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

by Rob Bagchi

  When the match resumed after a ten-minute break, the carnage continued with particularly bad tackles from Norman Hunter and Roy Vernon that were described by Ian Guild of the Yorkshire Post as ‘a disgrace to the game of football’. The match eventually finished in a 1–0 victory for United. Fortunately, the crowd had responded to an ultimatum from the police and there was no invasion of the pitch, but after the game an angry booing crowd had to be dispersed by mounted police from the streets surrounding the stadium. Strangely, it was the referee who was most vilified for his indulgence of Leeds: while United made a relatively quick getaway, he had to be barricaded in his changing room for several hours after the game.

  From the safety of their coach, which had to withstand another barrage of missiles, the Leeds players must have reflected on the ill feeling that had almost overwhelmed them. How far had they been responsible for provoking it? There has never been a satisfactory answer. Had the atmosphere been especially ugly from the kick-off, Bremner’s assertion that ‘because we all went in hard for the ball we became tagged with that “Dirty Leeds” label’ would be adequate. In fact, the truth was more complicated. When faced by teams willing to stand toe-to-toe with them, Leeds always tended to incite the wrath of opposition supporters because to them the game would appear one long succession of Leeds’ fouls. In fact, the foul tally in the Everton match shows Leeds committing twelve to Everton’s nineteen – but it was the manner in which Leeds carried themselves. United never seemed to care about their reputation, they never retreated when the opposition attempted to turn the tables and they knew just how far to wind up the opposition without winding up the referee. It didn’t matter if the match statistics exonerated them; they were such perfect villains. From this point on, the team the Sheffield United programme called a ‘travesty of soccer’ was pilloried on a truly national scale.

  How far ahead of its time this team was – the modernism of their methods and the crowd reactions they provoked – is highlighted by Leeds’ visit to Old Trafford in early December 1964. Like the Everton game a month earlier, this, too, was halted by the referee for ten minutes with Leeds 1–0 ahead, but on this occasion because a malfunctioning steam engine passing the ground had disgorged a huge cloud of smoke over the stadium. Leeds United were the future of football, the trailblazers of the now ubiquitous ‘professionalism’. No wonder they perturbed so many people.

  Other teams had been just as unpopular with opposition supporters, but what made this Leeds side so uniquely loathed was how much they managed to rile opposition players. In one of the autobiographies George Best gives a good example from that Old Trafford encounter of their adventurous aggression: ‘As the two teams walked down the tunnel,’ he wrote in The Best of Times, ‘I felt a terrific pain in my right calf as someone kicked me with brute force. I turned. It was Bobby Collins. “And that’s just for starters Bestie,” he said.’ Reprehensible, obviously, and entirely contrary to the spirit of the game, but one can’t help being amused by the sheer audacity of the man – and the naked malevolence of the act.

  Collins knew that fear worked. If a player is intimidated, the likelihood is that he will give his opponent more time – a footballer’s most precious commodity. Collins took it further than most would dare, far too far for some tastes, but it was highly effective. Over the next five years, as Manchester United conquered Europe and George Best was at his peak, he tore countless teams to shreds, but for all his sublime ability he never once dominated a game against Leeds United. It wasn’t because Best was physically frightened by Leeds, simply that Leeds were prepared to use every weapon at their disposal to stop him playing, whether physical, psychological, tactical or, like the tunnel assault, borderline criminal.

  But it wasn’t a cowardly approach. Nobby Stiles, Best’s protector-in-chief, took his team-mate’s revenge. ‘Every time you come down our right-hand side and kick George, you filthy bastard,’ he shouted at Collins, slamming him into the perimeter wall in a forceful tackle, ‘I’m going to friggin’ well hit you like that, only harder.’ Collins got up to score the only goal of the game. He had started it, taken the retribution as fair punishment, continued to hound Best despite Stiles’ injunctions and still led his team to maximum points. That was the hyperactive impudence that came to characterize Revie’s Leeds.

