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

by Rob Bagchi

  As if the loss of the double that night at Molineux wasn’t enough to leave a sour taste in every Leeds fan’s mouth, the whole sorry episode was exhumed five years later by the Daily Mirror as the third plank of evidence in their attempt to prove that Don Revie was corrupt. Adding to the claims of Stokoe and those conveniently anonymous Newcastle players about the two games at the end of the 1961/62 season, Mirror reporters Richard Stott and Frank Palmer alleged that Revie had enlisted Mike O’Grady, by now himself a Wolves player, as a ‘fixer’, paid to offer his new colleagues £1000 per man to gift the title-decider to United. The article was based on interviews undertaken with O’Grady and Gary Sprake (the recipient of £15,000 from the Mirror), which appeared to corroborate the allegations. However, when the case was investigated by the police and the FA, both parties found that Revie had no case to answer. When the People, the Mirror’s sister paper, repeated the claims, egging the pudding by alleging that Bremner kept trying to find takers for the ‘bribe’ in the course of the game, Bremner sued for libel. At the trial Sprake was forced to retract his version and Bremner was duly awarded £100,000 damages by the court. As for O’Grady, in 1990 he told Revie’s biographer, Andrew Mourant, that he felt pressurized by the journalists into talking to the Mirror but now refused to substantiate the paper’s story. It’s a strange tale, full of claims and counter-claims, but given the court’s verdict and the findings of the police and the FA, it’s difficult to see how we’re supposed to believe in Revie’s guilt. It just doesn’t add up.

  While Bremner emerged as the victor from this tawdry saga, Revie is still the loser. Mud has continued to stick to him, allowing those who feuded with him in the 1960s and 70s to exploit the immunity provided by his death to trot out all manner of wild accusations without needing a scrap of proof to back them up. Malcolm Allison, for example, interviewed by Rob Steen in The Mavericks, is allowed to say that Revie ‘used to leave £300 or £400 in an envelope in the referee’s room and they could take it or leave it. I’m just talking about a little thing called bribery.’

  Over the thirteen years Revie was manager of Leeds and nearly 500 games in all competitions, wouldn’t at least one referee, one might think, have corroborated Allison’s claim? Yet the allegation is left unchallenged. Revie’s death has meant his reputation is fair game for anyone. The lessons to be learned from all this are simple. Don’t walk out on the England job and sell exclusive rights to your story like Revie did, thereby making enemies of all the other newspapers, and, above all, don’t die early.

  After their shattering reverse at Wolves, Revie’s men returned to Leeds for what threatened to rank as one of the most anti-climactic trophy celebrations ever. The event only made an inside page of the Yorkshire Evening Post, though the local paper did its level best to place an upbeat gloss on proceedings. ‘The team might have been forgiven for viewing the prospect of a “triumphant” return to Elland Road with some cynicism,’ it reported. ‘They need not have worried. As they emerged from the Queen’s Hotel, the roar of the 1,500 people in City Square must nearly have dislodged the Black Prince from his horse.’ To their credit the Leeds supporters, who had shed copious tears for their team just two days previously, turned out en masse to salute the team’s Wembley achievement. And it’s just as well they did; the FA Cup had never been to Leeds and it hasn’t been back since. The fans lined the route of the traditional open-topped coach as it wound its way down Wellington Street, Gelderd Road and Lowfields Lane to Elland Road, where 35,000 ‘raised a cheer worthy of a Wembley crowd’.

  Revie’s battle-weary platoon made a strange tableau for the photographers, with Terry Cooper grinning from his wheelchair and Mick Jones with his arm in a sling, but they were genuinely touched by their reception, which momentarily threatened to get out of hand. About 1000 fans invaded the pitch as the procession made its way towards the Kop, and Revie threatened to take the team off the field unless they withdrew. Mystifyingly, some fans also ‘celebrated’ with a demonstration of unilateral hooliganism, smashing windows in shops and offices around the ground.

  The manager, so often maddened by the citizenry’s blasé attitude towards their football club, shared his players’ gratitude towards those well-wishers who had behaved themselves. ‘I just didn’t believe it would be like this,’ he said. ‘These supporters make me feel very proud to belong to Leeds United.’ For the acquisitive Revie, however, that pride was clearly contingent. Within a year he would be breaking bread with the chairman of Everton to discuss a possible move to Merseyside.

  TWELVE

  YESTERDAY’S MEN?

