by Rob Bagchi
Oddly Leeds had twenty-eight days rest between their sixty-fourth match of the season, the last of the League campaign and the sixty-fifth, the European Cup final in Paris. Armfield, whom David Lacey praised for ‘his calming influence on the disturbed Leeds psyche following the Clough cataclysm’, arranged four friendlies over the month to keep the players in shape. Ten years on from their European bow in 1965, more than half the team from their first ever tie against Torino a decade ago – Reaney, Bremner, Madeley, Hunter, Lorimer and Giles – walked out at the Parc des Princes for the biggest game in the club’s history. The man leading Leeds and the reigning champions, Bayern Munich, out on to the pitch that evening was also a familiar face. The French official Michel Kitabdjian, who had refereed the Elland Road European Cup semi-final leg against Celtic in 1970, escorted Bremner and Franz Beckenbauer to the touchline by the dignitaries’ box. His presence was not a happy omen.
Leeds, cheered on by Revie who was alongside David Coleman in the BBC’s commentary box, dominated the match for an hour, putting on a performance full of aggressive, fluent and incisive football that put Bayern Munich, who finished only tenth in the Bundesliga, on the back foot. The only favour Kitabdjian did Leeds was to allow Terry Yorath to stay on the field after his brutal foul on Bjorn Andersson which saw the Swede stretchered off. In the first-half alone Kitabdjian turned down two penalty appeals, the first for a Beckenbauer handball, the second when the Bayern captain slid in, missed the ball and wrapped both legs around Allan Clarke. In his autobiography even Beckenbauer concedes that the tackle should have been a penalty but he applauded the referee on the night.
In the second-half, with Leeds having had six attempts on goal to Bayern Munich’s none, United put the ball into the net for what appeared to be the opening goal. The free-kick, quickly taken by Giles found the unmarked Madeley who headed it back into the centre of the penalty box where it was cleared to Peter Lorimer who blasted the volley past Sepp Maier. The Leeds players all ran off to celebrate and Bayern, apart from Beckenbauer, trudged off for the restart. The Bayern captain stood at the back and put his right arm up almost as an afterthought which prompted Kitabdjian to consult the linesman, already back at the half-way line for the kick-off. He then blew his whistle and awarded a free-kick against Bremner for offside.
If Bremner was offside it was marginal and it is debatable whether he was interfering with play. The decision only added to the fury of the Leeds players and supporters. Even before Bayern had picked Leeds off on the counter-attack to score twice to win the match a section of the United support behind Maier’s goal had begun to tear out the plastic seats and rain them down on the French riot police mustered below. One Leeds fan managed to get over the moat at the bottom of the terraces and scaled the wire fence to get a run at the pitch. He was swiftly tackled by stewards, and in the charged atmosphere their kicking of him only riled the Leeds fans further. The rioting escalated beyond the final whistle and got so out of hand that Bobby Collins, the club’s former captain, was head-butted outside the ground by a Leeds fan fooled by his vaguely Teutonic appearance.
The feeling that Leeds were robbed persists to this day and the club’s fans can still be heard to sing ‘We are the champions, champions of Europe!’ at every match, in recognition of what had been denied to them. Even the mild-mannered Armfield said afterwards: ‘I felt exactly as I did when our home was burgled.’ Two years after losing the FA Cup to Sunderland the press wrote the team’s epitaph: ‘let down by their old failings of missing chances and losing their nerve when it really mattered, this was a re-run of all the bold failures.’ It was a harsh assessment given the referee’s handling of the game but they were right in a sense. This was the end of Revie’s team – Giles would leave that summer, Bremner and Hunter a year later. And, with a four-year European ban imposed on them for their fans’ behaviour, it was the end of Leeds as a European force, a spectacular Champions League run under David O’Leary notwithstanding.
After the match Revie left the BBC commentary box to offer words of consolation to his former charges, knowing full well that the revolution he had initiated at the Vetch Field in September 1962, when he gave Gary Sprake, Paul Reaney, Norman Hunter and Rod Johnson their debuts, had finally run its course. The family was about to leave home.
