by Rob Bagchi
United hit the top of the table after nine games, in a fine run of seven wins and two draws. Although a blip came in the autumn, with two defeats and three successive draws, over the long winter months they gradually clawed their way back. Liverpool, not quite at their best, was still a formidable competitor, hanging on to first place until late February. That month, temperatures fell to arctic levels, causing many postponements. Fortunately, Leeds had a special, if primitive, approach to ground maintenance. The playing surface was covered with tons of straw; flaming braziers thawed out a frozen surface, allowing them to play while other teams were left idling. Seven wins on the trot enabled United to pull ahead as Liverpool foundered against Nottingham Forest, Arsenal and Stoke City, all teams that Leeds did the ‘double’ over that year. Acknowledging the stress that had undermined them before, Revie was moved to pay tribute to his boys’ ‘skill and courage to play fine football despite the tensions at the top’.
Norman Giller of the Daily Express agreed: ‘Knowing that the South has yet to accept them as worthy of wearing the English crown … Leeds, this season, have clothed their game with clean tactics as well as a high degree of skill.’ Given the abysmal record of southern clubs in the post-war era it was a little presumptuous of the south to try to impose standards on the north, but London still liked to delude itself that it was at the heart of the game. Getting knocked out of all three cup competitions early also suited Leeds’ ultimate purpose: by the time it came to the run-in they had played far fewer games than in any of the three previous seasons and were far fresher. They had eight games to survive in April.
Victory over defending champions Manchester City and hard-fought draws at Hillsborough and the Hawthorns took them to Highbury to face the scrutiny of the sceptical London media. Arsenal, looking for vengeance for 1968’s League Cup defeat and reeling from the humiliation of their catastrophic loss to Swindon Town in the 1969 Final were anxious to dent United’s championship aspirations. The match eventually turned on referee Ken Burns’ decision not to send off Gary Sprake for thumping Bobby Gould in the face after the burly centre-forward had clattered into the goalkeeper. The players felt that Burns owed them one after the 1967 FA Cup semi-final and, amazingly, he obliged. Just as Leeds had been stupefied by that earlier decision, so here most spectators thought his discretion beggared belief. Goals from Jones and Giles, the latter rounding the Arsenal goalkeeper Bob Wilson and walking the ball into an empty net, secured the win. It put them in an almost unassailable position at the top of the League with just four matches to go.
Sprake may have avoided being brought to book for his disreputable behaviour, but the whole team was nevertheless roundly condemned for spending so much of the game wasting time. With the title deemed a foregone conclusion, compliments were of the backhanded variety. ‘Leeds would be deserving rather than popular champions,’ wrote Brian Glanville. ‘One has to admire them but it’s still hard to like them. If they’re not as ruthless as they were, they make up for that in cynical histrionics.’ Desmond Hackett also disapproved of the lengths they would go to ensure success: ‘Some of their dying swan acts were so obvious, even the referee ignored them. Leeds certainly merit the Championship awards but they do not rate any Oscars!’
The allegation that Leeds deliberately attempted to manipulate and pressurize referees is impossible to refute but has to be understood. In Europe, United had been on the receiving end of ‘gamesmanship’, or ‘cheating’, time and again. Indeed, earlier that season Mike O’Grady had been booked for being head-butted in the face by Napoli’s Omar Sivori, who had then cleverly dived to the floor more quickly than his victim. They had learned that it was up to the referee to make the decision, and if occasionally he made mistakes that harmed you, then evening it up by trying to influence the mistakes he made in your favour was entirely logical. It was all part of the ‘new’ game, amoral not immoral. Yet Leeds did not pioneer its introduction to British football. It had seeped in with every European campaign undertaken by British teams as they were shown what was required to compete successfully. Leeds could not see the sense in being hypocritical, kicking their way on the continent and adopting angelic postures at home. They rigidly applied the same methods at home as abroad. Whether people liked it or not was never the issue. If Leeds could get away with it, it was in.
