The Unforgiven: The Story of Don Revie's Leeds United

by Rob Bagchi

  It was a nice piece of symmetry; eighteen months earlier in the corresponding fixture Revie had blooded the youngsters, won the match and set the club on course for this grand adventure. As a throwback to that audacious experiment, he gave Terry Cooper his debut on the left wing; Cooper repaid Revie by setting up the opening goal for Alan Peacock. Within 35 minutes Leeds were 3–0 ahead and promotion was assured. In a jubilant dressing-room Harry Reynolds, openly weeping, uncorked the champagne he’d requisitioned from a nearby pub, composed a telegram to congratulate Sunderland on their promotion, lionized his manager – offering him an improved contract, the third in three years – and promised to buy the fish and chips on the trip home. The tortuous journey had begun in South Wales; fittingly, it also ended there.

  Precisely forty years earlier the club had won the only cup in its history, the Second Division title of 1923/24. Three points from the last two games would enable them to emulate their forgotten prede cessors but they could only manage an insipid 1–1 draw with Plymouth Argyle even after a pre-match lap of honour, another Revie innovation. It was like ‘waiting for a hot soufflé and being served cold porridge,’ according to the Yorkshire Evening Post. Some wags in the crowd amended the lyrics of the new anthem ‘Leeds United Calypso’ to ‘collapso’, but the sense of anti-climax didn’t stop the players from accepting ‘a substantial gift of money’ from the executive 100 Club or, for that matter, dancing through the night at their promotion gala at the Astoria dance hall.

  Peacock’s two goals away at Charlton the following Saturday meant that they could finally unlock the dusty trophy cabinet after four dire decades. In a defiant nod to his critics, Don Revie, totally unabashed, praised his squad’s spirit to the hilt. ‘They have obeyed my orders perfectly on and off the field,’ he said. ‘We have not always played popular football and the players have been denied gaining the flattering headlines that they would have because of their style. They have never grumbled once.’ They would never really change. In just over three years Revie had relentlessly driven his young team over numerous hurdles, but his ambition was far from satiated. The best was still to come.

  SIX

  A STONE’S THROW AWAY

  The joy of promotion can be absurdly brief. As soon as the bunting has come down from the town hall, journalists and bookmakers begin to intrude on the euphoria with the smug cynicism that too often passes for expertise. Would that managers could hold these soothsayers accountable for their arbitrary pre-season predictions. Don Revie, thinner-skinned than most of his colleagues, scoffed at suggestions that Leeds would flounder at a higher level without substantial additions to his playing staff. ‘I intend to give the present team a run in the First Division,’ he said, ‘and am very confident about them in that division.’

  And why shouldn’t he be confident? Had any of those who had forecasted a season of adversity for Revie’s feisty upstarts looked at the record books? If they had done their homework, they would have seen that since the war, only one team promoted as Second Division Champions had been relegated the following season. Furthermore, without the disparity in wealth between the two divisions that has polarized the game in recent years, promoted teams generally prospered in the First Division. Liverpool, the current League Champions in only their second season since promotion, debunked the notion that Leeds would inevitably struggle. The earlier examples of Tottenham Hotspur and Ipswich Town, both League Champions in their first seasons back, thoroughly demolished it.

  As for the fate of clubs built on the ability of one man, however, Ipswich Town provided a salutary lesson. Alf Ramsey shared Revie’s autocratic drive and had steered another unfashionable provincial club to the First Division title; sadly, little more than eighteen months after his departure to Lancaster Gate, Ipswich were back in the Second Division. Pertinently for Leeds United, the contract Harry Reynolds had thrust on Revie in the Vetch Field dressing-room in April 1964 still lay unsigned in the manager’s desk long into the autumn. United’s vulnerability was not illusory; both Sunderland and Sheffield Wednesday, unarguably bigger clubs, were formally on the prowl for the manager’s services. Reynolds might have rebuffed their initial approaches with apparent unconcern by stating, ‘It is not our policy to release vital first class assets. Only the best will do for United’; most other commentators couldn’t share his optimism. Billy Bremner would subsequently recall that as late as September, everyone at Leeds was resigned to losing Revie to Sunderland, the manager apparently attracted by the greater prestige and potential of his former club.

