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

by Rob Bagchi

  With the FA Cup Final looming, Leeds once again approached League secretary Alan Hardaker to have the club’s outstanding fixtures rescheduled. Once again Revie was rebuffed, apparently because the move would have compromised England’s commitments in the European Nations Cup and Wolves’ clash with Spurs in the UEFA Cup. To Leeds’ supporters it seemed as if the League’s principal remit was to stop the club winning trophies. Those with long-enough memories place Hardaker alongside Ray Tinkler and assorted other officials among the gallery of rogues whose actions are felt to have prevented Revie’s team from fulfilling its potential.

  Hardaker, Football League Secretary from 1957 to 1979, has been dead for over twenty years, but retrospective accounts of his reign suggest Leeds’ infuriated followers may have had a point. A blunt and autocratic man, he began his autobiography, Hardaker of the Leagues, thus: ‘One of the few things I have come to be certain about in football is the impossibility of attempting to be a just and forward-looking administrator as well as generally popular. For every person who thinks a decision is right, there is another who will condemn it as a sin against the game in general and himself in particular.’ He made a virtue out of seeking to prove his own dictum. The late Bryon Butler recalled some of the various titles by which he was variously described: “‘the great dictator”, “football’s godfather”, “a cross between Cagney and Caligula”, “the League’s answer to Idi Amin” and, most fancifully, “St Alan of St Annes”. Hardaker always referred to himself as “only a paid servant whose job is to implement decisions and rules”,’ Butler himself observed, ‘but it’s fair to say that, as an enforcer, he didn’t believe in tip-toeing through life simply to avoid treading on a few feet.’ Whatever Hardaker’s merits, his personal enmity toward Revie ensured that the club would receive no favours while he was in charge. His successor, the lugubrious Graham Kelly, is frank about the two men’s estrangement, pointing out that ‘Hardaker loathed Revie with a vengeance that can only have been reserved for a fellow Yorkshireman who he felt had twisted his way to the top.’

  So it transpired that Leeds had to win three critical games out of eight if they were to capture the ‘double’ – with Hardaker doubtless praying that they would slip up. The first game in the sequence saw 46,565 fans pack Elland Road for the home game against Chelsea, Leeds’ biggest gate of the season. A 2–0 victory left United needing only to beat Wolves a week later to capture the title. Ironically, Brian Clough’s Derby had done Revie a huge favour by beating Liverpool with a single goal at Anfield. Clough, showing his usual chutzpah, had played Steve Powell at right-back at the age of sixteen. ‘How many managers, how many clubs would have been prepared to do that?’ he crowed later. The Rams were now top but had completed their forty-two-match programme. With one game to go, only Leeds, one point behind, and Liverpool, two adrift, could topple them. At last Revie was moved to admit: ‘I think we have a chance now of the double.’ The bookies agreed. Leeds were 5–2 on to win the league, with Derby available at 7–2 and Liverpool 6–1. Revie’s team were even money to lift both trophies, with Ladbrokes ruefully admitting it stood to lose ‘a lot of money’ if Leeds won either.

  With the Centenary FA Cup Final to be played on 6 May, another queue was forming at Les Cocker’s treatment table. Giles, Clarke and both full-backs, Madeley and Reaney, had picked up knocks in the Chelsea game. Eddie Gray, who had missed the match with a thigh strain, was also struggling to get fit. Giles’ groin injury was the biggest worry. In the event, however, Revie was able to field a full-strength team, with the exception of long-term casualty Terry Cooper. But he was taking no chances. His players were ordered to rest; even golf was ruled out of bounds.

  No one was expecting a pretty game. Even Revie admitted that the 1968 League Cup Final clash had been ‘an often bitter, niggling affair, which must rank as one of the worst games seen at Wembley’. This time he expected better, but it was hardly going to be a beautiful marriage of contrasts. ‘It is never easy to get the better of Arsenal because they are extremely well-organised,’ he said. ‘Arsenal are never more dangerous than when they are pinned deep in their own half. They have the ability to take opponents by surprise with quick, incisive counter-attacks.’

  Despite Revie’s characteristic habit of heaping praise on the opposition, there was a steely determination in the Leeds camp not to let a third FA Cup Final slip away. ‘I dread the thought we could go another season without winning something,’ Revie commented in the run up to the game. In those days the match was the only domestic fixture to be screened live on television, and the competition was at or near the high-water mark of its prestige. Losing the 1970 Final against Chelsea, Revie now admitted, had been ‘the biggest disappointment of my life’. Losing a European Cup semi-final was, apparently, less of a blow.

  As if to remind Leeds of what was at stake, the Football Association had arranged for all the past-winners of the Cup, including Arsenal, to parade their colours around the stadium. The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were also in attendance, paying one of their relatively infrequent visits to a football match. Captain Bremner, nevertheless, had little time for such pre-match fripperies. ‘I believe it was all a bit of a shambles,’ he recalled, ‘which did not surprise me. The only professional point was when Tommy Steele led some singing.’ Predictably enough, the match would not mirror the grandeur of the occasion.

  In the first half the Gunners’ counter-attacking strategy very nearly paid dividends. Harvey, the only player in the Leeds team not to have played at Wembley before, brilliantly saved a 30-yard deflected drive from Frank McLintock. Then, on the half-hour, a lunging Paul Reaney cleared a shot from Alan Ball off the line. Jack Charlton, who would be thirty-seven the following Monday, was having one of his finest games in twenty years as a Leeds player. At the other end Leeds were endeavouring to follow Revie’s instruction to attack, and were to make twenty-one scoring attempts to Arsenal’s twelve, but with Peter Storey keeping a tight rein on John Giles, and Frank McLintock resolute at the back alongside Peter Simpson and Pat Rice, they were finding the going tough in the early stages. It was not until the final minutes of the first period that Leeds contrived any clear-cut openings. The first saw a clever ball from Bremner beat three Arsenal defenders before landing at the feet of Allan Clarke, who found Jones near the edge of the area. His low shot beat Arsenal’s stand-in keeper Geoff Barnett, but passed just wide of the post. Just before the interval, Leeds came even closer to scoring. A Lorimer cross from the right was met by a header from Clarke, which beat Barnett but hit the cross-bar.

  Arsenal had the first real opportunity of the second half, when McNab headed into the side netting from an Armstrong cross. But with Giles and Bremner gradually gaining the ascendancy, the match was approaching its defining moment. On 53 minutes Mick Jones ran on to a pass from Peter Lorimer down the right. After gliding past McNab to the by-line, Jones supplied a measured cross to Allan Clarke, who was running in towards the penalty spot. Clarke’s diving header beat Barnett down at his left-hand post. The strike prompted a wild exhibition of delight and relief among players and supporters. ‘I knew as soon as I connected it was a goal,’ said Clarke. ‘I had time to see the goalkeeper first and pick my spot and I followed it all the way in.’

  For Revie the memory of so many near-misses extinguished any spontaneous display of satisfaction. He merely rose from the bench and gestured as if to say, ‘Keep it calm, keep your discipline.’ There were still 37 minutes to go. He needn’t have worried. Leeds played with more confidence after the goal and had numerous chances to add to their lead. Most of Arsenal’s increasingly desperate attacks petered out on the edge of the Leeds area. There was to be just one final scare. On 70 minutes Charlie George sent a stinging shot past Harvey, which cannoned against the bar. Simpson, racing in, stabbed the rebound wide. After the disappointments of 1965 and 1970, victory brought Revie joy unconfined. ‘I have waited and sweated a lot of years for today but it has all been worth it,’ he said. ‘This is the second
happiest day of my life: the first was when we beat Liverpool to win the Championship.’ The hardest part, he said, had been to tell Gary Sprake he wasn’t playing: ‘Gary accepted it. It is all part of the family spirit at this club.’

  There was to be a pause before his players could at last lay their hands on the FA Cup. In the 88th minute of the game Mick Jones had collided with Barnett, dislocating an elbow. Bremner delayed climbing the steps to collect the trophy while Jones was receiving treatment on the pitch. Eventually, however, he could wait no longer. ‘I wiped my hands on my shirt and [the Queen] gave me a lovely smile,’ said Bremner. ‘I think she said, “Very well done, you have earned it”, but you don’t really take it all in when you’ve got thousands of people just waiting for you to lift the trophy in the air.’ Jones did make it up the steps, his heavily-strapped figure one of the game’s most enduring memories. Aided by Norman Hunter and clearly in agony, he collected his medal while his team-mates postponed their lap of honour.

  For forty-eight hours at least, this particular Leeds triumph would not bringing a swinging hangover in its wake. The traditional post-match parade was postponed until the following Thursday and the players were absent from the celebration banquet in London. That event was hosted by FA chairman Dr Andrew Stephen. He was also chairman of Sheffield Wednesday, the last Yorkshire side to win the FA Cup, in 1935. ‘We are all delighted with this young man’s [Jones] determination to be presented to the Queen,’ Dr Stephen commented rather pompously. ‘It was very much appreciated in the Royal Box.’

  For once even the London papers were generous in their praise. ‘Leeds, the most consistent team in European soccer for the last eight years, carried off [the Cup] in a final which eventually was one-sided,’ conceded our old friend David Miller, then of the Sunday Telegraph. The doyen of sports writers, the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney, wrote that ‘Leeds … outplayed Arsenal to an extent that was inadequately reflected in the scoreline. It was Leeds whose football was the more controlled, whose ideas were more inventive. Once Leeds had settled, and especially after their goal, they dominated Arsenal completely.’

  It was then the consensus in footballing circles that no side which had not won the FA Cup could lay claim to true greatness. Now this victory confirmed Leeds’ status as one of the great post-war sides. Revie’s comparison with ‘Real Madrid in their pomp’, alluded to in the match programme, no longer seemed quite so vainglorious. ‘They were held in awe by a generation of schoolboys,’ recalled the Independent’s Jonathan Rendall in a retrospective on the Revie years, following Leeds’ promotion back to the First Division in 1990. ‘In 1972, Esso Petrol Stations ran a promotion in advance of the Cup Final. Thousands of silver alloy coins, each containing the name of previous winner, were given away to be mounted in a plastic collectors’ album. There was one coin – that for the Centenary Cup winners – that was bigger than all the others. For weeks before the match, the allotted spaced for it yawned at the head of the album. Inevitably Leeds filled it. They even had their own currency, and devalued your own [team’s].’

  Leaving their wives – and the Cup – behind, Revie’s players were back on the road within an hour of the final whistle. Their destination was the Mount Hotel near Wolverhampton, where they were to prepare for Monday’s ‘double’ decider. At dinner that night Wolves legend Derek Dougan, ironically as it turned out, presented Allan Clarke with the Golden Boot for scoring the winning goal.

  Leeds limped into Molineux two days later, visibly wilting after eight highly charged matches in a month. Jones was already missing and three other members of Revie’s meagre squad would not have played had the match not been so momentous. Eddie Gray took to the field with one of his thighs bound in tape from knee to groin, while Clarke and Giles both had painkilling injections. Clarke, limping throughout, would eventually make way for Terry Yorath, leaving Leeds without either member of their first-choice attack. Bremner started the match at centre-forward, with Mick Bates taking his place in midfield.

  Revie’s men should have been too much for Wolves, even though their opponents played with the type of passion (in what was for them, after all, a ‘dead’ game) that Sir Alex Ferguson would later amusingly term ‘perverse’. Leeds were expected to play a containing game to get the point that would have won them the Championship. Wolves were in the middle of a two-leg UEFA Cup Final against Spurs and would surely be happy to play for a draw. For once Revie was to cast caution aside. In his newspaper column, he declared that Leeds would go all out for victory, notwithstanding his player’s tired limbs. ‘I reckon it would be soccer suicide to adopt a negative style of play,’ he said with unconscious irony. ‘Teams can always be relied on to raise their game when they play against us. Wolves prefer opponents to play defensively because it means their own flaws at the back are not exposed.’