A win at home to Leicester City, followed by a draw at Goodison Park on a night when Liverpool were held at Coventry, left Leeds five points clear with two games to play. Technically, only Shankly’s team, with three games left, could catch them. Fate (or the fixture compilers) decreed that United’s penultimate match, on the Monday night after the FA Cup Final, took them to Anfield. A point, and the title would be theirs. The legend of that night in Liverpool has grown to apocryphal proportions, but witnesses insist it actually happened: the Anfield crowd displayed incredible sportsmanship towards Bremner and his team.
The match was played in a furious atmosphere. In front of the inevitable Liverpool onslaught, Leeds did not quaver. Madeley dropped deep to help out his beleaguered colleagues at every opportunity, frustrating Liverpool’s forwards with a grim display of organized obduracy. Reaney and Cooper had been detailed to sit tight on Callaghan and Thompson, Liverpool’s two wingers, forcing the main thrusts to go through the middle where there were massed ranks of white shirts. Clear chances were missed, but in the end Leeds hung on to win the point that guaranteed them the championship. It was fitting that their defensive ability, the basis of all they had achieved, clinched the title for Revie.
What happened next has become part of Leeds United folklore. Beforehand, Revie had instructed Bremner, if they should get that decisive point, to lead the players after the game towards the Kop. Bremner took some persuading, but after they had celebrated before their own travelling support, Bremner duly marched his men forward. The ground fell silent, but instead of being lynched, the Leeds team were surprised to find themselves being loudly hailed as ‘champions’ by the 27,000 Koppites massed in front of them. The players stayed put for 20 minutes, soaking it all in, larking around, jumping on one another and paying their tributes to both sets of fans. They had been derided and despised for such a long time that one could not blame them for basking in the adulation. ‘Being cheered by a rival crowd – any rival crowd – was a new experience for us,’ Eddie Gray recalls. ‘This in itself was as much of a turning point for Leeds as the Championship achievement.’ Back in the dressing-room, where Shankly had provided a crate of champagne, Revie clearly felt flattered by the two extraordinary events of the evening: ‘The reception given us by the sporting Liverpool crowd was truly magnificent,’ he said, ‘and so, for that matter, was our defence tonight. It was superb in everything.’
Eight years after he had been appointed, almost as an afterthought, at a woefully undistinguished club heading for insolvency, Revie had taken Leeds to the top of the domestic game. All the brickbats he had had to endure, all the strain, were made worthwhile by the hospitality of the Kop. Shankly, an incurable romantic where football was concerned and not one to bandy around accolades where they were not deserved, gave Leeds his stamp of approval. ‘Leeds United are worthy champions,’ he proclaimed. ‘They are a great side.’ That was good enough for Revie and his team. The respect of their fellow professionals was all they craved and now they revelled in the novel experience of popularity. They were underdogs no more. A psychological weight had been lifted. ‘That wonderful night at Anfield saw our burning faith in ourselves justified,’ Billy Bremner reflected. ‘At last we were well and truly vindicated.’ The irksome oiks, Revie’s ‘Little West Riding Hoods’, had joined football’s aristocracy.
NINE
HIGH AND DRY
Revie, an exultant Manager of the Year, had every right to celebrate that summer of 1969. His team had dumbfounded the critics, rewriting the record books for number of points accumulated and fewest defeats in a season. ‘All these successes,’ he wrote, ‘made the past failures more easy to bear, and to look b
ack upon without anger or anguish.’ It was like the end of a terrible journey, all the rancour obliterated by the pleasure of finally arriving. Never one to allow himself an easy ride, however, he limited his enjoyment of the moment to a few short weeks before announcing to his players that his ambition for the 1969/70 season was ‘the miracle’.
Only a few days after they’d returned from their holidays, Revie set them the target of the League Championship, the FA Cup and the European Cup. It’s a reflection of the esteem in which they held him and their own self-belief that no one summoned a Corporation van to come and take him to the nearest asylum. A ‘double’ was difficult enough; only one team had managed it all century. But the ‘treble’? That, surely, was ridiculous. It is clear that even he did not think it was a realistic ambition; indeed, he conceded subsequently, ‘the deliberate aim of a treble was nothing short of fantastic’. By constantly upping the ante at the start of each season, though, he was trying to insure against stagnation. ‘It was said that our manager could rest easy now, because the footballing world had acknowledged us as true Champions,’ reflected Billy Bremner. ‘Rest easy? Don’t you believe it!’ Satisfaction was a dangerous emotion in management, and Don Revie refused to permit his players that luxury. The League Championship was no pinnacle. In their minds they had only just begun.
