We Are the Damned United

by Phil Rostron

  I was sat in the communal bath the day before along with another lad called Jimmy Ashall, a full-back. And Don was saying to us, ‘How do you fancy going to Bournemouth?’ We said, ‘Bournemouth? What’s going on there?’ and Don replied, ‘I’ve been offered the player-manager’s job and I’d like you both – especially you, Peter – to come.’ I said, ‘I’ll have to think about that one, Don.’ My wife was from Leeds and very, very close to her mother. I went home and said, ‘How do you fancy going to Bournemouth?’ I looked at her face and thought ‘She’s not right happy about that!’ We’d just had a daughter, our Debbie. I said to Don I’d think it over and we were all sat in the dressing-room the next morning and who walks in but Harry Reynolds, the chairman. He said, ‘Right, lads, settle down, you are not going training yet, I’ve got some news.’ We were half-guessing he was going to say Jack had got the sack because we were on a bad run. He said, ‘I’d like to introduce you to the new manager. Please come in.’ And it was Don! That was the Bournemouth trip off.

  Ray Fell, long-time chairman of the Leeds United Supporters Club, says: ‘It is legendary amongst the older Leeds United fans that when relegation to Division Three threatened in 1961, the then chairman, Harry Reynolds, sat at his desk to compose a letter recommending the prowess of Don Revie to clubs that had expressed an interest in appointing Revie as manager. Harry Reynolds realised that he was recommending exactly what Leeds themselves required, tore up the letter and promptly made Don Revie the manager.’

  Revie was to remain a one-club man in the managerial ranks for 13 years, making a huge imprint on the game. He built his new Leeds United on rock-solid foundations, which became the platform for the Second Division title within three years and, once promoted, the runner-up berth in the league and an FA Cup final appearance in their first season back in the top flight. By the early 1970s, the team he created would dominate English football. He was awarded English Manager of the Year three times between 1969 and 1972, and in 1970 he was given the OBE. All told, Revie took his team to two First Division titles, one FA Cup, one League Cup, two Inter-Cities Fairs Cups, one Second Division title and one Charity Shield. They also made it to three more FA Cup finals, one more Inter-Cities Fairs Cup final and one European Cup-Winners’ Cup final.

  THE EMERGENCE OF ‘OLD BIG ’EAD’

  Back in 1967, what was being achieved by Clough and Taylor in the fortification of lowly Hartlepools was not going unnoticed in the wider world. Everybody has to start somewhere, and the little cash-strapped Cleveland club, while giving Clough the chance to cut his teeth in management, could only ever be a launch pad for somebody with such intense ambition and unwavering self-belief. Aston Villa, who would be relegated to Division Two in 1966–67, and their better-placed Midlands rivals West Bromwich Albion were among the bigger clubs coveting his services, but the prize of his signature, and that of Taylor, was to go to Derby County. Tim Ward’s five-year managerial reign at the Baseball Ground had seen them fall some way short of chairman Sam Longson’s desire for top-tier football, and the club was in a kind of limbo, just being, doing and surviving.

  It needed igniting, but little could anybody have imagined the inferno that was to develop once Longson had lit the flame in a meeting with Clough and Taylor at Scotch Corner that ended with ink on a contract. Clough started with an undertaking to Rams fans that they would better their 1966–67 finishing position in the league of 17th, and he was close: they ended up 18th.

  The 1968–69 season saw the start of the Clough revolution. He had brought in John O’Hare from Sunderland and Alan Hinton from Nottingham Forest, and these very effective players were soon to be joined by Roy McFarland, who was signed as a 19-year-old centre-half from Tranmere Rovers for £25,000 and who quickly became a big influence on a club he would later manage. Kevin Hector and Colin Boulton were already stalwarts of the side, and the new Clough signings went on relentlessly. John McGovern joined from Hartlepool, Willie Carlin arrived from Sheffield United and, against all odds, Clough was able to dissuade the legendary Double-winning Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Dave Mackay from his chosen course of becoming assistant manager of Edinburgh club Hearts, where he had begun his career, and bring him to Derby instead.

  A run of success that would see them race to the Division Two title began fittingly with a 3–1 victory over Chelsea at the Baseball Ground. By the end of November, Derby were on top of the pile, and they spent the rest of the season laughing over their shoulders at rivals in vain pursuit. Clough had done it – for his chairman, for the club, for the fans, for the city and for himself. He knew he could deliver, and now Derby could enjoy rubbing shoulders with the best clubs in the land.

  Following their elevation to the top flight, Derby got off to a tremendous start, beating relative giants such as Everton, Newcastle and Tottenham. The newcomers were the last Division One side to lose a match. In the end, though, home losses to Coventry and Manchester City and away defeats to Leeds and Arsenal brought a sense of reality back to the club and its fans. It was at this critical point in the campaign that Clough splashed £100,000 on Nottingham Forest’s Welsh international defender Terry Hennessey. It was such an inspired signing that Derby went unbeaten through their last dozen matches of the season, climbing in the process to a very respectable finishing position of fourth, thirteen points adrift of champions Everton. It was some achievement, and one that should have brought European football to the Baseball Ground. However, the UEFA Cup place that ought to have been theirs was denied Derby by an FA/Football League inquiry into financial maladministration.

  Attempting to build on his success, Clough broke the club’s transfer record by paying Sunderland £170,000 for defender Colin Todd and also brought in Preston North End midfielder Archie Gemmill. Speaking to Neil Moxley of the Daily Mail in 2009, Todd recalled of Clough:

  He was very clever in his assessment of people. I was a very quiet person. He tried to provoke me. He’d play in the five-a-sides and he’d stand there and kick me whenever he could get away with it. If I snapped, then I’d turn on him and he’d be laughing. He had achieved what he wanted. His attitude was: ‘You are a defender, you need to get nasty.’ He set standards for you to achieve. If you look at players now, I think there would be some who think three completed passes out of five was good. Not for Brian Clough. Five out of five and you stayed in his team for the next game. Three out of five and he’d be asking: ‘What kind of standard is that? We are not looking for ordinary here. We want perfection. People who think three out of five completed passes is good, there’s the door.’

  A new season that had started in promising fashion with a 4–1 defeat of Manchester United in the Watney Cup petered out somewhat and a ninth-pace finish behind Arsenal was all they could muster. But Clough was kidding them, hoodwinking them. All those who thought that the rot was setting in, that Derby had got too big for their boots and were about to pay the price, could think again.

  Come the start of the 1971–72 season, Mackay had gone to pastures new, taking up the player-manager position at Swindon Town, and new captain McFarland was confined to his sickbed with flu. Yet a steely, determined Derby negotiated the first twelve matches without defeat and lay in a menacing position in third place. There was a minor blip over the festive period, but there was a resilience to the team that saw them claim second spot at Easter. A breathtaking single-goal victory over Liverpool in their final game of the season shot them to the top of the league, but the odds were heavily stacked against them staying there and claiming the title, on account of the fact that FA Cup-winners Leeds United needed only a point from their game in hand at Wolves to be crowned champions. Leeds were to play this crucial fixture within 48 hours of their glorious cup final defeat of Arsenal, and the Derby contingent didn’t stick around to see the outcome. Peter Taylor took the players to Majorca; Clough went on a family holiday to the Scilly Isles.

  But on Monday, 8 May 1972 – with Leeds playing their third high-profile match in seven days, minus Mick Jones,
who had broken his collarbone at Wembley two days previously, and necessarily fielding several injured and exhausted players – Wolves went two goals up and held on for a shock 2–1 win. Liverpool could also have claimed the title had they beaten Arsenal at Highbury, but they failed to do so and Derby, to general amazement, were the ones with the silverware.

  It was the European Cup – a long way from Hartlepools – now for Clough, and there were to be no barriers to their passage on this occasion. Zeljeznicar Sarajevo were easy meat for Derby in the first round, and a stunning 3–0 defeat of Benfica at the Baseball Ground in the second-round first leg paved the way for a place in the quarter-finals. Here the Czechoslovakian side Spartak Trnava were competently dealt with and crack Italian side Juventus loomed ahead in the semis. Defeat at this stage was difficult to stomach for Clough, who went through the rest of his life believing that the West German referee was bribed and the Italians were ‘cheating bastards’. Derby could finish only seventh in the league in defence of their title, and soon Clough and Longson were at loggerheads, with the chairman showing increasing irritation at his manager’s high profile in the media.

  Clough, it seemed, was getting as much airtime on radio and television as newsreaders and weather forecasters, and when he wasn’t on air in person there were the mimics such as Mike Yarwood (as indeed there were mimics in pubs, clubs and offices) giving a mighty good and instantly recognisable impression of Old Big ’Ead.

  Twelve matches into the 1973–74 season, Longson summoned Clough and Taylor to a meeting in which the resignations of the management pair were tendered. Clough would later call that ‘the worst decision I ever made’. In just over six seasons at unfashionable Derby, the pair had won the Second Division championship, the Watney and Texaco cups and the First Division championship, not to mention taking the club to the semi-finals of the European Cup. They would go on, of course, to enjoy further spectacular successes at Nottingham Forest, but it remained a disappointment to Clough that he had not furthered his trophy-plundering at Derby.

  While some suggested that Clough should have been offered the job of England manager in 1974, he was persuaded to join Brighton & Hove Albion, taking Peter Taylor with him, and was struggling in the Third Division, suffering a 4–0 defeat at home to Walton & Hersham in the FA Cup and losing 8–2 at home to Bristol Rovers. Meanwhile, two massive jobs were empty: Leeds United, because Revie, rather than Clough, had answered his country’s call and become England manager; and Liverpool, because the legendary Bill Shankly had suddenly announced a shock retirement from the game. Clough later claimed, ‘I was unlucky enough to be offered the wrong one. If I had gone to Liverpool, I would have died there. I would have become as close to that club as the paint on the walls.’

  But in July 1974, to the amazement of many, he went to Leeds. And civil war between Old Big ’Ead and English football’s cavaliers was declared.

  1

  CHANGING OF THE GUARD

  I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.

  Brian Clough

  What made Leeds United under Don Revie tick? Besides the many trophies, Revie’s Leeds didn’t end the season outside of the top four between 1965 and 1974. After the first of their league titles in 1968–69, the manager offered a fascinating insight into his approach to the game of football in an article entitled ‘What I Expect from my Players’, which appeared in the 1970 Park Drive Book of Football. Forty years later, Revie’s remarks do not sound dated:

  Some time before Leeds United won even the first of the several honours that have come our way in recent seasons, I told a gathering of the players that if they became champions they would realise, I hoped, that there was more to it than being the top team. I cannot recall my exact words, but remember well the gist of them, which was that it was not sufficient merely to become champions; of equal importance in my book was to behave like champions, off as well as on the field.

  This can have many aspects: behaviour on the field, behaviour away from it; appearance on the field, conduct off it. Many aspects, but all contributing towards the whole, the complete, educated, accomplished footballer of today.

  Many years ago the great Scottish club Rangers had a foreign manager, one Willie Struth. Over the years many tales have been told about him, some perhaps embellished with the passing of time and in the retelling. But from at least one or two of them there shines a fine example of what I mean, and what I expect from a champion team.

  There is the story about how he used to order any player with hair nearing his collar to attend upon the hairdresser; how he roared out two players found in the cheaper seats in a Glasgow cinema with the blast, ‘As Rangers, you will occupy seats befitting your position.’

  He was said to have been something of a martinet, but I doubt whether any of his players suffered because of that. Indeed, from some who served under him I have heard nothing but praise, and certainly he produced in his players a terrific pride in their club and in their profession.

  That of course is how we should be. The more so today when not only the salary but also the image of the player has risen to unparalleled heights; when the public, particularly its younger members, set their sights on the footballer and their standards by him. In addition, any club enjoying a fair measure of success, and certainly any player within any such club, is subject to pressures of publicity never before experienced in the game.

  So we have today a situation in which a team taking the title, indeed long before actually achieving it, becomes subject to constant survey – has the eyes of the public upon its every action, both on the field and away from it. In addition, as more and more clubs enter into European competition so the image of the British footballer, and through him the Briton himself, is spread further afield with more and more coverage through press and television.

  We thus have the situation in which any club and its players are faced with the dual problem – that of winning matches and doing so with dignity on and off the field.

  I could be said, perhaps, to be particularly conscious of this, because of what I still believe to be a totally unfair impression given abroad about Leeds when we first started to chase the honours. I refer, of course, to the suggestion that we were more physical than skilful. I have never subscribed to any such view, neither did I to any suggestion that we were more a defensive side than anything else. Fortunately, for my beliefs the events of the past few seasons have spoken for themselves and by now Leeds are hailed as a side containing as many skills as any, and more than most.

  I recall George Best being asked last season, and just before we met them in the FA Cup semi-finals, how he rated Leeds. He replied, ‘Their strength is that they have no weaknesses: they also possess a tremendous team spirit and players of great individual skills.’ I like to think that George was echoing the thoughts of most of the people in football, but for a long time we had to suffer other things being said about us, and bear it with dignity. And that is what being champions is all about really – wearing a crown with dignity.

  Dignified was not the description that Brian Clough would have applied to Revie’s Leeds United. On the contrary, he detested their style of football and, as he would candidly admit to the squad he inherited from Revie in 1974, adhered to the idea that Leeds were indeed ‘more physical than skilful’. Revie went on to address that attitude, which was not held by Clough alone, by saying:

  Let me stress straight away that I am not suggesting an ‘after you’ type of player on the field. Perhaps it would be as well if I said at this stage what I expect from a player of Leeds United.

  On arrival at Elland Road any new boy, be he a young apprentice professional or an already established star, is quick to appreciate that he should combine courage, hard but fair play and complete confidence on the field, with courtesy, good conduct, manners and humility away from it. I do not intend to speak on his need for soccer skills, already obvious or latent. That goes without saying.

  To ass
ist in this we hold our own ‘educational classes’ at United, with members of the staff as the tutors and the incoming teenagers as the pupils. Augmented by advice from outside professional and trade organisations, we inculcate into the lads a knowledge of dining out, checking in to and out of hotels, how to travel in comfort, even how to reply to toasts and many other things. In addition there is the emphasis upon religious advice if they want it and talks on girlfriends, male and female fans, etc. Everything and anything in fact.

  The idea behind all this is to ensure that so far as is humanly possible every lad on the staff has, within a short time of joining Leeds United, been taught sufficient to feel comfortable in any kind of company, able to enter any hotel he wishes and also made aware of the temptations as well as the honours and awards that can come his way.

  I have heard it said that this is not the function of a football club; that a club’s sole concern should be in the promotion of a fine football side and to the winning of more matches than achieved by the opposition. But surely it is all part and parcel of the same thing.

  Let me say immediately that no one is more aware than we at Elland Road of the importance of winning matches and of establishing a fine football side with which to do so. Indeed that is the major purpose behind everything we do, but there are other ancillary things to be considered.

  One is that while winning matches is of vital importance, the manner in which successes are achieved must also be considered.

  The other vital factor ancillary to winning matches, and winning them in the right spirit, is that the boys who obtain these honours for a club and its city, and in turn are feted by them, should be honourable representatives of that club, and that city.

  As I said earlier, let there be no question of us trying to put manners before everything else. We are part of a football club, and a successful one at that, and such successes have been achieved only by a complete 100 per cent dedication – being able to match skill with sinew when required in hard but fair combat with the opposition.