by Rob Bagchi
In the FA Cup it had taken a second replay at neutral Villa Park for Leeds to beat Norwich City. Allan Clarke scored a hat-trick in an ultimately emphatic 5–0 victory. Thereafter Leeds’ highest-profile victims were Derby County, as Revie’s men swept smoothly towards their third Final in four years. The semi-final draw paired Leeds with Bill McGarry’s Wolves, who were attempting to reach their first Final since 1960. The clash gave Revie’s team the perfect opportunity to gain revenge for the trauma of blowing the double at Molineux eleven months previously. A photograph of Revie’s players punching the air as the draw came out of the hat suggested they would relish the opportunity. Wolves had yet to concede a goal in their FA Cup campaign, and the match, held at Maine Road, was a predictably defensive encounter. The single goal, which Revie had correctly predicted would prove decisive, was lashed in from close range by Billy Bremner on 68 minutes. His furious celebrations in front of the Leeds supporters suggested their fiery talisman had exorcised the Molineux demons.
Leeds’ FA Cup Final opponents were Second Division Sunderland, whose manager Bob Stokoe was an even more virulent critic of Revie than Clough. It was the definitive David versus Goliath encounter. A team from the Second had not won the FA Cup since 1931 and, understandably, the media consensus was that Sunderland did not have a prayer against probably the finest club side in Europe. ‘No way Leeds can lose it,’ asserted the Daily Mail on the morning of the match. While Revie made his routine noises about respecting his opponents, in private he was less equivocal. ‘Before the game I could not see any way we could lose,’ he later admitted. ‘We had the players, the experience, the firepower and the team spirit.’ Ever-cautious, however, he would not countenance any public display of confidence, and once again this would contribute to his team’s undoing. As his squad set off for London, he explained how the ‘quiet route to success’ meant treating this game ‘as just another match’.
It was a catastrophic misjudgement. A carefree Sunderland had been grandstanding in London for days, determined to extract every last ounce of enjoyment from an occasion they can never have expected to grace. Moreover, with United in purdah Bob Stokoe had free rein to begin an unsubtle but effective bout of psychological warfare against his opposite number. His first outburst was the usual nonsense about the allocation of ‘England’s dressing room’, which had gone to United, and the matter of having the Leeds fans at the tunnel end, where the teams would enter the stadium. The latter complaint was especially meretricious. Stokoe knew full well that 81,000 of the 100,000 crowd – the Sunderland supporters and 62,000 ‘neutrals’ – would be rooting for his team.
Rather than dismissing or simply ignoring Stokoe’s absurd gripe, Revie unwittingly revealed that it had fed his neurosis, commenting wearily that, ‘We get blamed for practically all it is possible to get blamed for these days.’ Wolves manager Bill McGarry’s attack of sour grapes gave Stokoe more ammunition, as he declared himself ‘staggered’ in the aftermath of his side’s semi-final defeat, ‘at the way Bremner went the whole 90 minutes disputing every decision that went against his team’. ‘I am not trying to knock Leeds in any way,’ agreed a disingenuous Stokoe, ‘but we are playing a real professional side and, let’s face it, the word professionalism can embrace a multitude of sins as well as virtues. The case about Bremner is the only comment I want to make about Leeds. My message is simple. I want Mr [Ken] Burns, the Cup Final referee, to make the decisions and not Mr Bremner.’ Holed up in the team’s hotel, Bremner declined to get drawn into a slanging match. ‘It’s like Wilfred Pickles’ “Have a go” week,’ was the Leeds captain’s gnomic response.
It is impossible to prove that Stokoe’s bid to prejudice Burns had an effect on the outcome of the match, but when the game came around, the Leeds captain would be uncharacteristically out of sorts. We also know that Burns’ relations with Leeds had been strained since the 1967 semi-final. Certainly the Sunderland boss had no doubts: ‘They [the media] did a marvellous job for me,’ confirmed Stokoe, proving himself a master of the gamesmanship he had so hypocritically condemned to some credulous journalists. ‘I’m not saying the referee was influenced, but he didn’t allow Bremner to get at him.’