  Eleven years into his regime, Revie’s team had now won five major trophies, but if they were to achieve the immortality he felt was their due, the manager knew time was running out. In 1971 Revie had expressed the hope that Leeds could remain one of the top clubs ‘for perhaps the next two or three years’. It sounded a conservative assessment at the time, but it proved to be spot on, since there was no conveyor belt of stars to replace those that left or retired. By mid-1970, when the team he built was complete, Revie had spent £500,000 on players such as Allan Clarke, Mick Jones and John Giles. He had also sold shrewdly, recouping close to £300,000. Even at their peak in the 1971/72 season Leeds United did not have the financial clout of Everton or Spurs, never mind Manchester United. It was the old problem of the city’s divided loyalties: quite simply, not enough people came to watch Leeds to provide the revenue for a huge transfer kitty with which Revie could make a successful team into a successful club. He dreamt of a dynasty but was well aware that permanently securing Leeds’ place at the top table was a forlorn hope, given the fluctuating crowds and the strange ambivalence of most new supporters.

  ‘Leeds have spent the best part of a million pounds on ground improvements and expect to spend more,’ wrote Peter Morris in The Team-makers: a Gallery of the Great Soccer Managers, published in 1971. ‘But they must keep a successful team to justify it. Always, you have the uneasy feeling that if Revie were to leave Leeds and the club began a slide down, there would be a startling reversion to the days when the club nearly dropped into the Third Division.’ Morris’s prescient work was spot on. Leeds narrowly avoided just such a fate in the late 1980s before the club’s renaissance under Howard Wilkinson. In 1972 Don Revie realized he had at best a couple of years to cash in with his present team before some difficult choices had to be faced. Then, either he would have to go or he’d have to ditch the majority of his team.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that Revie would eventually leave. By 1972 Revie’s talent for finding raw talent through the club’s widely envied scouting system, especially in Scotland and the north-east, and then inculcating it with his peculiarly puritan work ethic, seemed to have exhausted itself. The clock was ticking, and the players knew it, too. ‘I think when we’ve all finished, Leeds might have a good team,’ reflected Allan Clarke, ‘but they’ll not have a great team.’ (The job of Revie’s eleven successors has been to prove Clarke wrong, and none has yet managed it, though Brian Clough’s record suggests that he might have, had he approached the task with Peter Taylor at his side and a little more sensitivity.)

  Leeds, with their fickle fans and provincial directors, were always struggling to keep pace with the scale of Revie’s ambitions. ‘If you think small then you stay small,’ he had reasoned after taking the job. Whether haggling over his salary or trying to sell his best players, the Board thought small too often. ‘What you put into the game you take out, otherwise there’ll be no returns,’ Revie used to tell young players coming into the club. ‘You can earn a lot of money in ten or fifteen years and at the end be financially secure for life if you are prepared to work hard. This is common sense.’ Even in 1971 Revie was explaining to one writer how he was going to build a football academy at Leeds – a hostel ‘where youth players would learn the game and at the same time prepare themselves under qualified teachers for a life outside it when their playing days were over’. The Leeds manager would eventually get
his academy, but Revie did not live to see it. It would be another twenty years before Howard Wilkinson masterminded the facility at Boston Spa, near Wetherby, which has produced – among others – Harry Kewell, Jonathan Woodgate and Alan Smith. Revie, ‘the Don’ in more than name, would have been the ideal figurehead for such an institution. More attuned to the training ground than the boardroom, his influence was all pervading. ‘Revie is the epitome of industry,’ said an impressed Peter Morris. ‘Visit Elland Road any day of the week and you’ll meet him as like as not in heavy sweater and tracksuit trousers, his face bathed in honest sweat, perhaps blowing just a little. He will subside into his office chair to talk to you, but all the time you can see the man is positively itching to get on with it and he looks curiously out of place behind his desk – a grizzly bear perched on a cocktail bar stool.’

  In August 1972 as he embarked on another campaign, Revie had the team he wanted. What he needed was the run of the ball, an even break from officials and a season relatively free of injuries and suspensions. Even if that was likely to be a forlorn hope, he can’t have expected it all to come crashing round his ears within the year. By the end of the most curious season in Leeds’ history, however, it seemed that the ‘glory years’ were behind them.