Don Revie had yet to make his debut as England manager by the time Brian Clough was sacked by Leeds and he got off to a pretty decent start, winning six and drawing three of the nine matches of his first year in charge. He tried to impose his influence on the squad – in came the dossiers and bingo games – and also on the fans by encouraging them to sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ before internationals, however both initiatives failed. The ‘family spirit’ did not translate to the national team and many of the players found themselves sniggering at the manager’s hopelessly naff and anachronistic attempts to replicate the bonding he had orchestrated at Elland Road.
The predominant features of his reign were his thin skin whenever criticised and a selection policy that was recklessly catholic. ‘With Alf Ramsey it was more difficult to get out of his side than in, but it was completely different with Don Revie,’ his first captain, Alan Ball said. One of his biggest problems was his relationship with Sir Harold Thompson, the pompous vice-chairman of the Football Association who took over as chairman in 1976. At an official dinner, when Revie and Elsie were sat next to Thompson, the England manager objected to Sir Harold’s habit of referring to him by his surname. ‘When I get to know you better Revie, I shall call you Don,’ the Oxford professor snottily said. Revie, in a brilliant but career-damaging reply, said: ‘When I get to know you better Thompson, I shall call you Sir Harold.’ Revie was England manager for three years, a job he quickly came to hate. Feeling the heat of public opinion following the defeat to Italy in 1976 which made qualification for the 1978 World Cup look remote, he began looking for a way out and found it when he was approached by the United Arab Emirates Football Association to take over as national coach. Initially he turned it down but when Italy beat Finland and made England’s chances of World Cup qualification even more unlikely, he boarded a plane to Dubai to discuss the matter further. After flying out to South America to finish England’s summer tour, he asked the FA to pay up his contract on the grounds that they had been lining up Bobby Robson to replace him. When they refused he contacted the Daily Mail, sold them the story of his resignation and boarded a plane to the Middle East.
‘The day I took the job,’ he wrote, ‘I was excited by the prospect of having the pick of the country. But I’d been spoiled for choice at Leeds and I realised there are no more around like Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles. As soon as it dawned on me that we were short of players who combined skill and commitment I should have forgotten all about trying to play more controlled attractive football and settled for a real bastard of a team.’ In his parting shot he could not resist mentioning the two players closest to his heart and mourn how the whole of England could not match his favoured sons.
His escape from Lancaster Gate, and decision to fight the ten-year ban from English football a vengeful Thompson had imposed upon him, gave the green light to his detractors, and they soon began to rake over all the stories about match-fixing. Stories from the title-decider against Wolverhampton Wanderers in 1972 when he and Bremner were accused of trying to bribe the Wolves players were aired and, though Bremner won £100,000 in libel damages from the Sunday People in 1982 when they were reprinted, the smear continued to tarnish both men’s reputations. Others, including Frank McLintock, have echoed the allegations that Revie made them an offer ‘to take it easy’ when playing against Leeds, but to date, even in the wake of Revie’s death, irrefutable evidence is still yet to emerge
In November 1979 Don Revie returned to Britain to fight his ban from English football in the High Court. His barrister, Gilbert Gray QC, easily demolished Sir Harold Thompson’s case. ‘Sir Harold, he said, ‘in his own court was effectively prosecutor, witness, judge and jury.’ Calling
the FA’s punishment of Revie a restraint of trade, Gray damned the governing body’s in-house disciplinary tribunal as ‘a more tightly closed shop than a trade union could devise.’ Mr Justice Cantley upheld Revie’s appeal under the Right to Work Act and cited legal precedent to dismiss the FA’s penalty as unfair. Revie’s victory, however, had a hollow ring and the judge took the opportunity after announcing his verdict to condemn the former England manager’s behaviour. ‘He presented to the public a sensational and notorious example of disloyalty, breach of duty, discourtesy and selfishness,’ Mr Cantley said. Revie had won in principle but the stigma dogged him for the rest of his life. He never worked in English football again. Don Revie’s Middle Eastern exile continued until 1984 when he returned to Britain and embraced retirement.