  From December the Championship race was distilled down to three teams. In the absence of Liverpool, who were preoccupied with Europe, Manchester United, Chelsea and Leeds uncoupled themselves from the pack and careered away. The psychological implications of breaking away so early are interesting. Often it is not the ‘Cup Final’ encounters with one’s rivals that cause a team to crack, but the pressure to keep on accumulating points against the makeweights. Every Saturday at 4.45 p.m., win, draw or lose, the players come into the dressing room to be told how the other two have got on. If your result is better than the other teams – elation. If worse – depression. And if the results are similar, the status quo prevails for another week and the stress levels build. Normally, this scenario does not occur until Easter, by which time there are only a handful of games left to play. Knowing that one slip-up could cost you the title even as early as December is a more demanding situation altogether. But perhaps Leeds’ success the previous year, when they had led the charge for promotion, lessened the attritional desperation of constantly attempting to keep pace with Manchester United and Chelsea. Their victory at Old Trafford put them in second place behind Chelsea; then, with amazing aplomb, they embarked on a sixteen-game unbeaten run which took them into late spring as leaders and short-priced favourites for an improbable title.

  The boldness of Revie’s perseverance for so long without a recognizable centre-forward deserves scrutiny. To camouflage the attacking weakness of his team, he demanded a greater fluidity than had hitherto been the norm in English football. This innovation had been the making of him as a player, but here he adapted the ‘Revie Plan’ for most players in his team, so that when Leeds’ attacking thrust was coming from the full backs or centre-half, as it so often did, then Collins, Giles and Johanneson, nominally attackers, would drop back to cover. Revie encouraged his players to do things that had never pre viously been part of their job descriptions, and although he was lucky in their readiness to follow him, his own daredevilry should never be underestimated. It wasn’t quite free-flowing ‘total football’ on the Dutch model, because it was based far more on defensive discipline, but it did share an awareness of the individual’s responsibility to think on the hoof, to plug the gaps left by a less rigid positional function. If this meant Collins retreating to take Charlton’s place in defence and the dangers of Charlton getting caught upfield, Revie was prepared to accept this. Manchester United and Chelsea were formidable challengers, both capable of more classically coherent attacking football than Leeds, but neither had, as Richard Ulyatt argued, ‘a greater driving force than Leeds have in Don Revie, none of them possesses team spirit in a greater degree. Team spirit and ambition mean as much as skill and experience in football of every class.’ Heart, balls and brain; Revie was mixing a pretty potent cocktail.

  For a novice team to sustain its title challenge for so long was remarkable enough. Complicating matters further was the club’s first notable run for fifteen years in the FA Cup, a competition in which United’s dismal lack of achievement had become a running joke in the city. After efficiently dispatching Southport in the third round, Leeds were drawn to face Everton in the fourth, a tie which, given the bad blood between the two teams, chilled the hearts of most aesthetes. Predictably, the mutual animosity was still rife and the 1–1 draw was marred by countless fouls. For once, Leeds came off the worse, being reduced to ten men after Bremner was stretchered off with a gashed leg. Fortunately, he recovered to take part in the replay at Goodison Park three days later, a far less fractious affair even though the crowd, at over 65,000, was comfortably the biggest the team had ever seen. Charlton and Weston scored the goals in the 2–1 victory, but the match’s most de
cisive feature was the defensive cover provided by Leeds’ terrier-like midfield. Easy wins over Shrewsbury and Crystal Palace put them in the semi-finals for the first time in the club’s history, and then sod’s law saw them drawn against Manchester United, the very team that had spent the last five months doggedly shadowing them.

  All winter Revie had remained steadfast in his decision to wait for Peacock’s return before admitting that Leeds could win anything; in truth, he was right to err on the side of caution. Throughout January and February, Leeds’ form had been scratchy, grinding out five draws in six games, with the partnership of Storrie and Weston only contributing two goals. However, in those days draws were not the devalued currency that they have become since the winning imperative was enshrined in the three-points-for-a-win formula. Back then they still retained respectability, indeed honour. Fortuitously, after several frustrating delays, Peacock finally re-emerged in late February to score four times in a run of five victories that consolidated Leeds’ position at the top of the table. His presence revitalized Revie’s team as an attacking force, knitting the whole side together with his precise and intelligent play. Significantly, in the ten league games he managed to play in all season, the team scored 27 goals compared to the 56 they scored in the thirty-two games he missed. Put another way, he was worth a goal a game more to the team when he played. Leeds had stayed in the race through their energy, organization, will and impudence. Now, belatedly, Revie could unleash them in the way he had so painstakingly and expensively plotted.