  In 1977 Don Revie resigned as England manager to take up a lucrative post in Dubai coaching the United Arab Emirates national side. He drew a storm of vilification for ‘scuttling’ off to Dubai in a ‘tawdry get rich quick scheme’; the headlines read simply ‘Don Readies’. In 1964, however, the man who would later be dubbed ‘Don Readies’ did not walk out but, in a pattern that was to repeat itself time and again in his career, had all but resigned before once again plumping for the greater security of Leeds United. Many of his summers were ruined by these protracted bouts of agonizing indecision. Yet the Don ‘Readies’ jibe misses the point. Revie was never shy when assessing his own worth, but it wasn’t money per se that motivated him. In life it was security; in football it was control. Leeds United always offered both.

  If Reynolds was nervous about Revie’s prevarication, the manager himself exuded calm confidence. Nothing could guarantee success in the First Division, but Revie had enough experience, albeit as a player, to recognize that Leeds’ brand of high-energy football should continue to disconcert the opposition at any level. Back then the ‘national game’ wasn’t so national. Leeds United might have had a reputation in the northern press, but without exposure on television, few teams would know exactly what to expect. Reports from the opposition’s scouts on United in their pre-season friendlies could only broadly outline the team’s shape and style. Much else would remain a mystery until their competitive debut, and by then it would be too late.

  In the simpler environment of football in the 1960s Revie’s contemporaries’ prime concern was getting their teams to play to a set plan. If that worked, it removed the opposition from the equation. Revie, in contrast, always worried about the opposition first. It’s doubtful if any other manager made such systematic use of scouts’ information as Revie did. Cocker, Owen and Lindley were meticulous: they would report whether, for example, the goalkeeper was a ‘flapper’ or a catcher, or whether the right-half could accurately pass the ball across his body to the left-wing while running right, and then they would drill the team to modify their tactics to counteract the opposition’s strengths and capitalize on their weaknesses. The famous dossiers would usually be ready by Thursday, and on Friday morning the reserves, instructed by Owen, would copy the style of Saturday’s opponents in a long practice session. By the end of it the first team had worked out their positions by rote to such an extent that if X habitually bypassed Y to pass to Z, every member of United’s side knew specifically what to do. Leeds were the most heavily ‘coached’ team of the era. It was the cornerstone of their success, at least until Revie finally trusted his players’ instinctive adaptability.

  The pre-season tour of Northern Ireland had gone extremely well, but for two minor incidents – Bremner being taken into custody for allegedly being intoxicated while asleep in his car and Johanneson’s late return from his first trip back to South Africa in three years. It had been quiet by the standards of Revie’s first years in the job. The fans had by now become accustomed to summer signings, and that sense of anticipation was exploited by a hoaxer putting up dummy newspaper hoardings around the city claiming that United had signed Denis Law for £200,000. An afternoon of hysteria in Leeds City Square ensued. Had Law genuinely been available, Don Revie would have joined a long queue for his services. But this season none of the players Revie admired were realistically attainable. Moreover, he quite liked the fact that his team was inexperienced and not cowed by the task ahead
. ‘We have eight players who have never played in Division One,’ he said, ‘but if we get away to a good start, there should be some surprises.’

  In early August the Football Association produced the kind of surprise he hadn’t bargained for. In a move interpreted by Revie as the first shot in a long campaign to sabotage and discredit Leeds United, it published a table of English clubs’ disciplinary records: Leeds had the worst. The reports provoked a furious denunciation in the city, and closer examination revealed that it was a bit of a stitch up. In the 1963/64 season not one Leeds player had been sent off and only one professional, Billy Bremner, had been suspended for repeated misdemeanours. Countless other clubs had players getting first dibs on the rubber duck: at United they all bathed together. It transpired that Leeds’ status came from a survey of the whole club: it was the number of sending-offs in junior football that had hoisted Leeds to the top of the FA’s infamy league. Revie openly pondered on the FA’s motives. Even the most paranoid Leeds fan would accept that the FA’s ‘vendetta’ couldn’t have started so early; regardless, they stood prejudged before the season started. No wonder the slogan ‘Dirty Leeds’ caught on so quickly.