The decision to take the England job had proven an ignominious move for all parties, Don Revie, the Football Association and, above all, Leeds United – hardly a fitting end to such an exceptional project. More and more as Revie returned to Elland Road in the mid-80s in his consultancy role, it might have seemed as if he had never been there. The club, once again, teetering towards insolvency with a team of has-beens and never-would-bes in a half-empty, dilapidated stadium, had come full circle – back to the brink of relegation to the Third Division. Only he had had the drive to get them out of it the first time. Ultimately, it would take decades, sixteen managers and hundreds of millions of pounds to leave the club in a lower division than the one he found it in and with only one more major trophy in the Elland Road display case than on the day he left – the truest measure of the man and what he had achieved.
POSTSCRIPT
IN THE END
In the midst of a happy retirement, in 1987 at the age of fifty-nine, far away from the stress of the press vilification that had dogged him for ten years, Don Revie was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. Boldly, he re-emerged from his exile in Scotland to campaign for funds to promote research into his terminal condition. He elicited much help, sympathy and respect from a host of former colleagues, from a handful of his international players (most notably Kevin Keegan), from his remaining allies in the press and even from those who had been his most disparaging critics. Naturally enough, however, he found the greatest support from those who had never abandoned him – from the players, staff and fans of Leeds United.
In 1988, now shockingly frail and confined to a wheelchair, Don Revie made his final appearance at Elland Road. Received onto the pitch by a guard of honour comprising every one of his ‘sons’ (save for the uninvited pariah, Gary Sprake), he watched the testimonial match arranged by the club to raise funds for research into the disease with a fierce pride and, he admitted, not a few tears. As he took his leave of them, his players seemed upbeat if a little mannered, and, once he had left the ground, the whole day took on an elegiac tone, with each of his ‘boys’, one by one, giving the media the soundbites they so craved. It wasn’t a day for profound reflection: everyone said essentially the same thing – he was a great manager and, more importantly, a great man.
Unsurprisingly, it was left to Billy Bremner to come up with the phrase to sum up his mentor. ‘He is Leeds United,’ he said simply. The words may sound a little glib now, but that tribute remains the most apt epitaph. Moreover, even more than ten years since his death it’s still correct to employ the present tense. The whole club is built on and continues to reflect Don Revie’s personality and career. That sustained success, tantalizingly elusive on so many occasions, never definitively achieved, has given the club and its supporters, these authors included, a certain manic edge, not lacking in confidence as such, but distinctly prone to chippy cynicism and bouts of despair. It is also, of course, a reflection of how far the club travelled so quickly, from nothing to glory and back again in twenty years, from clogs to clogs in three generations, as the Yorkshire analogy succinctly puts it. Similarly, the true Revie dilemma – does bad luck cause insecurity and pessimism, or is it the other way round? – has turned most Leeds fans into magnificently obsessive conspiracy theorists. To this day they are distrustful of the FA and always quick to decipher any hint of anti-Leeds bias in the media, a bias that many are convinced stems from a lingering distaste of Revie and his team.
So just how good were Revie’s Leeds? The best club side to have emerged up to that point in English football history? It is possible to make such a case, based on their sheer resilience and the consistency of their performances and results for ten years. Perhaps the last word should go to David Miller, so often one of their most scornful critics. In March 1988 Liverpool’s dominance of the domestic game was at its zenith. They had equalled United’s record of twenty-nine matches unbeaten from the start of the season, and would have beaten it with a victory over Everton. To the immense satisfaction of Leeds supporters, they failed. That Allan Clarke’s brother scored the goal that defeated them would have put an ironic smile on Revie’s face, too. In the run-up to that Merseyside derby Miller pondered on which was the better side – and he chose Leeds. ‘Leeds were a far better team than they allowed themselves to appear,’ he wrote. ‘This was at least partially because of the marvellous efficiency of their game, comparable to Liverpool’s, was undermined by that undercurrent of almost neurotic caution emanating from their manager. If the two teams were to meet, Leeds would win – but that’s what most people said before they played Sunderland.’ As ever with Miller, there is a backhanded compliment to go with the garland, but it’s one which still grants Revie and his team their hard-fought place at the pinnacle of the domestic game.