  It was Revie’s misfortune that in both competitions Manchester United stood between his team and success. At Hillsborough his semifinal virgins belied their inexperience by embroiling themselves in a ragged, violent 0–0 draw. This was another game held up as an example of Leeds’ wickedness, usually by Manchester United propagandists who conveniently forget their own cadre of cloggers. On this occasion, however, Leeds were more sinned against than sinning. Nobby Stiles’ early dreadful tackle on Albert Johanneson set the tone for the game, which quickly degenerated into a series of skirmishes, on and off the ball, between Jack Charlton and Denis Law, and Billy Bremner and Pat Crerand. The Yorkshire Post, never as fanatically pro their local club as most other provincial newspapers, soundly castigated Busby’s team for the calculated ferocity of their approach. ‘For a side so packed with talent, their behaviour was shabby in the extreme … Saints would have been hard pushed not to retaliate. Leeds are no saints.’ If this uncharacteristic rough-house treatment was meant to distract Leeds, it didn’t work, but with Johanneson limping for the majority of the game and Best absent through injury, both sides lacked real penetrative pace.

  The replay, too, four days later at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground, was deadlocked at 0–0 as the two sides punched and counter-punched to little effect. In the 89th minute, however, Johnny Giles floated a free-kick from inside the centre-circle into the penalty area, where Bremner, with his back to the keeper, somehow contorted his neck to glance the ball, at point-blank range, past a flummoxed Pat Dunne in the Manchester United goal. On the sidelines Kenneth Wolstenholme observed that ‘Don Revie’s gone mad’, knowing that leaving it so late to score was the best way of guaranteeing victory. It was an impressive piece of skill from Bremner but no mystery that the chance fell to him to deliver the sucker punch, so regular was his uncanny habit of contributing at critical moments. Not for him the meaningless fourth or fifth in a comprehensive drubbing. His goals always seemed to matter. With the final against Liverpool four weeks away, Revie let the city go wild at the thought of Wembley, but he withdrew his players to a quiet Dales hotel to focus on the first part of a highly improbable ‘double’.

  Wins against West Ham, Stoke and West Bromwich Albion in eight days took Leeds into their decisive home game against Manchester United in buoyant mood, having beaten them twice already that season. Their confidence of sealing the title was not misplaced, since a win would have put Leeds five points clear with four games to play. Bremner, however, was suspended, and though Jimmy Greenhoff manfully endeavoured to fill the gap in midfield, Leeds succumbed to a 1–0 defeat. It put them squarely on the back foot in the race, since Manchester United emerged from Elland Road only a point behind Leeds with a game in hand.

  The only consolation that weekend was the announcement that Bobby Collins had been elected Footballer of the Year, a controversial choice, but as the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney saw it, entirely merited: ‘Even those who feel that his conduct is often less than exemplary admit that he is a footballer of great skill and dedication and that his accomplishments in the last two or three years were so remarkable as to make him an obvious candidate for this award.’ If this was not to be the only piece of silverware to grace Elland Road that season, Collins would have to inspire his flagging team-mates one last time to win all their remaining fixtures and exert maximum pressure on Matt Busby’s team. Since the Football League, in their wisdom, refused to alter the schedule for the last four games – Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Monday – four games in eight days, it proved a punishing and impractical assignment.

