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

by Rob Bagchi

  In late 1971 Revie did make one abortive bid to strengthen the squad, and it was to prove a boon for headline writers. Asa Hartford, an attacking midfielder then playing for West Bromwich Albion, was lined up as cover for Giles and Bremner and actually trained with the Leeds squad. But the £177,000 deal was scuppered when Hartford failed his medical due to a heart defect. The club’s caution was misplaced. Hartford’s career continued unhindered at Manchester City and Everton, and he also won fifty caps for Scotland. Forever after, though, the player was doomed to carry the unwanted tag ‘hole in the Hartford’.

  Revie may have had little quality to spare, but this did not prevent 1971/72 becoming ranked by most aficionados as Leeds’ finest. ‘By then we were the best team in Britain by a long way,’ said John Giles. ‘There was a beauty about that team. By 1972 there was no team in the world that we feared.’

  The repercussions of the West Bromwich Albion debacle the previous season were to prove costly, however. The FA Disciplinary Commission investigating the pitch invasion that followed Astle’s ‘goal’ took a dim view of post-match comments by Revie and chairman Percy Woodward inferring that referee Tinkler’s woeful performance had partly justified the crowd’s reaction. It fined Leeds £500 and forced them to play the first four home matches of the following season at neutral grounds. Revie and Woodward were also censured, though both apologized to the commission.

  Leeds were unbeaten in exile, taking six out of eight points on their travels. At Leeds Road, Huddersfield, United drew 0–0 with Wolves and beat Crystal Palace. Newcastle were thrashed 5–1 at Hillsborough, while the first ever First Division game played at Boothferry Park, Hull, saw Leeds draw 1–1 with Spurs. Leeds returned to Elland Road in style on 18 September, a Peter Lorimer goal enough to see off title challengers Liverpool. Unfortunately, away from home Leeds had been unable to recapture the consistency of the previous season. Five league games were lost before Christmas, including the visits to Sheffield United, Huddersfield Town and Southampton. At the turn of the year Leeds would hit a path of imperious form, which turned the public perception of the club on its head. Pragmatism gave way to poetry as Manchester United, Southampton and Nottingham Forest were demolished by displays of huge swagger and panache.

  After seven years in the First Division, the team knew their regular opponents inside out and believed in their own innate ability to triumph over them. It was time to throw away their inhibitions. The first casualty, as Norman Hunter recalled, were Revie’s beloved ‘dossiers’. No one dared tell him to his face that they’d stopped listening, but the players were of one mind: all this irrelevant homework on the opposition was now a weekly chore to be endured.

  The felicitous presence of television cameras at the home games against Manchester United and Southampton left the viewing public in no doubt about the cultural revolution that had taken place at Elland Road. The former were dispatched 5–1 on 19 February, the game notable for a Mick Jones hat-trick and Eddie Gray nutmegging George Best in front of the dugouts. ‘George nutmegged lots of people in his time,’ said the self-deprecating Gray. ‘I don’t think he worried about that.’

  The humbling of Charlton and Best should, perhaps, be put into context. Manchester United, by then enduring the unhappy reign of Frank O’Farrell, had come into the match on the back of five successive defeats, but still the triumph was no fluke. A fortnight later came the performance Revie rated as the finest of his reign – the 7–0 demolition of Southampton. This produced one of Match of the Day’s most repeated passages of play, when Leeds played keep-ball with their humiliated opponents. Allan Clarke began the torment, playing a self-consciously lazy pass to Bremner, who picked up the hint. Leeds then strung together thirty passes without interruption, the whole move ment interspersed with a string of outrageous flicks and feints by Giles and Bremner.