  There was just one major addition to the squad, though this was the season that would see Joe Jordan and Gordon McQueen emerge as first-team regulars. Signed as a central defender, the versatile Trevor Cherry became the only non-international in Leeds’ first-team squad when he moved to Leeds from Huddersfield Town for £100,000. Cherry had captained Huddersfield to the Second Division title in 1970 and would eventually replace Terry Cooper as Leeds’ left-back for Revie’s last two seasons.

  The season opened in depressing fashion, Leeds losing 4–0 at Chelsea to record their worst opening day performance for twenty-four years, although there were some mitigating circumstances. Jack Charlton was injured and Norman Hunter and Allan Clarke both missed the game through suspension. Roy Ellam, another new signing from Huddersfield, partnered Paul Madeley in central defence. With Cherry in for Cooper, Leeds’ makeshift backline was dealt a further blow when Harvey left the field with concussion. Mick Jones was carried off with a twisted ankle and Peter Lorimer took over in goal. Damage limitation was the most Revie could hope for.

  Normal service was resumed at Sheffield United the following Tuesday. With thirty-seven-year-old Charlton back at the heart of the defence and Harvey back in goal, Leeds won 2–0. Another victory followed, at home to West Bromwich Albion, but Leeds’ stuttering start would eventually prove fatal to their championship aspirations. Just five of the first eleven games were won, already prompting murmurings in the press that Revie’s ageing team was over the hill. ‘I think they must accept that Giles and Charlton are past their peak, and that Bremner’s overworked batteries are running low,’ wrote the Guardian’s Eric Todd. ‘Leeds have achieved many things but now … the writing is on the wall.’

  The obituaries were premature, but two defeats by Liverpool before Christmas were portentous. The Anfield club was soon to assume the mantle of England’s premier club, a title they would not relinquish for the best part of two decades. One of those defeats came in a hotly contested League Cup replay in extra time at Elland Road on 22 November, but Shankly proclaimed the result a mixed blessing, with fixture congestion threatening to get in the way of his own title ambitions. ‘The losers of this match may well be the winners in the end,’ he remarked. He was wrong.

  In the league Leeds had bounced back from another home defeat by Liverpool in September by thrashing champions Derby 5–0, but there was a fin de siècle air about the club after two successive defeats. Ten thousand fewer fans turned up to watch the Derby game, and worse was to follow on 16 December when only 25,000 showed up for the home game against Birmingham City, though Leeds’ form by that time had begun to recover. Revie was entitled to wonder whether the Leeds public deserved him.

  The team’s indifferent form did not help, but events surrounding the clash with Manchester United on 18 April provided abundant evidence of another potent incentive for some fans to stay away. ‘Soccer Fans Blaze Terror Trail in Leeds’ was the splash headline of the local paper the day after the match. Crowd trouble was the now the rule rather than the exception in games involving Leeds, and never more so than when their hated trans-Pennine rivals came to town. For the less belligerent supporters the simple task of getting to and from the ground had become a hazardous obstacle course. Even taking care to remain in the thick of one’s own fans was no guarantee of safety. On that particular Wednesday evening one Leeds man was kicked unconscious on Boar Lane, in the heart of the city, by eight youths wearing the colours of his hometown team. He had been reckless enough to protest that they had been jostling his pregnant wife.

  On the field the ordeal of chasing honours on several fronts was yet again proving Leeds’ undoing. Revie’s men turned in a listless display and Manchester United, fleetingly rejuvenated under Tommy Docherty and unbeaten for six matches, won 1–0. It was a devastating blow to Leeds’ championship hopes. Bremner summed up the mood in the dressing room: ‘We felt pretty sick. Our dressing room was like a morgue. Nobody spoke. We genuinely felt we had a good chance of catching Liverpool and winning the title. I felt more disappointed for the gaffer than anyone else. He had set his heart on having another crack at the European Cup.’

  Injuries and suspensions had again taken a heavy toll on Revie’s squad in early 1973, but although Trevor Cherry had filled the gap vacated by Terry Cooper, even as the fixtures piled up the manager was not to be tempted back into the transfer market. His rivals were less reluctant, another ominous sign. Defeat by Manchester United left Leeds eight points adrift of leaders Liverpool with five matches to go but two games in hand. Crystal Palace were dispatched 4–0 at a barely half-full Elland Road a few days later, a result which merely delayed the inevitable. Fittingly, it would be Liverpool who would finally put an end to Leeds’ title hopes two days later. A crowd of 56,000 packed Anfield to salute Liverpool’s first trophy in seven years. Goals from Kevin Keegan and Peter Cormack duly delivered it against a Leeds team deprived of several first-team regulars.

