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

by Rob Bagchi

  The goal thrust Revie into something of a quandary. If he could keep both Charlton and Bremner in attacking positions, then maybe Leeds could snatch an undeserved winner. Alternatively, he could bring them both back and play for a draw. But the team had played so poorly that his first instinct was to split the difference: recall Charlton into his conventional role while Bremner stayed up-front. It left Leeds tactically compromised, allowing too much space for Liverpool to exploit without the compensation of any additional attacking threat to keep their midfield and defence occupied. Six minutes into the second period, Ian St John headed the decisive goal past Sprake and, for all their efforts in the last nine minutes, United were unable to get off the canvas a second time.

  In defeat, Revie was sanguine. As Ron Yeats marshalled his line of players up the steps to receive the Cup, the Leeds United manager strode onto the pitch to console his depressed players. Despite two trophies having been snatched from them in less than a week, Revie exuded defiant pride. Bremner, the goalscorer, was in tears. ‘Don’t let it worry you, Billy,’ Revie told him, ‘We will be back and next time you’ll be skipper and we’ll win.’ Jack Charlton also remembers Revie telling him, ‘We’ll win it next year.’ As a player, Revie had watched Manchester City lose at Wembley in 1955, only to lead them to victory himself in 1956.

  Back in Leeds the following day they were feted at a huge civic reception. There, Revie rejected the slur that his team had over-achieved for most of the season but lacked the class to win anything. This had not been a once in a lifetime opportunity, a romantic swan song for a team past its peak. Leeds United were a work in progress and, as Jack Charlton put it with amazing sangfroid, ‘there would be plenty of chances in the years to come’. Runners-up medals in both senior competitions and a place in Europe were hardly trifling spoils from a first season back in the First Division. With a strong foothold secured and base camp established, the assault on the summit could begin.

  SEVEN

  RUNNING ON THE SPOT

  If the Champions League, that fool’s paradise which lends relative failure the trappings of success, had existed in the mid-1960s, the next three seasons would have seen Leeds United rewarded with the reputation of an elite club. Back then, second best meant second best. Unable to translate potential and progress into silverware, they were branded perennial ‘chokers’ and, to use a cricketing analogy, ‘flat track bullies’. What would now be hyped as a considerable achievement was then brutally dismissed as inadequate.

  Such a verdict presupposes that Leeds began the 1965/66 season as a mature team, yet how often have we seen a club play beyond its potential for a season in the top division before struggling? In recent years both Bradford and Ipswich have been examples of football’s equivalent of the ‘difficult second album’ syndrome. Revie’s aim was to win something and win it quickly; instead, he had to settle for the steady development of his team as a force in European football. Almost forty years on it can look like three seasons of worthy but essentially fruitless endeavour. Nonetheless, it was a period that provided his players with the education which equipped them to establish Leeds United as consistently the best team in England. While over the next ten years all their main challengers peaked and troughed, some reaching heights that Leeds could not achieve, one must remember that on the very day Leeds won the First Division title for the last time under Revie’s leadership, Manchester United were relegated. While Revie was in place, Leeds bucked the cyclical trend of decline and renewal that afflicted not only Manchester United but also Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Everton. That his precocious charges had three years of disappointment to make up for undoubtedly helped him to do it.

  The desperation to net that first trophy, any trophy, contributed to their ultimate frustration. A scatter-gun approach left them giving equal priority to every fixture in every competition, often thrusting them into the latter stages of tournaments just when fatigue began to take its toll. Norman Hunter has argued that when they accepted that they were unlikely to win every competition in a season, they invariably had more success; but when the honours’ board of a club was as barren as United’s, it is understandable that Revie did not want to limit ambitions.