  Rated at 33/1 for both the title and the FA Cup, Leeds began the season as outsiders in more senses than one: their players already mythologized as part cannon fodder part assassin. In their last preseason friendly they had slaughtered Wrexham 8–2, but an injury to Peacock left them facing yet another season with their principal striker sidelined. Revie’s initial plan had revolved around the fit-again Storrie partnering Peacock, greedily feeding off the England international’s aerial dominance, but another cartilage operation put paid to that until late February. It led to a reprieve for Don Weston, the one player whose First Division potential Revie had qualms about.

  This strike force would hardly have set the world alight, and by half-time in Leeds’ opening fixture away to Aston Villa, after a lung-bursting but pretty ineffective 45 minutes, they were already 1–0 down. Those who had written Revie’s team off would have congratulated themselves.

  Aston Villa, fourth bottom the previous season, weren’t much of a force, but so comprehensively had they outplayed Leeds that Bremner, for one, remembered thinking, ‘We’re not going to be good enough.’ Revie, however, didn’t panic, and in his half-time talk warned the players that in sapping heat their desire to prove themselves had led them to play at a suicidal pace. In the second half, following his instructions to the letter, they played at a slower tempo. As though only now realizing that Peacock was absent and that both Storrie and Weston were both a good six inches shorter than their missing centre forward, the team finally began to play the ball on the ground. Goals from Johanneson and Charlton secured victory and a lesson was learned. In 45 minutes, as Phil Brown cryptically put it, they had worked out how to play against ‘tall timber with [a] small-built forward line’. It stood them in good stead for the next six months.

  While the team was learning its lesson, Harry Reynolds had not yet learned his from the Charles fiasco. He couldn’t help getting carried away, and for Leeds’ home debut against the Champions Liverpool, gleefully prepared for the first capacity crowd at Elland Road since the 1920s. The club had reverted to their ‘premium’ pricing policy, and this time the lack of protest seemed to indicate that the increases were thought justified. No one got rich, however, betting on the Leeds public’s enthusiasm. In fact, 36,005 people turned up for the team’s first game back in the First Division for five years, and a match against the current league Champions to boot. Another way of putting it is that the ground was 19,000, one-third short of capacity. Admittedly, it was a mid-week game, but three games the previous season had attracted bigger crowds. It was an unambiguous indication of the real strength of football in the city. This reluctance of the floating core of Leeds supporters to show up in numbers is the fundamental reason why the club’s credibility as a ‘big’ club was so regularly questioned. For far too long, whatever roots the club had laboured to establish still lay in shallow soil.

  Even so, Reynolds’ misplaced optimism had potentially disastrous consequences for the fans that did bother to turn up. His expectation of at least a 50,000 attendance led to the paddock stands being crammed full while vast swathes of terracing behind the goals were left vacant for all the non-existent latecomers. One fan complained that the crush was so intense he feared for his life; conditions, others claimed, were ‘like the black hole of Calcutta’. Luckily for a penitent Reynolds, there were no major casualties.

  If the administration of the club continued to be amateurish, on the pitch United tore Liverpool apart. Goals came from Weston, Bremner and Giles in a compelling 4–2 victory. In a nod to Liverpool’s four famous sons, the Yorkshire Evening Post maintained that Leeds had won with their ‘from me to you’ keepball: not only did they outplay the Champions, they also out-Beatled them. The following Saturday, in front of an even smaller crowd, Leeds made it three wins out of three by defeating Wolves 3–2, with Storrie scoring his first goals for six months. Against both Villa and Wolves, moreover, they had battled back from losing positions, an encouraging sign that their form couldn’t altogether be put down to ‘promoted club syndrome’. It was too soon to tell definitively, but even to the London media they looked well equipped to cope with the challenge. If they could only convince their own supporters, Harry Reynolds would be as ecstatic as Revie.