To emphasize his intent to lead an unprecedented charge at all three major trophies, Revie bought himself a present. The one weakness his team had persistently displayed was their lack of an out and out goalscorer, a genuine 20-goals-a-season star. In their title-winning season only Mick Jones had reached double figures. If Leeds were to prosper in the European Cup, Revie urgently needed someone to capitalize more heavily on the chances created by his illustrious midfield. To this end he shamelessly badgered relegated Leicester City to release Allan Clarke, a dead-eyed finisher with just the requisite hint of cruelty about him. Like all his major deals, it was meticulously researched, with the player’s temperamental suitability to join the Leeds fellowship always being the clinching factor.
Clarke was a magnificent footballer – quick, assured, intelligent, opportunistic and so conspicuously secure in his own ability that it was commonly assumed that he was in love with himself. His unruffled, straight-backed running style betrayed the natural arrogance of the thoroughbred centre-forward, and if his single-mindedness would later lead him off at odd tangents (during his unhappy stint as Leeds manager once advocating the birching of unruly Leeds fans and volunteering to administer the thrashings personally), it added a withering dimension to United’s play. It was the first time since Collins that Revie had invested in something approaching the finished article; he had to demolish the domestic transfer record to do it, but the days when the Board would quibble at such an outrageous outlay had long since passed. For £165,000, or the price of thirty new Barratt homes in those days, Leeds United had finally purchased their own bespoke Jimmy Greaves.
Goals from Charlton and Gray in the Charity Shield against Manchester City got Leeds away for the second successive season with a trophy to brandish at yet another civic reception. Their early form in the league, however, was a little rickety. Clarke’s brio undoubtedly added punch to United’s attack, but playing with two out and out forwards on a regular basis for the first time in years took some time to get accustomed to. Clarke’s introduction also coincided with Lorimer’s permanent inclusion in the team on the right side in preference to O’Grady – to give Leeds more attacking options than ever before – but it curtailed the freedom of Bremner and Giles to advance as much as they had in previous seasons.
Lorimer was not an orthodox midfield player or winger. Although he possessed enough defensive nous to stay in position when necessary, his inclination to attack distorted the rigid tactical template that had been the basis of United’s defensive dominance. From now on it was neither 4–4–2 nor strictly 4–3–3, but more like 4–3%–2% as Lorimer ploughed forward to support Clarke and Jones at every opportunity. This is what Revie meant when he said he’d let the team ‘off the leash’ after the first title. Lorimer’s role was the embodiment of the concept and he, more than anyone, was responsible for injecting the dynamism into Leeds’ play that characterized the last five years of Revie’s tenure.
It was a long haul through autumn and winter in the league. Not until the middle of January, when they put together seven victories in eight games, did they finally get back to the top of the table. With Clarke in the team, they were scoring more goals per game than ever before, but with Madeley often playing at full-back in the absence of the injured Cooper, they were also shipping more goals than usual. Madeley was a competent full-back – indeed, most of his twenty-four England caps came in this position – but without him as a shield in front of Hunter and Charlton, the whole defence was far more vulnerable than the year before.
With only eight clean sheets all season in comparison to the twenty-four in 1968/69, it is pretty obvious that allowing the players their heads to play in a more open fashion significantly weakened the foundations of the Championship winning team’s success. Revie grasped the nettle because he was confident that a greater attacking verve would compensate for the extra licence in defence, a psychological switch from never wanting to lose to always wanting to win. In a poor First Division with Liverpool and Manchester United in decline, this strategy should have brought back-to-back titles. That it didn’t was due more to Leed’s elongated runs in the FA Cup and Europe than the dogged Everton team who ended up as eventual Champions. By early March, Leeds’ programme was so congested that six of the team, the club physician warned Revie, were on the verge of nervous and physical collapse. Revie’s appetite for the ‘treble’ was in danger of running his shattered team into the ground.