  From 1965/66 to 1967/68 Leeds were runners-up in the league once and fourth twice, FA Cup semi-finalists on two occasions, semi-finalists and losing finalists in the Fairs Cup, before finally winning the Fairs and League Cups in 1968. It was a formidably harrowing apprenticeship for them to serve, particularly coming on top of their twin setbacks in 1965. It was made all the more difficult to bear once the sympathy of the media had evaporated, leaving them open to ridicule as ‘chokers’. Those who favoured the psychological explanation for their fate as eternal bridesmaids were wide of the mark. It was much more mundane than that. In the three seasons they played 186 matches, with Revie picking his strongest XI on all but four occasions. At the crucial times the players were totally knackered. Bremner has dismissed the import of such end of season congestion when they often had to face three or four games in a week; all that mattered to him was that they were young and fit. It’s the sort of thing footballers tend to say, but it failed to take account of mental exhaustion. Winning a trophy in 1968 meant Revie at last had the courage to compromise. They were later attacked for the bunker mentality they adopted in relations with the outside world, but one has to say that it was pretty obvious why they did it, considering all the barbed jibes of opposition supporters and press alike.

  In the summer of 1965 Revie chose once again not to get involved in the transfer market. His one longstanding target, Alan Ball, had a prohibitive value placed upon him by the Blackpool Board and, though he was eventually allowed to leave the following year, Revie was unable to persuade the Leeds Board to sanction a fee of over £100,000 for his services. It was the only really serious disagreement Revie ever had with Harry Reynolds, but maybe, in hindsight, it was for the best. While Ball was an outstanding player, he was extremely unpopular with opposition crowds. Leeds had enough trouble on that score. Imagine the stick had the vociferous ginger World Cup winner slotted in alongside Bremner, Collins and Giles in the Leeds midfield black hat brigade! Furthermore, it is doubtful that he could have had more impact than Peter Lorimer, who, after three years’ careful grounding in the reserves following his premature debut, was now considered ready for a starting place.

  With Storrie still nursing the injury sustained in the Cup Final, Lorimer took over alongside Peacock, Revie having finally lost patience with Don Weston. United got off to a roaring start in the league, top of the table after five games, with Peacock in such excellent form that after a three-year hiatus he earned an England recall. An ecstatic Revie claimed, ‘I couldn’t have been more pleased if I’d been selected myself.’ ‘People were saying we had bought a “boner”’, he went on, but Peacock’s form had proved them all wrong. Given Peacock’s frailty, this boast was somewhat ill advised, as his knees were clearly not strong enough to withstand the torture of two games per week. By the end of January 1966 no amount of courage, Revie’s patented soapy massages or injections could get Peacock ready to play. From then until March 1968, when he finally accepted the doctors’ admonishments and retired, he only managed to play a further nine times. Without him, Leeds were never as potently fluid. Leeds’ excellence in defence often allowed them to smother games once they had taken the lead but, valiantly though Belfitt, Greenhoff and Madeley tried to give the attack some teeth, United could never reach the dynamic attacking heights without a sophisticated, conventional centre-forward to act as a spearhead. Revie’s long prevarication over his replacement significantly undermined his team’s chances until he finally settled on Mick Jones of Sheffield United in September 1967.

  One doesn’t have to be much of a code-breaker to identify who Hugh McIlvanney was referring to in his wish list for 1967, published in the Observer on New Year’s Eve 1966. ‘The losers in football in 1967,’ he wrote, ‘should be and probably will be those teams who have
tried to devalue skill and flair and to make physical endeavour and functional efficiency the supreme virtues. Sooner or later, they will be made to realize that the First Division is not an athletics meeting.’ He singled out Best, Law, Charlton and Liverpool’s Gordon Milne as the players who fought successfully against this tendency, but no specific mention was made of any of Revie’s charges.

  Leeds’ reputation in Britain was still poor. At best, still in thrall to the gung-ho spirit of the domestic game, the big hitters of Fleet Street conceded that they were a very difficult team to beat. Abroad, however, was a different story. Their first forays into European competition were received with plaudits from coaches and journalists more au fait with the defensive arts.