By the morning of the match the Leeds players were unsettled, their manager’s innate anxieties heightening their own. A team used to snapping and scrapping and battling against the odds was acutely uncomfortable in the role of overwhelming favourites. One photographer in the team hotel who was rash enough to take a picture of the team had his camera torn from his hands. Revie did not like the team being photographed before games – another daft superstition.
Dave Watson, the craggy Sunderland centre-half who would later play under Revie for England, recalled watching the Leeds players being interviewed at their hotel. ‘They were very subdued,’ he observed. ‘No one was cracking any jokes. The answers were very clipped, as if they were afraid to give something away. We thought: “What’s wrong with them?”’ Sunderland’s mood could not have been more different. ‘Our lot were the complete opposite, clowning around,’ said Watson. ‘We all fell about. Bob Stokoe was there, with one of the directors, and everyone was splitting their sides … everyone except [ITV’s match commentator] Brian Moore.’ Stokoe even allowed the cameras on to the team coach, something then unprecedented. In the tunnel Sunderland wore their cares as lightly as Leeds were tense and preoccupied. ‘When we came out the noise was like being hit in the face by a sledgehammer,’ Dave Watson remembered. ‘All the neutrals seemed to be backing us. Again, that seemed to get to Leeds.’
This time United could not blame injuries for the nightmare about to unfold. Cherry, deputizing for Cooper, was the only member of the team not to have played at Wembley before. Otherwise Leeds were at full-strength, with Jack Charlton the only player missing from the victorious team of 1972. As in 1970, Eddie Gray was touted as the probable match-winner, particularly as he would be running at Dickie Malone, supposedly Sunderland’s ‘weak link’ at right-back. Gray, however, who rarely disappointed in high-profile games, would eventually be substituted. With the rain falling steadily, both sides began uncertainly on a slippery pitch, but Sunderland’s non-stop running and chasing stopped Leeds from settling into their rhythm.
Watson, later capped sixty-five times for his country, was the unsung hero of the occasion, though it is not his name that is remembered. Yet he was lucky on 10 minutes when a foul on Bremner in the penalty area went unpunished. Had referee Ken Burns taken Stokoe’s entreaties on board? Watson, too, had a hand in Sunderland’s goal, which came on 31 minutes, taking three United players with him as Billy Hughes curled in a corner from the right, beyond Leeds’ defensive cover. Watson’s run caused the sort of carnage that Jack Charlton had patented for United. If any team should not have been distracted by it, that team should have been Leeds, who’d been using the trick for almost a decade. Over-preparation and Revie’s obsession with Watson’s aerial potency in those assiduously devoured dossiers was their undoing, as the defence was left open to a sucker punch by Watson’s clever dummy. Midfielder Ian Porterfield cushioned the ball on his thigh before crashing a right volley into the roof of the net.
With an hour to go, and regular chances coming their way at frequent intervals, Leeds should not have been unduly concerned; but something was patently wrong. As the teams emerged for the second half, the red and white striped shirts galloped past those in white, eager to return to the fray. ‘United players appear to know their fate’ was the caption to a newspaper photograph published the next day, of the Leeds players ambling back on to the field. Of the eight men in shot, only Peter Lorimer is not staring fixedly at the ground.
Leeds did start the second half far better than they had finished the first, but for the umpteenth time their luck was out when it really mattered. Cherry had the ball in the net on 50 minutes but the goal was ruled out, quite rightly, for a foul on Sunderland’s goalkeeper Montgomery. The pivotal moment of the game came with a quarter of the match remaining. Trevor
Cherry, linking up with the attack, hurled himself at a Paul Reaney cross to power in a diving header. Montgomery parried the ball to Lorimer, who drilled in the ball from close range. ‘And Lorimer makes it one each!’ bellowed BBC commentator David Coleman. Except that he had not. Montgomery, twisting in mid-air, had somehow managed to push the ball on to the crossbar, from where it bounced back past a prone and despairing Cherry. The Sunderland goalkeeper had pulled off Wembley’s most memorable save, but he knew little about it. ‘I just threw myself where I thought the shot would go, and it hit my hand,’ he recalled. The moment might have been manufactured to fuel the fatalism with which Revie imbued his team. ‘I think we knew then that we were never going to score,’ said Billy Bremner. ‘We didn’t stop trying, but I think we all felt that it wasn’t going to be our day.’ Despite Cherry and Madeley being thrown into the attack and Yorath replacing the ineffective Gray, there was no way back for Leeds. Paul Madeley came closest to equalizing, with an angled shot that was stopped on the line, but it was Sunderland who finished the stronger.