Don Revie died on 26 May 1989, a victim of his terrible disease. His funeral service at Warriston Crematorium, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, was a simple affair at which both his families were present. Their former boss had ordered them ‘to have a few drinks on me’. Thousands had lined the route of the funeral procession of his great friend Bill Shankly. At Warriston just a few hundred were present. No one attended from English football’s governing bodies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bale, Bernard, Bremner! The Legend of Billy Bremner, André Deutsch, 1998
Brears, Peter, Images of Leeds 1850–1960, Breedon Books, 1992
Bremner, Billy, You Get Nowt for Being Second, Souvenir Press, 1969
Burt, Steven & Grady, Kevin, The illustrated History of Leeds, Breedon Books, 1994
Charles, John, The Gentle Giant, Stanley Paul, 1962
Charlton, Jack with Byrne, Peter, Jack Charlton: The Autobiography, Partridge Press, 1996
Charlton, Jack, For Leeds and England, Stanley Paul, 1967
Clarke, Allan with Richards, Steve, Goals Are My Business, Pelham, 1970
Clough, Brian with Sadler, John, Clough – The Autobiography, Partridge Press, 1994
Dunphy, Eamonn, A Strange Kind of Glory: Sir Matt Busby and Manchester United William Heinemann, 1991
Giles, Johnny, as told to Tomas, Jason, Forward with Leeds, Stanley Paul, 1970
Gray, Eddie & Tomas, Eddie, Marching on Together – My Life with Leeds United Headline, 2001
Jarred, Martin & Macdonald, Malcolm, Leeds United: A Complete Record 1919–1989, Breedon Books, 1989
Leeds United Book of Football No. 1, Souvenir Press, 1969
Leeds United Book of Football No. 2, Souvenir Press, 1970
Macdonald, Malcolm & Jarred, Martin, The Leeds United Story, Breedon Books, 1992
Mourant, Andrew, Don Revie – Portrait of a Footballing Enigma, Mainstream, 1990
Mourant, Andrew, Leeds United Flayer by Player, Guinness 1992
Revie, Don, Soccer’s Happy Wanderer, Museum Press 1955
Saffer, David, Sniffer! The Life and Times of Allan Clarke, Tempus, 2001
Warters, Don, leeds United: The Official History of the Club, Wensum, 1979
INDEX
AC Milan (1), (2)
Accrington Stanley (1)
Addy, Mick (1)
Airdrie (1)
Ankaragucu (1)
Archer, Keith (1), (2)
Arm
field, Jimmy (1), (2)
Arsenal (Gunners) (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13), (14), (15), (16), (17), (18), (19)
Aston Villa (1)
Barr, John (1)
Bates, Mick (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)
Bayern Munich (1)
Beckenbauer, Franz (1), (2)
Bedford Park Avenue (1)
Belfitt, Rod (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)
Bell, Willie (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)
Bennett, Alan (1)
Best, George (1), (2)
Birmingham City (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)
Blackburn Rovers (1)
Blackpool (1), (2)
Bologna (1)
Bolton Wanderers (1)
Bolton, Sam (1), (2)
Bradford City (1), (2)
Bremner, Billy (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13), (14), (15), (16), (17), (18), (19), (20), (21), (22), (23), (24), (25), (26), (27), (28), (29), (30), (31), (32), (33), (34), (35), (36), (37), (38), (39), (40), (41), (42), (43), (44), (45), (46), (47), (48), (49), (50), (51), (52), (53), (54), (55)
Brighton (1)
Bristol City (1)
Buckley, Major Frank (1), (2)
Burnley (1)
Bury (1), (2), (3)
Busby, Sir Matt (1), (2), (3), (4)
Cameron, Bobby (1), (2), (3)
Cardiff City (1), (2)
Carl Zeiss Jena (1)
Carter, Raich (1)
Celtic (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)
Charles, John (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)
Charlton Athletic (1), (2), (3)
Charlton, Jack (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13), (14), (15), (16), (17), (18), (19), (20), (21), (22), (23), (24), (25), (26), (27), (28), (29), (30), (31), (32), (33), (34), (35), (36)