  October 1965 saw United’s debut in the Intercity Fairs Cup, the precursor to the UEFA Cup. Facing the top Italian side Torino at Elland Road was as difficult a baptism as they could have faced. Nereo Rocco, Torino’s manager, so stocky he was almost cuboid, remarked that ‘Leeds were a fine team’ with ‘a simply magnificent crowd’. Neither verdicts would have occurred to English commentators. Revie pulled the oldest trick in the book by sending out his players in unfamiliar shirt numbers in the hope of disrupting Torino’s rigid man-to-man marking system. It didn’t take the Italians long to work that out. Revie’s little ruse gave Leeds the initial attacking impetus but Torino rallied to make the score 2–1 as United, naively, continued to press for a third goal.

  La Gazzetta dello Sport called them ‘steam-roller Leeds’: Revie, it went on to say, ‘showed he has learned about the continental kind of play’. For the away leg Harry Reynolds had to charter two planes from Yeadon to take supporters to Turin, a sharp turnaround from the indifference of recent years. To the incongruous strains of ‘Ilkla Moor’ from their fans, Leeds held out for a 0–0 draw in a frenzied game that revealed a new maturity to their counter-attacking style. It was all the more impressive since Collins was appallingly injured when Poletti jumped on him while he was lying on the floor, 10 yards from the ball. As Collins lay screaming in pain, his femur shattered by the assault, the Italians attempted to bundle him off the pitch in order to restart the game – at which point a free-for-all broke out. It says a lot for the mental toughness of the other Leeds players that they steeled themselves throughout the remaining 40 minutes. La Stampa’s correspondent was enormously impressed with the way Leeds held out. ‘This was the fastest game in Italy for a long time,’ he wrote. ‘Leeds are a robust, determined team, full of willpower and exceptional ability. This team has told us something about British soccer that we’ve not heard for years … all the team seemed to be spurred by fire.’

  Here we have the crux of Leeds’ domestic difficulties. They were a team that appealed to Italian tastes but not to British ones. They didn’t adhere to the strict disciplines of catenaccio but they put into practice much else they had learned from their earlier encounters with Serie A teams. They gave their defensive focus a British twist: a hard-running, seemingly helter-skelter ability to hit teams on the break. It made them a highly effective European outfit. Such a technical approach with its occasional exuberant, emotional edge was neither fully appreciated nor even understood at home. The British palate would eventually catch up.

  Leeds’ victory had come at a very high price. The foul that broke Collins’ thighbone was so vile that the two players’ wives up in the stand, Vicky Bremner and May Bell, burst into tears at the sight. Collins, as one would expect, took his injury stoically, but the long months of recuperation loomed ominously for Revie and his team. While Beryl Collins flew out to Italy to retrieve her husband, Revie was left with the problem of replacing his inspirational skipper. His decision to switch Giles inside rather earlier than he had hoped (Giles was in fact to keep this position for the next ten years) left him with the recurring problem Revie had thought he’d solved with his purchase: what to do with the right-wing berth?

  For the first time in nearly two years the manager had to resort to the chequebook, signing Mike O’Grady, a player now largely forgotten but one whose versatility on either flank proved extremely useful over the next four years. With Johanneson’s continual injury problems largely consigning him to a bit-part role from then on, the £30,000 paid out to Huddersfield Town for the England international proved an astute move. Giles, meanwhile, took to the centre with relish. ‘Only then,’ he told Leeds, Leeds, Leeds, ‘did I feel I was playing in my best position.’ The traumatic transition from Collins to Giles was seamless in football terms but it left a huge hole at the heart of the team. This talented but raw and callow side had been driven on by the martinet in the size two boots. Now they were on their own.

  Bobby Collins returned from his fractured femur for one game at the end of the 1965/66 season and started the following season back in his old place in the heart of midfield. However, the injury had essentially been so severe that it would have ended a normal player’s career. Even at thirty-six, Collins did not allow a little thing like chronic pain to get in the way of him and his addiction to football, but with his mobility severely hampered, he only made a handful of further appearances that season before being granted a free transfer at the season’s end. He moved on to Bury and continued to turn out regularly until the age of forty-one during spells in England, Scotland and Australia before three short appointments managing Huddersfield Town, Hull City and Barnsley in the early 1970s and 80s.