  Barry Davies’ spellbound commentary gives a flavour of the moment: ‘To say that Leeds are playing with Southampton is the understatement of the season,’ he intones. ‘Poor old Southampton just don’t know what day it is. Every man jack of this Leeds side is now turning it on – oh, look at that! [as Giles flicks the ball onto Clarke’s chest, his left foot arced behind his right ankle]. It’s almost cruel. The Elland Road crowd are lapping this up. For the second home match running Leeds United are turning on a brilliant show and the other team are just not on the park. [Revie, chewing fiercely throughout, is impassive alongside Mick Bates in the dugout.] One has to feel some sympathy for Southampton, but the gap between their position and Leeds is an almighty chasm.’ Even the Daily Telegraph would join in the plaudits: ‘Leeds, with their breathtaking efficiency, left no doubt about the sheer quality of their football. With John Giles and Billy Bremner juggling in midfield, Leeds, as manager Don Revie has claimed, had more than a passing resemblance to Real Madrid in their prime.’ It was a supreme moment. Eleven years after he’d made the decision to switch the club strip to all-white in homage to Real Madrid, Revie had finally received the one compliment he always hoped for.

  In early 1972 Revie had become commercially involved with Paul Trevillion, a football illustrator and budding inventor. Persuaded that the best team in the country were not getting the plaudits they deserved, he accepted Trevillion’s suggestion that, by adopting a few gimmicks to bypass the press and whip up the hysteria of the public, United could quickly reverse the years of negative publicity.

  In short, the project was the full-scale marketing of the team – not to sell replica shirts (the souvenir shop was still full of programmes, badges and the odd woolly hat), but to manipulate its image. It involved madcap but funny schemes like the pre-match salute, the sock-tags, group warm-up callisthenics, culminating in the choreographed kicking of plastic footballs into the crowd. Strangely, it worked. The most memorable part was the salute. The team would run out of the tunnel two minutes before their opponents, giving the crowd ample opportunity to barrack the visitors when they appeared shortly afterwards. The players would then form a line either side of the centre spot and salute each part of the ground in turn, milking the applause. And all before they had kicked a ball.

  Trevillion’s rituals merit a mention in My Super Football Book 1973, which quite absurdly gives Revie sole credit for them. ‘The idea of the “Leeds Wave”,’ it notes, ‘was the idea of manager Don Revie in 1972. Arguably the greatest club side in Europe, they also bring some showmanship to the occasion. The manager also decided they should perform warm-up exercises before the match to entertain their supporters. Other teams derided the idea, but the Leeds players entered into the spirit, cavorting around the ground displaying their names to the fans.’ Thirty years ago football shirts were adorned with a number, the club crest and nothing else, but Trevillion had special tracksuits made, with each player’s surname embroidered on the back. After the match the players would throw their number-bearing, autographed sock-tags – another stylistic affectation – into the crowd, ‘to be snapped up by souvenir hunters’. Years later, when the club had sunk into mid-table and crowds had dwindled, all this performance would come to seem faintly embarrassing. Few mourned when the whole routine was quietly dropped.

  Leeds’ detractors were not about to disappear, of course. Witness this passage from the Scotsman, from an article entitled ‘The Bad Guys Are in White’, published as late as 1996:

  It was no coincidence that the first person to be given the tag of ‘utility player’ was a Leeds man [an allusion, presumably, to Paul Madeley]. The truth is the entire team were utility men. There were frills around the fringes, supplied by Terry Cooper and Eddie Gray, but the outfit as a whole was sterile and surgical. When each cog played its part, as happened in the 7–0 demolition of Southampton, the Leeds machine was the most productive in British industry. But it happened all too rarely, and the latter years of Revie’s reign saw the emphasis on power at the expense of finesse. The bludgeon, as represented by Joe Jordan, replaced the scalpel.

  In fact, the reverse was true. Leeds had by this time
come to rely on their talent to carry them past opponents who were almost always their technical inferiors. How could Giles and Bremner, players of complementary brilliance at the heart of the midfield, ever be dismissed as ‘utility players’?

  At home that 1971 season Leeds were all but impregnable. Just two points were dropped in the seventeen games actually played at Elland Road, but a record of just one win in three away ensured that Revie’s team would be one of a gaggle of clubs vying for the title. Among them was Derby County, managed by his future nemesis Brian Clough. Ironically, and contrary to the Scotsman’s theory, it was United’s fresh willingness to attack away from home that was cited as the cause of their undoing, by leaving them exposed at the back.