  By virtue of Manchester United’s game in hand, Leeds stayed in first place until their final game kicked off, away to bottom-placed Birmingham City. In the preceding week they had faced three quasi-derby games, a double-header with Sheffield Wednesday and an away fixture at Sheffield United. They had lost at Hillsborough while still without Bremner, but bounced back to win at Elland Road and Bramall Lane. Going into the Monday night fixture at St Andrews, Leeds still held a one-point lead but had a marginally inferior goal average to Manchester United, who still had two games to play. Within an hour, Leeds’ whole season had completely disintegrated. Birmingham scored three times. Revie, Bremner remembered later, instructed them to ‘take it steady’ and conserve their energy for Wembley. Well aware that Manchester United were beating Arsenal at Old Trafford, he knew the game was up.

  In the 65th minute a penalty award changed the course of the game. Giles scored, Revie became re-energized, Reaney made it 3–2 and, with four minutes to go, Charlton equalized. If they could score again, Manchester United would at least have to get a point at Villa Park two days later. But even with eight white shirts in the Birmingham penalty box and two sweepers to keep smashing the ball back, Leeds were unable to clinch the goal that would have kept the race alive. Not for the last time, they would not settle for the classical anti-climax, the disastrous and embarrassing cock-up. Their refusal to accept defeat led them to tantalize their fans further, revitalizing hope when there should have been none, not capitulating despite the odds stacked against them. Manchester United duly took the title on goal average. Both sides had identical records, except for the six extra goals Manchester United had scored. Ultimately, Peacock’s long spell on the sidelines had been critical all along. Revie hid his disappointment well, magnanimously telephoned Busby to congratulate him and, in an unpopular move, ordered the team straight onto the bus to head south, five days early, to prepare for Wembley.

  This was Revie’s special time, the time he loved most. Secluded with his players in the Selsdon Park Hotel near Croydon (later the birthplace of Ted Heath’s strange ‘Selsdon Man’ project), he could escape the distractions of running the whole club and indulge himself in organizing his famously innocent diversions of indoor bowls and dominoes. But on this occasion it was counter-productive. The consensus among his squad was that they should have been allowed to go home instead of being holed up in a Surrey hotel for days on end with nothing to do. Bored and out of sorts, they became over-focused on the technicalities of their game plan and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead.

  Cup Final day came, and even before Revie had led his players out at Wembley to greet the Duke of Edinburgh, the tension they felt was palpable. In the tunnel Bill Shankly, at the head of his Liverpool team, turned to Bobby Collins, an old adversary from Merseyside derbies, and asked ‘How are you, Bobby?’ ‘I feel awful,’ Collins replied. Billy Bremner vividly remembered
the game being like a nightmare where he was running away from someone but could never find the speed to elude them. Too many Leeds players had off-days, notably Johanneson and Peacock, and with Jim Storrie hobbling injured on the peripheries and Gerry Byrne, the Liverpool full-back, playing for all but the first five minutes with a shattered collar-bone, the match was a woeful spectacle.

  So preoccupied with containment did Leeds seem to be that, for the whole of normal time, they barely created a single worthwhile chance. Without Gary Sprake’s goalkeeping they would have lost easily. Danny Blanchflower, writing in the Sunday Express afterwards, went as far as to accuse Leeds of not fully entering into the spirit of a Cup Final game but this is a harsh judgement. If anything, Leeds were stage-struck. Nevertheless, Hugh McIlvanney put his finger on it when he observed that ‘a welter of self-conscious method did not conceal the shameful poverty of imaginative football’. The 30,000 fans who had travelled to London tried to keep the players going by their incessant chanting of ‘Leeds, Leeds, Leeds’, but it was only in extra time that the game stuttered into life. Leeds would have settled for a 0–0 draw, but Roger Hunt’s goal for the Reds meant that caution, at last, had to be dumped. Revie ordered Bremner upfield to replace Storrie and encouraged Charlton to try for better fortune against Ron Yeats than Peacock had enjoyed. Eight minutes later Charlton, in the centre-forward position, headed down Norman Hunter’s clipped cross-field pass to Bremner, who hit a heavy half-volleyed shot with the outside of his right foot. It sped, unstoppably, into the top right-hand corner of the Liverpool goal. United’s first ever goal at Wembley was a memorable example of Bremner’s artistry and his unyielding drive. One of the few players to have performed on the day, it was typical of him to come up with something when all seemed lost.