  The willingness of more than 200 supporters to pay in excess of £50 for what amounted to little more than a day trip to Italy seemed to suggest that Leeds’ long tribulations with their capricious public were coming to an end. Ten days later a large crowd assembled at the airport to welcome Collins and his wife home, similarly revealing a real affection for the club. Yet nothing was ever quite straightforward for Leeds and their fans. Although the average attendance had reached a healthy plateau of around 36,000, enough to give Reynolds and his Board great comfort, from match to match it still had an alarming propensity to oscillate wildly, reaching the heights of 50,000 when a real challenger was in town but dropping as low as 25,000 when the division’s duffers turned up.

  This kind of fluctuation bred an air of uncertainty in the club, leaving directors, staff and players more than a little perplexed. Torino’s Rocco had commended the club for its wonderful, scrupulously fair crowd, but it didn’t always seem that way to Revie and his team. Against Blackburn Rovers in 1965, Leeds sauntered to a 3–0 lead after only 25 minutes. They were rewarded by their own supporters with a slow hand-clap for failing to extend that margin in the second half. Revie was enraged: ‘They were three goals up after going headlong on a most tiring afternoon for football,’ he complained. ‘They came off lathered in sweat and had the match well in hand. I was appalled!’

  A furious debate broke out among the fans as to the main cause of this lack of respect. Some regulars from the paddock stands accused the ‘Johnny Come Latelys’ of the Scratching Shed. Others bizarrely blamed the poor tannoy system that drowned out the half-time entertainment from ‘The Minstrels’, a deeply non-PC act that belted out honky-tonk tunes for no apparent reason. If the crowd could have heard their popular standards, it was said, they would have joined in, but the lack of amplification scuppered the crowd’s momentum. One letter-writer in the Yorkshire Evening Post, ‘Scotia’, went so far as to claim that it was a response to Leeds’ rough tackling – ‘Staying away altogether if this sort of thing goes unchecked is the next logical step. We had been assured that United would play like gentlemen.’ (It begs the question, ‘By whom?’) This plaintive appeal for sportsmanship was not representative of the majority of the crowd. They had come to expect conspicuous effort and were simply bored as United cruised easily to victory. It does reveal, however, the difficulties faced by ‘new’ or emerging clubs. The only way of hooking a large and appreciative audience is by winning. This always eases the identity transference from a fickle public to its football team. It wasn’t until the season of their first title win that Leeds United could be s
aid to have truly established itself in its own city.

  Now led by Jack Charlton, who had reluctantly resumed the captaincy, United’s first European campaign went from strength to strength. In the second round SC Leipzig were beaten 2–1 away on a pitch covered in six inches of snow rolled flat enough to make play of a sort possible. Their bold performance in the heartland of Honecker’s republic was enough to secure the tie before a pallid 0–0 draw back at Elland Road. During the next home tie against Valencia, a dozen policemen had to restore order as a fourteen-man brawl erupted. Leeds’ stand-in captain was well to the fore as he sought retribution after a sly off-the-ball kick from Vidagany. Both players were eventually sent off after a ten-minute break had allowed the teams to cool down, but Leeds still managed to equalize Valencia’s early goal through the type of long, rasping shot that became Peter Lorimer’s party piece.

  The Football Association’s rather predictable response was to convene a special inquiry into Charlton’s conduct, but, much to their chagrin, the Dutch referee appeared as the defence’s key witness, exonerating Charlton of any culpability for starting the altercation, if not for marauding after the defender like a dyspeptic giraffe to gain his revenge. This charitable intervention did not save Charlton from a £20 fine, which did nothing to improve the FA’s dysfunctional relationship with the club. Revie was even more aggrieved to learn that the Spanish FA took no action regarding the two Valencia players sent off. Those members of the press who travelled to Spain for the second leg sanctimoniously hoping to condemn further carnage were to be disappointed. O’Grady’s fine goal put Revie’s European initiates into the quarter-finals.