  In the FA Cup, meanwhile, Leeds were making steady progress towards their second Final in three years. Liverpool were shut out at Anfield in the fourth round and conquered in the return at Elland Road, Allan Clarke scoring both goals in a 2–0 win. But it was the sixth-round tussle with Spurs which is best remembered, though the margin of victory was modest. Only an outstanding performance by Pat Jennings saved the North Londoners from a drubbing. Reporting in the Observer, Hugh McIlvanney enthused that Leeds’ football was ‘breathtaking in its scope and fluency, alive with dazzling improvisations … There was scarcely a weakness to be seen and excellence was everywhere.’

  By the end of March, Leeds were, as so often in the past, still on course for the ‘double’, as the season once again hinged on half-a-dozen critical games. Yet again, however, the team were hamstrung by their perennial twin bugbears – too many games and too many injuries. The former certainly contributed to an ultimately decisive setback on All Fool’s Day. Leeds were forced to play fellow title contenders Derby just twenty-four hours after taking on West Ham at Upton Park, where two goals from Eddie Gray had salvaged a point. Add in that the Baseball Ground more resembled a ploughed field than a football pitch, as it usually did in those days, it came as no great surprise that Leeds succumbed. Revie’s tired troops were helped by the return of Giles after a groin strain, but the fast and tense match was no place for the flowing football which had so distinguished Leeds in the preceding weeks. Conscious that their energy would sap later on, United began at a frantic pace. Giles had a goal disallowed after nine minutes, but that was as close as Leeds came to going in front. Six minutes later a cross from Alan Durban was met by the head of striker John O’Hare and Derby were in front. The goal triggered an onslaught on the Leeds goal, earning a string of corners, and only two trademark goal-line clearances kept Leeds in contention. Derby got the clincher they had long threatened in the 69th minute when Kevin Hector released John O’Hare for a clear run at Gary Sprake. O’Hare’s shot was blocked but the ball rebounded from Sprake’s body, cannoned off a retreating Norman Hunter and trickled into the net.

  Refusing to capitulate, United kept their titles hopes alive with a comfortable home win against Huddersfield Town and a rare away triumph against their bogey team Stoke City. Leeds were almost at full strength, but there was one hugely significant absentee: David Harvey replaced the injured Gary Sprake. After nearly 380 appearances, Sprake’s Leeds career was almost at an end, although this was not evident at the time. He would make just three more appearances before being sold to Birmingham City in October 1973. The fee was £100,000, then a record for a British goalkeeper.

  Sprake is very much the prodigal son of the Revie family. Rather ungraciously, Revie himself admitted that Leeds might have won more had he replaced his goalkeeper earlier. Despite a decade of shared hotel rooms and shared ambitions, the Welshman is the one member of ‘the family’ who has no interest in reliving past glories. Perhaps this is partly because he continues to be remembered more for his occasional failures than his considerable achievements.

  A rare interview with the reclusive Welshman in 2001 carries an unexpected note of pathos. Since he was forced out of football with a back injury in 1976, the intervening years have not been kind to Sprake. Now fifty-six and living in Solihull, he has had two heart attacks, a triple by-pass and a blood clot on the lung, which saw him ‘die on the operating table’. He has also been through a divorce and spent ten months on the dole. He has not been back to Elland Road since 1977. ‘I’ve had invites,’ Sprake was quoted as saying, ‘but I was never much for watching from the stand even when I was a player. And I haven’t seen much of the lads I used to play with. I suppose you drift apart.’ Sprake is being disingenuous here. Being persuaded to ‘corroborate’ allegations against Revie in support of those long-standing match-fixing rumours, which earned him £15,000 from the Daily Mirror and the cold-shoulder from all his former team-mates, is the real reason for his self-inflicted exile.