  Leeds’ general form over the season was symptomatic of the problems faced by all decent young teams: a series of winning sequences – one of seven matches, one of five, one of four, one of three – interspersed with the odd defeat by one of their stronger rivals. Among their seven losses, the only team to beat them from the bottom half of the table was Blackpool, who thrashed them at Bloomfield Road in early September. By the end of that month, United had already lost four times, but then embarked on a storming run that saw them beaten only once until mid-April. Midway through that run, Revie finally signed the new contract, belatedly convinced that his team really was going to be able to maintain the challenge. Their results were even more impressive in the light of Peacock’s injury. In an otherwise settled team Revie was never entirely comfortable with the striking combination, constantly experimenting with Weston, Belfitt and Johnson as he attempted to find the best substitute partner for Storrie. None of them ideally fitted all Revie’s criteria but each made important contributions along the way. In his pre-Christmas crack at filling in for Peacock the nineteen-year-old Rod Belfitt scored four goals in seven games. In the end it was the goals of Charlton, Bremner, Collins, Giles and Johanneson that kept Leeds in contention, the quick inter-passing and ability of Giles, Bremner and Hunter to pick out runners causing as much havoc in the First Division as it had in the Second.

  Havoc of a different kind was never far from the surface. On 17 October, the day Harold Wilson’s election victory was announced, Spurs were beaten 3–1 at Elland Road in a match where the opposition received four cautions to Leeds’ none. This trend was becoming increasingly prevalent. In the next home game against Sheffield United, Len Badger became the second opposition player sent off at Elland Road in four weeks. Were all these referees ‘homers’? It seems unlikely. A pensive Revie put it down rather to Leeds’ reputation. ‘Opposing teams,’ he remarked, ‘have gone on to the field keyed up, expecting a hard match. The number of opposition players sent off in our matches proves it.’ It was a subtle trick, simultaneously shifting the blame on to the opposition while jubilantly reminding everyone of the FA’s report. Richard Ulyatt’s match report from the Sheffield United game puts the situation into perspective: ‘With the marking as close as it was,’ he wrote, ‘with the tackles so determined, youngsters not entirely in control of their elbows and older players slyly using theirs, it was not surprising that the man who suffered most contumely was the poor old ref.’ It takes two sides to have an on-pitch war, and while Leeds weren’t always the ones to ‘kick off’ first, neither did they shy away from the battle. This refusal
to be intimidated was gradually swelling attendances at Elland Road and earning the bitter respect of their peers, but at away grounds it provoked outrage and contempt. Indeed, in Leeds’ very next game it caused a riot.

  Goodison Park has never been the most welcoming place for opposition teams to visit. Even before it became notorious in the 1980s for its hostility and fruit-throwing episodes, Jack Charlton viewed the crowd there as ‘the worst before which I have ever played … there always seems to be a threatening attitude, a vicious undertone to their remarks’. On this particular afternoon, when the remarks of the crowd, however vicious, were the least of their worries: the Leeds players genuinely feared for their safety. Jack Archer of The People called it a ‘spine-chilling’ game, one littered with a long procession of fouls, the type Charlton described as ‘sneaky things – going in over the top, boots hanging in late’. In only the fourth minute Giles and Sandy Brown, the Everton left-back, had jumped into a tackle just outside the Everton penalty area. Brown, incensed by the vigour of Giles’ challenge and subsequently complaining of ‘stud marks in the chest’, got up and threw a left-hander at Giles and was predictably sent off. From then on the frenzied atmosphere saw both sets of players flying into tackles with the crowd baying for retribution. Gary Sprake in the Leeds goal was pelted with coins throughout, and any of his colleagues who ventured near enough to the touchline was met with a volley of missiles. When Willie Bell clashed with Derek Temple in the 39th minute, there was a real danger of a pitch invasion. Ken Stokes, the referee, was then himself hit by a missile. Now he simply stopped the game and took the unusual step of ordering both teams back to the dressing-rooms to cool down. ‘The pitch was bombarded with apple cores and orange peel,’ Archer recounted, ‘and the stands rocked with shouts of “Dirty Leeds, Dirty Leeds”.’ With no banana projectiles to hand this time, the Everton crowd consoled themselves by going bananas instead.