner and Mick Jones. Those players were John McGovern and John O’Hare. How sweet it must have been for them.
Even during the club’s rare moments of triumph, Nemesis was never far away. Eric Cantona became an adored talisman as his irresistible cameos helped propel Leeds to their third title. He went on to score a hat-trick at Wembley as Leeds beat Liverpool in the 1992 Charity Shield. And then – what? ‘Wait a minute,’ someone must have said: ‘Aren’t Leeds supposed to be dour and utilitarian?’ So Leeds sold him. For next to nothing – to Manchester United. Who immediately won their first title for twenty-six years, thereby establishing a domestic hegemony that endures to this day. The worst transfer decision in British football history? You be the judge.
Wilkinson was sacked in 1996 following a humiliating 4-0 home drubbing by … Manchester United. And yes, Cantona scored. Of course he did.
The present volume is too slim to describe in any detail the torturous decline of the Peter Ridsdale era and its aftermath, when Leeds United’s capacity for self-harm moved from the changing room to the boardroom. Suffice to say that two members of that side were Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate and its manager was the aspiring author David O’Leary. Oh, and the executive chairman was the kind of guy who rents goldfish.
And so, two relegations later, with the stadium and training ground sold off to relieve debts, Leeds tread water in a division to which they had never previously sunk. And ignominy continues to be piled on ignominy. Histon, a village which most Leeds fans could not place on a map, recently bundled United out of the FA Cup. No one but an excitable ITV commentator was at all surprised.
Today the chairman is Ken Bates, whose comically abrasive nature somehow suits the club’s reputation for put-upon bellicosity. Approaching 80 and resident in Monaco, one wonders whether Bates truly knew what he was letting himself in for. He found out soon enough, with play-off final defeats against Watford (Championship) and Doncaster Rovers (League One) that were so one-sided as to be embarrassing. Over 50,000 Leeds supporters showed up for the latter Wembley showpiece, thousands of them accommodated in the Doncaster end. When tickets ran out at Elland Road amid chaotic scenes, Rovers had to close their own ticket office after it was inundated by opposition fans.
If anything leavens what is not a particularly uplifting story, it is this. Still they come, and in large numbers, seemingly inured to failure. Half a century after Don Revie arrived at Leeds, initially as a player, he would have been perplexed by this. One of his great bugbears was the complacency with which the Leeds public appeared to regard his team’s success; crowds for lower-profile games were often disappointing, even when the club was chasing the title.
He, however, would have been the first to see the essential difference between the Second Division club with no history he took on and the one marooned in the third tier with unrealised, possibly unrealisable, potential that bears its name. It is only because of what he built, and what was long since dismantled, that the club’s support is so substantial. Unforgiven still, we know that only renewed success will bring redemption.
Rob Bagchi and Paul Rogerson
January 2009
INTRODUCTION
THE LEEDS UNITED FAMILY
Barry Davies is not a man to condone violence. But on 17 April 1971 the normally polished Match of the Day commentator came dangerously close.
Needing a win against West Bromwich Albion to draw away from the nagging challenge of Bertie Mee’s Arsenal side, Don Revie’s Leeds United are already 1–0 down. Then, a poor ball from Norman Hunter cannons off Tony Brown into the Leeds half, where Albion’s Colin Suggett is loitering at least 15 yards offside. More in hope than expectation, Brown continues his charge towards goal, and linesman Bill Troupe duly raises his flag. So transparent is the offence that there is a moment of suspended animation while players on both sides wait for referee Ray Tinkler to blow his whistle. He does not. An almost apologetic Brown continues on towards the Leeds goal before squaring for Jeff Astle to execute a simple tap-in. Astle, smirking and still half-expecting the referee to see sense, jogs back to the halfway line. A decision of almost baroque incompetence has cost Don Revie and Leeds United the championship.
As the truth dawns that Tinkler has given the goal, Elland Road explodes with rage. There follows one of English football’s most bizarre pitch invasions. A handful of spectators, many of them advancing in years, emerge from the packed stands to remonstrate with Tinkler, who is now surrounded by burly policemen. One bewhiskered invader is nattily attired in what is surely a Burton’s blazer. This is Leeds after all. A breathless Davies is as incredulous as the players: ‘Leeds will go mad,’ he shouts, ‘and they have every justification for going mad!’ If only momentarily, Tinkler’s personal safety appears to be in jeopardy. Twenty years later, Johnny Giles is still indignant: ‘They weren’t hooligans, they were grown men. How he could give the goal there, I just don’t know.’ Don Revie, stunned that a season’s graft has been undone by one single individual, walks on to protest but appears to think better of it. Hunched in a blue gabardine raincoat and chewing fiercely, he gazes skywards in disbelief. He has seen it all before. Davies, screaming now to be heard above the crowd, sympathizes. ‘Don Revie, a sickened man,’ he yells. ‘Just look at him, looking at the heavens in disgust!’
Utter the words ‘that bastard Tinkler’ to any Leeds fan over a certain age and you’ll meet with instant recognition. That infamous afternoon has come to encapsulate the Revie era, when one of the greatest club sides English football has ever produced ran the gauntlet of official obduracy, media disapprobation and ill fortune of sometimes grotesque proportions.
Barry Davies, mindful of the displays of genius he was lucky enough to be paid to watch, was normally an honourable exception. Just two months earlier he had looked on enraptured as Leeds had demolished Southa
mpton. They hadn’t merely won 7–0: they had finished up playing a humiliating game of keep-ball with their cowed opponents. ‘Leeds are putting on a show, and poor old Southampton just don’t know what day it is,’ Davies enthuses. ‘It’s almost cruel.’ The television sequence is one of the most famous in the history of British football.
These days the stadium junkie Simon Inglis can justifiably – and memorably – describe Leeds’ Elland Road stadium as ‘(looming) into vision like a giant industrial combine’. This dramatic if absurdly symmetrical complex is a monument as much to that simple decision to appoint Don Revie as manager of Leeds United, as to the influx of TV cash into the elite football clubs in the 1990s. Indeed, since the death of John Charles, who used to attend most home matches and could usually be spotted in the unpretentious concourse bar conceived to honour him, there is no evidence of anything pre-Revie at Elland Road except for a bust of the Gentle Giant that adorns a banqueting suite in a stand which now bears his name.
Revie, quite simply, did not save Leeds United, for when he took over there was not much worth saving. He made them. Not in the way that Shankly and Busby spectacularly revived the fortunes of temporarily moribund institutions, nor in the way that Kevin Keegan effectively rebranded Newcastle United in the early 1990s. He built Leeds from scratch, systematically, and with no history, culture or real constituency to fall back on.