  For Terry Cooper, like Sprake, that particular Saturday at Stoke marked the beginning of the end of a lengthy and distinguished Leeds career. In Cooper’s case there was to be a brief post-script. He reappeared in 1974, winning an England recall from Revie, but injury struck once more and he never returned to being a Leeds regular. Revie, who rated Cooper ‘as the world’s number one left back’, tried hard to remain positive as his season began to unravel once again.

  Dropping three points out of four at West Ham and Derby could have been fatal to Leeds’ title hopes, but results elsewhere kept them in title contention ahead of the looming FA Cup semi-final against Birmingham. ‘Somebody up there likes us after all!’ said Billy Bremner. ‘Such a nail-biting finish is good for the game and whoever wins the title will be worthy champions.’ Bremner’s upbeat message is undermined by the facts. Winning at Stoke did not advance Leeds’ cause one bit. Derby remained top by a point, while Liverpool and Manchester City stayed in touch just a point behind Leeds.

  If Leeds were going to miss out on the Championship, there was little doubt that Revie favoured Liverpool over both Derby County and Manchester City. His admiration for Shankly knew no bounds and in this relationship, at least, the warmth was mutual. ‘The Liverpool players are totally loyal to Bill Shankly because he is totally loyal to them,’ Revie said. ‘That situation does not exist in as many clubs as you might think. One of the reasons I admire Shankly is that he never criticises his players publicly, even when things are going badly. Some managers tend to be difficult to please … in fact they give the impression they are never satisfied with their players. I know how disheartening this can be to a team.’ This is a veiled dig at Brian Clough and Malcolm Allison, the antitheses of Revie’s ‘ideal’ manager. In fact, he detested the pair of them – hated their brashness, the way they turned into braggarts as soon as a camera came anywhere near them, their ‘holier than thou’ sermons on how the game should be played, and the implied criticisms aimed at his team. Unfortunately for Revie, in 1972 the Derby manager was to have the pleasure of delivering the perfect rebuttal.

  For the moment, however, the Leeds manager was more concerned with overcoming Second Division Birmingham to reach his third FA Cup Final in eight years. With the previous season’s humiliating Cup exit still fresh in his mind, Revie was taking no chances against a team he knew Leeds ought to beat comfortably. ‘Without wishing to appear pompous, it is asking a lot of any side to match Leeds for skill. That’s why nearly all our Cup opponents from lower divisions have attempted to nullify our flair at the expense of our own creative ability.’ Refusing to risk anything, however, he ordered Maurice Lindley and Syd Owen to prepare the usual ‘dossier’ on Birmingham. Billy Bremner’s verdict was forthright. ‘If we don’t go through, it will be our own fault, not that of our “spies”. If we can’t beat Birmingham, we don’t deserve to win.’

  His insouciance turned out to be justified. Leeds won 3–0 at Hillsborough in a match dubbed a ‘Saturday afternoon saunter’ by the Yorkshire Evening Post. Birmingham had made a rather desperate bid to psyche out Leeds by emulating their trademark warm-up, but their cheek was about the only thing they got right all afternoon. It was over as soon as Mick Jones opened the scoring after 18 minutes. Six minutes later Birmingham were caught square at th
e back as Eddie Gray fed a through ball to Peter Lorimer, who put Leeds further ahead with a low shot into the corner. Jones’ second, on 64 minutes, rounded off a comfortable passage to Wembley.

  By Monday the ever-cautious Revie was encouraging his team to forget about Wembley and concentrate on the League. While his men were on duty at Hillsborough, Derby and Liverpool had cruised passed Huddersfield and West Ham respectively. Leeds were now fourth, three points behind Derby but with two games in hand. ‘This week is one of the most important of the season,’ said Revie. ‘It brings two away games and if we can collect points from these games we shall be well on the way to the title.’ Losing away to Newcastle wasn’t as calamitous as it first appeared, as Derby were beaten by Manchester City, and in United’s next game the imperious Giles kept Leeds in the frame by converting a penalty at West Bromwich Albion for a 1–0 win. With two league games left, Leeds were still fourth, two points behind Manchester City, who had completed their league programme. Derby and Liverpool were a point ahead of Leeds, with one and two games outstanding respectively.