At the final whistle Revie stood rigid in the rain, pain etched into his face. Stokoe, who had flouted Cup Final protocol by wearing a red tracksuit, came skipping and jumping onto the pitch to hug his match-winning goalkeeper. Grace in victory was not in the script. ‘I hadn’t a lucky suit like Don Revie,’ he jibed, ‘so I just came as one of the lads.’
In the war of words whipped up by Fleet Street in Cup Final week Revie had been hopelessly outgunned and, although the result might have embarrassed the pundits, it delighted his numerous detractors. Artistic license was freely issued, the Daily Moil’s Vincent Mulchrone being among the more fanciful observers. ‘In Sunderland,’ he wrote, ‘there is one job for every forty boys and the thirty-nine stepping straight from school to the dole queue wrote a sign on the wall begging the lads to put Sunderland on the map. The lads obliged.’ One Sunderland supporter was so overcome with delight that he hurled an armchair through his front window. When Stokoe’s team returned to Sunderland to parade the cup, bed-ridden patients at the local hospital demanded to be wheeled outside so they could salute their heroes. ‘Leeds, a paradox of arch-professionalism and high superstition,’ wrote another scribe, ‘wilted like men crushed by divine intervention.’ ‘My main memory is the journey after the game to our hotel for our banquet in the evening,’ recalled Allan Clarke, United’s Wembley hero twelve months before. ‘I’ve never seen so many fans crying after a defeat – it was so obvious they felt we’d let them down, and that hurt more than not winning the cup.’
Commendably, Revie declined the opportunity to vent his spleen at Stokoe after the game: ‘The better team won on the day,’ he admitted. However, he would later acknowledge that the result was the most shattering experience of his career – and by now he had a raft of them to choose from. In an unaccustomed speech at the post-match banquet he struck that note of plaintive defiance he habitually adopted under siege. ‘It’s a bit unusual for me to stand up,’ he began, ‘but I feel our players have done enough in ten years to walk in to your applause, even without the FA Cup. We never tried to cheat, we tried to be honest, and I would be less than honest if I did not ask you to salute the most consistent side that ever lived.’
For some Leeds supporters, however, defeat by Sunderland was another signal that the long-serving backbone of Revie’s team had reached its sell-by date. Debate raged on the letters page of the local paper, where several self-consciously heretical correspondents started to lambaste the manager and his team. ‘The unpalatable truth is that Leeds had only themselves to blame …’ declared one of them, ‘but were betrayed by a malady which seems unforgivable. Giles, the midfield mainspring, is no longer the effortless general and is too easily caught in possession … United must hope the much-missed Cooper recaptures his England form and Don Revie must also consider the claims of Jordan and the promising Frank Gray.’
United would soon have the opportunity to prove such gloomy prognostication wrong in the Final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup, but there was to be a rather significant hiccup in their preparations. Just three days after declaring that the obituaries being written for his side were premature, Revie sensationally gave them substance. A day before the Final in Salonika, northern Greece, the Leeds manager held a breakfast meeting with the Everton chairman, John Moores. He was heading for Elland Road’s exit door.
Bill McGarry, Bobby Robson of Ipswich and Jimmy Armfield, then of Bolton, had all turned the Everton job down. Quite why Revie was Moores’ fourth choice is unclear. The episode reflects particularly poorly on Revie, who set such store by meticulous preparation for important games. Once again, the prospect of more money had given him itchy feet. Everton were offering an annual salary of £20,000–£3,000 more than he was earning at Leeds. At forty-six the Leeds manager was perfectly entitled to seek a better-paid job, but his timing stank. His players admitted talk of his departure unsettled them, as their minds turned to the onerous task of defeating Italian giants AC Milan, and if Revie’s strategy was to blackmail the United Board into giving him a rise, it hardly endeared him to the supporters.