An atypically dull, scoreless draw with Liverpool on 7 March left Leeds still in top spot, having only lost two games all season, a 3–2 reverse at Goodison Park back in August and a wretched Boxing Day defeat at Newcastle. Everything seemed to be on course for a spectacular finish. The partnership between Jones and Clarke was flourishing, with the former scoring more goals in fewer games than in previous seasons when he’d been forced to toil alone. Clarke and Lorimer also thrived, contributing 31 goals between them as United’s reliance on the 1–0 victory was thrillingly abandoned. Underlining their dominance with a glut of three, four, five and six goals per game performances, Leeds were playing a style of football at this high-water mark of their season that looked unstoppable. In January they had humiliated third-placed Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in a 5–2 rout, following this up with another five-goal performance to blow West Bromwich Albion away.
The transformation in Leeds’ style was a natural corollary of their new maturity – the movement off the ball had become increasingly subtle and the options available to the man in possession were manifold. Gone were the days when the best route to goal was behind the full-backs and a cross into the penalty area. Now United were shooting from distance, feeding the rapacious Clarke in the inside-right or inside-left channels, hitting the ball over the top for Jones and giving Lorimer the opportunity to blast the ball from anywhere in the opposition’s half. It was all based on Bremner and Giles’ ability to control the pace of the game, and this they achieved with apparent ease on the hard pitches of autumn and winter. Once the spring thaw had set in, however, the mud bath surfaces cancelled out the advantages possessed by teams with superior techniques. With the levelling effect of those awful pitches plus the fixture pile-up, the twin toll they exacted on the Leeds players’ legs blew Revie’s dream apart.
United’s debut games in the European Cup had been a less than taxing experience. With only four rounds in total before the Final, it was by far the least gruelling of all the major tournaments. In the four games scheduled before Christmas, Leeds cruised past the Norwegian Champions SK Lyn Oslo 16–0 on aggregate and twice thumped their old Hungarian adversaries Ferencvaros 3–0 to book their place in the quarter-finals. On the competition’s resumption in
early March, Leeds were drawn against Standard Liège, coming through as 1–0 winners in both difficult legs. This victory set up a semi-final tie with Celtic, then on course for their fifth successive Scottish title and recognized by the less parochial English journalists as the best team in Britain by a comfortable margin. United’s run in the FA Cup followed a similar pattern. Leeds kicked off their campaign at Elland Road on 3 January 1970, celebrating the announce ment of Revie’s OBE in the New Years Honours List two days earlier by beating Swansea Town 2–1. Victories over non-league Sutton United, Mansfield Town and Swindon Town eased their passage into the semifinal before they faced their real significant test – Manchester United.
It was at this point, in mid-March, that a choice clearly had to be made. Despite some players’ subsequent assertions that Revie had never prioritized the League that year, knowing it to be a test too far on top of his other aspirations, this is just retrospective justification. After all, they were top with just seven games to go. Leeds weren’t in an impregnable position, but had the League been all they had had to go for, they would have made a better fist of it than they actually managed. Revie, as he points out time and again in his ‘Green Post’ columns and in the Leeds United Book of Football, published in the summer of 1970, definitely wanted all three trophies. It was only at this point in the season, with a World Cup looming, allowing no prospect of extending the season beyond April and Norman Hunter’s injury in the second leg against Standard Liège uppermost in his mind, that pragmatism dictated he should concentrate on the two cups.
In an ideal world, two wins would get them the FA Cup, and two wins and a draw the European Cup. The League would require far more effort, and, since they’d already won it once, the other two competitions had greater novelty value. So it was that Leeds came to give Everton a helping hand towards the title by running up the white flag. Cramming the team with reserves Yorath, Hibbitt, Belfitt, Lumsden, Galvin and even the long-marginalized Johanneson for the last six League games reveals just how much United had switched their focus. United’s second-string team picked up only 3 points from a possible 12, earning the club a £5,000 fine for fielding an uncompetitive team from the Football League, who refused to believe Revie’s claims of an injury epidemic. Interestingly, the 9 points lost in this spell were the precise difference between themselves in second place and Everton in first at the end of the season. This sacrifice at such a late stage was completely understandable given what was at stake in the other two competitions. However, it now required the winning of at least one of them to justify such a cynically cold-blooded compromise.