  This was the year, however, that Revie was to suffer a double-whammy at the hands of officialdom. Hardaker’s intransigence had already placed a formidable obstacle in his path, and now appalling refereeing would yet again thwart his ambitions. That evening at Molineux, Bill Gow of Swansea earned his own entry in the Elland Road book of infamy by denying Leeds three penalties. The most blatant offence came on 23 minutes when Bernard Shaw got both hands to the ball to stop Allan Clarke from shooting. Gow was unsighted but the linesman, J.C. Collins, was having none of it. ‘It was one of his first games and he froze,’ said Norman Hunter. But Leeds should already have been in front. Gow had waved play on after goalkeeper Phil Parkes brought down Allan Clarke early on. In the second half Shaw was the guilty man again, handling a Lorimer shot, but once more Gow ignored Leeds’ pleas. By that time Leeds were a goal down, even though they had dominated the match. From Wolves’ second corner – Leeds had already had seven – Francis Munro shot through a crowd of players into the net. Dougan returned to haunt Clarke and Leeds on 65 minutes, putting Wolves 2–0 up against the run of play. Bremner renewed Leeds’ hopes a few minutes later, scoring from a Paul Madeley pass, but with Jack Charlton up alongside his captain in attack, their frantic final efforts were unavailing. Wolves full-back Gerry Taylor decided the championship in the dying moments, clearing off the line after Yorath had lobbed the ball over the head of goalkeeper Parkes. Once again, when it had seemed far easier to prevail than fail, Leeds were left cursing their luck. It was over.

  They were not the only footballers feeling bitter that night. At Highbury, Leeds’ FA Cup Final opponents had denied Liverpool the win that would have taken the title to Anfield. In the 88th minute, with the Liverpool supporters chanting that Leeds were losing at Wolves, John Toshack fired home – only to be ruled offside. Bill Shankly slammed referee Roger Kirkpatrick for a ‘diabolical decision’ that ‘cost us the championship’.

  Derby’s players received the news of their unexpected triumph on the beach in Majorca, where they had repaired for a close season break with assistant manager Peter Taylor. Brian Clough had taken his family to the Scilly Isles. Taylor, wrote Clough, ‘convinced them the title was ours, but I can’t honestly say I shared his confidence. I expected Leeds to get the result because Revie was the most thorough of men who, wherever possible, left nothing to chance.’ With Leeds and Liverpool faltering at the last, some tagged Derby unworthy champions. Clough, unsurprisingly, disagreed. It must have been doubly galling for Revie that Clough and not his old friend Shankly was the beneficiary of Leeds’ misfortune. The Derby manager had already carved out an alternative career as an eccentric and outspoken TV pundit, and United’s ‘cynicism’ was the frequent subject of his barbs. On one occasion he had even called for Revie to be fined and Leeds kicked out of the First Division, an appeal that was to guarantee him a frosty reception at Elland Road just two years later. ‘Leeds in those days cheated,’ says Clough, ‘and I was more than happy to draw people’s attention to the fact.’

  Alan Hardaker was evidently of the same mind, and it is hard for many to look beyond him as the real architect of Leeds’ demise on that May evening. The Leeds play
ers certainly think so, though Revie’s penchant for making influential enemies hardly helped their cause. ‘He [Revie] didn’t want to make friends,’ Peter Lorimer told Bryn Law of BBC Radio Leeds, a revealing comment about someone who so painfully wanted to be liked. ‘One of the biggest things he did wrong for himself as a manager was to become a great enemy of Hardaker, who made things tremendously difficult for us. Alan Hardaker had a personal thing about Don Revie, but Don was that kind of man. He could make enemies. He was such a professional and if there was any rule he could use, and he was entitled to use it, he would go for it.’ Norman Hunter believes this very professionalism backfired on the fateful May weekend, when Revie’s players were prevented from celebrating their Cup win. ‘What the gaffer should have done is let us go out and get absolutely smashed,’ he told the same interviewer. ‘We’d have gone in the steam room on Sunday and been fine by Monday.’

  Alcohol and professional football were more comfortable bedfellows then, players getting ‘stoned’, as Jack Charlton misleadingly puts it, to relieve the tension towards the end of the season, but there had never been any chance of Hunter getting his wish. The most the players could look forward to was a meal in a motorway service station on the way up the M1. The manager had also decreed that the players would be allowed a morning in bed on the Sunday, followed by hot baths and massages. The evenings would be spent playing bingo and carpet bowls. Monday morning would see some light training, with the players then going back to bed for a light tea.