Amid feverish rumours of his imminent departure, the affair descended into farce. On 14 May, as his team prepared to board their plane for Greece, Revie drove to Moores’ Merseyside home to discuss terms. By the time he’d reached the outskirts of Liverpool the United manager was completely lost. He pulled over at a set of traffic lights and asked for directions to Freshfields, the suburb in which Moores lived. ‘There was no doubt the driver was Revie,’ said the Everton supporter who ended up giving him directions. ‘He was driving a yellow Mercedes [Revie’s new club car] and, unless he had a twin, it simply had to be him.’ The rumour was given further credibility when Revie joined his players at Manchester Airport for the flight to Greece – normally he would have joined them at Elland Road for the coach trip there. Furthermore, the previous Saturday, Revie had been in the BBC team of commentators for England’s game with Northern Ireland at Goodison – another opportunity for Everton’s directors to sound him out.
Revie himself did nothing to quash the speculation, refusing to confirm or deny the rumours. The Yorkshire Evening Post drew its own conclusion. ‘Unless he has a change of mind, or United persuade him to stay,’ it mused, ‘Revie seems likely to sever his connection with the club that gave him his chance of management 12 years ago, and which he in turn steered from the depths of the Second Division to a place of prominence in Europe.’
He had indeed turned Elland Road from a scrapyard into a shrine, transformed a team that, back in the late 1950s, even the club’s own supporters had disdainfully nicknamed ‘the clowns’. Yet it is surprising that Revie’s disloyalty did not attract more criticism. In the valedictory pieces that were already being penned on his reign at Leeds, the tone is one of pathetic gratitude. Despite nearly a decade at the summit of British football, the city of Leeds still harboured the suspicion that the Revie era would prove a glorious aberration.
Revie brushed aside talk that AC Milan, a point ahead of Juventus and Lazio at the top of the Italian league, would be more concerned with winning the national championship than the Cup Winner’s Cup: ‘Milan will want to win this cup first and win the title afterwards.’ For Leeds, Mick Bates, Joe Jordan, Frank Gray and Paul Madeley stood in for Bremner, Clarke, Giles and Eddie Gray. To add to Revie’s problems, Giles failed a fitness test on a hamstring strain.
A minor source of encouragement was the raucous support of a 45,000-strong crowd at the new Kaftatzoglio Stadium. Jack Mansell, a former Rotherham United manager then in charge of one of Salonika’s three Greek First Division sides, told the press that the locals were ‘Leeds United daft. There was tremendous disappointment here when they lost the FA Cup Final,’ he added, rather improbably. ‘All my players are Leeds fans and three of my players actually cried.’ A thunderous deluge greeted the teams as they took the field. It provided a fitting backcloth to a tempestuous match, remembered now mainly for the scanda
lous performance of referee Christos Michas. The Greek’s name was to be forever added to the Elland Road roll-call of infamy, to sit alongside those of Burns, Hardaker, Tinkler and Stokoe.
Milan gained the benefit of Michas’ first dubious decision after just four minutes, when Paul Madeley was mysteriously penalized for a foul on Milan striker Bigon, despite it being obvious that Madeley had won the ball cleanly, barely touching his opponent. Chiarugi took full advantage of Michas’ generosity. He rifled the free-kick into the net off the base of a post, aided by a slight deflection from a United defender. A chorus of booing greeted his celebrations. United might have buckled, but as nine Italians retreated to their own penalty area, they fought back.
It was soon clear, however, that Leeds had more to contend with than their illustrious opponents. After both Lorimer and Hunter had gone close, Jones was scythed down in the box as he followed in a Jordan shot. Michas waved play on. Early in the second half United were denied a second clear penalty when Romeo Benetti blatantly handled a Paul Reaney shot from the right; to trump it all, Michas ignored a third spot-kick appeal when Lorimer was hacked down as he surged in from the right wing. United could not contain their frustration. Minutes from time, Hunter was mangled from behind by Rivera and, in the mêlée that followed, was sent off along with Sogliano of Milan.