  Losing out to his old pal Shankly was a sight more palatable to Revie than their fate the previous year when they had surrendered the Championship to the odious Clough, and Revie had no hesitation in adopting magnanimity in defeat. The United team formed a ‘guard of honour’ as the victors left the field, in conscious imitation of the long ovation they had received from the Kop in 1969. ‘I am far from brokenhearted,’ said an unusually stoical Revie. ‘Deep down I didn’t really expect Leeds to finish top. Naturally we would have liked to win the championship but, next to ourselves, I think Liverpool are the side we would most like to see achieve it.’ The Liverpool manager, shrewd as ever, was not slow to acknowledge the significance of his encounters with Revie’s team. ‘We have now beaten Leeds three times this season, and some teams haven’t managed that in eight years,’ he quipped.

  Leeds had been playing catch-up all season, but Revie had other reasons to be sanguine about losing the league. By that stage his team were progressing toward two Cup Finals, and he had good reason to be confident of winning them both.

  The European Cup Winners’ Cup was a competition Leeds had never previously entered. Their early passage was relatively comfortable, despite a lacklustre performance against the Turkish side Ankaragucu in the first round, where they had to rely on a Mick Jones goal to earn a 2–1 aggregate win in front of a paltry 22,000 crowd at Elland Road. More comfortable aggregate victories followed against Carl Zeiss Jena (2–0) and Rapid Bucharest (8–1). In the semifinal Leeds were paired against the Yugoslavs Hajduk Split, a far tougher proposition. The attendance for the home leg, played first, was a dispiritingly low 32,000. Leeds’ poor crowds had become something of an embarrassment even to their own supporters.

  They sparked an anguished debate on local television. On Look North, the local BBC TV
news magazine, one fan came up with the novel theory that Leeds’ gates were lower than their rivals’ because Yorkshire folk demanded value for money. In the Yorkshire Evening Post another penny-pincher concurred: ‘After seeing United shut up shop when one or two goals up, I have often wondered if we should all go home at half-time.’ Perhaps the most bizarre explanation for the sparsely populated terraces came from the fan who questioned the siting of United’s ground. ‘I am convinced it’s at the wrong side of the city,’ he speculated. ‘The soccer centre of Leeds is north of the river [Aire], and certainly the amateur and schoolboy game is much stronger there.’

  Those who did manage to struggle across town witnessed a disciplined performance from Leeds in the home leg of the semi-final. A supremely fit Hajduk had played with swagger and confidence, but an Allan Clarke goal gave United a narrow advantage to take to Yugoslavia. Unfortunately for Leeds, the man now hailed as the best close-range finisher since Jimmy Greaves would miss both that game and the final – should Leeds qualify. The England striker was sent off at Elland Road for retaliation after being tackled from behind by the defender Boljat. The Hajduk player escaped without a caution. Revie was ‘surprised’ UEFA handed Clarke a two-match ban instead of the customary one-game suspension, but there was no right of appeal.

  Revie came to consider United’s performance in Yugoslavia the equal of his team’s finest in Europe, the 1968 Fair’s Cup Final triumph against Ferencvaros. The game was played just two days after the Anfield defeat, which finally put an end to Leeds’ championship hopes. Eddie Gray was also absent, along with Clarke. As a tired Leeds side arrived at the ground, they were taunted by the notoriously volatile Hajduk fans, with the prediction of a 5–0 hammering. Captain Bremner smiled and shrugged his shoulders. His highly experienced team were not to be ruffled. Leeds played a controlled, defensive game, restricting their opponents to just one clear chance. In fact, it was Leeds who contrived the better openings. On 20 minutes Peter Lorimer crashed a drive against the foot of a post, and in the second half a Mick Jones effort was clawed round the post by the Split goalkeeper. In the final act of the game Giles drilled a shot into the net, only to see the goal disallowed because the referee had blown the final whistle as the ball went in. Revie hailed his team’s feat as ‘fantastic … at a time when many people are once again trying to write us off. Again, however, victory came with a sting in the tail. Bremner had picked up a caution and would also miss the Final. Now it was on to Salonika – and their ninth Cup Final in nine years. A scratch Leeds side would, for once, be the underdogs against AC Milan, the only club to have won both the European Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup.