by Greg Tesser
To understand life in 1970, it first has to be understood that the 1960s ethos of expression and fairness and services before profit was still dominating the British landscape. The current obsession with screwing as much money out of people as possible without necessarily providing a top-class service had yet to permeate the thought processes of either business or sport. But the seeds were there, and the decision to hold the Horse of The Year Show so close to the showpiece of the English game at the home of English football was an example of this folly.
The amateurs of Enfield and Dagenham had experienced these nightmare conditions a mere seven days before in the FA Amateur Cup final, and club secretary C.S. Taverner had been scathing in his post-match comments.
‘We’d sooner have played on our own pitch,’ he moaned. ‘It was pretty grim; in fact I have never seen it look so bad.’
Leeds boss Don Revie used even more vociferous language: ‘If they are putting 100 tons of sand on Wembley then it is goodbye to good football. A hundred tons will deaden the pace on the ball. It will be like playing on a beach.’
Skipper Billy Bremner echoed his manager’s verdict with these words: ‘The pitch was in a terrible state. There was not a sign of the normally immaculate turf, which everyone associates with Wembley. The pitch had been sanded, but you found yourself almost ankle deep in mud and sand, at times, and if Wembley’s once lush turf was stamina-sapping, I can tell you that pitch on which we played destroyed the energy of the players, as the game wore on. The pitch didn’t run true – the ball came at you from awkward angles, bounced and bobbed about, as you tried to ply passes with precision.’
BBC Television commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme made these comments at the kick-off: ‘The pitch is rather like Goodwin Sands. Quick turns might be very dangerous manoeuvres this afternoon.’ And later, ‘the players are already sinking into this soft, sanded surface.’
Peter Osgood later told me that the ‘pitch was just like some kind of pudding, but you just got on with it. It was certainly tiring though’.
However, despite the pitch and the plethora of pre-match protests, the contest itself proved to have as many surprises and twists as an Agatha Christie whodunit.
Sitting in my vantage point at the old Wembley, I was soon struck by how well Leeds were coping with the conditions compared to their opponents, whose more cavalier and some would say more arty approach to the game, floundered in the sinking sands of the famous old stadium.
Poor old Dave Webb was being given the run-around by Leeds’ young silky-skilled winger Eddie Gray, so it came as no surprise when Revie’s men took a twentieth minute lead through Jack ‘Black Book’ Charlton. It was a mess of a goal, and probably in many ways best summed up the infamous track; a downward header that you would expect a schoolboy to clear, but it died a quick death on the surface and as Eddie McCreadie attempted to clear, he understandably completely mistimed his kick, and the ball almost apologetically found the net. Chelsea appealed to referee Eric Jennings that Peter Bonetti had been impeded, but all to no avail. The Leeds lads were one up, but the goal was all about the pitch.
Four minutes before the break, one of Chelsea’s so often unheralded heroes, Peter Houseman, levelled matters with a low shot that Leeds keeper Gary Sprake somehow managed to fumble.
A few words on Peter Houseman, so sadly killed in a car crash with his wife and two friends, in 1977, aged just thirty-two.
During my time as agent, when I seemed to live and breathe and eat and sleep Chelsea, what always struck me was how different Houseman was to so many of the others. When photographer Terry O’Neill likened the Chelsea team to the cast of the film The Dirty Dozen, Ossie became Clint Eastwood, ‘Chopper’ Harris was Lee Marvin, Hudson a young Robert Mitchum and so on and so on. But Houseman was not part of this fit.
He was like a throwback – and I mean this as a compliment. He was modest almost to a fault, very polite, quiet and in all respects the complete antithesis of the King’s Road hellraisers so beloved by the red tops. He was definitely a professional footballer more in keeping with the deferential years of the 1950s. It was in a way to his credit that the Swinging ’60s seemed to have passed him by.
As a player, he was a tireless worker and a clever winger; there were not many more proficient crossers of a ball in the game at that time. He was not a robust performer, and it was not unusual for some of the crueller members of the Stamford Bridge faithful to refer to him as ‘Mary’ when he seemed to be backing out of a tackle.
But Chelsea and manager Sexton relied on him just as much as the side’s flashier players, and sometimes even more. As for me, I never even thought of adding his name to my list of clients, which in a way was to my everlasting shame. I, like so many, got caught up in this new world when football and the ’60s counterculture climbed into bed together for an affair; not long-lasting, but long enough to consummate a marriage without the vows.
Half-time and the Blues were lucky to be level. The second period followed much the same pattern as the first, and with six minutes left on the clock, Leeds’ Mick Jones was the first to react when Allan Clarke’s header had hit the post, and put away what was surely the winner. But these Blues never knew the meaning of defeat, and two minutes from time the always-brave Ian Hutchinson headed in the equaliser.
Extra-time couldn’t separate the two teams, so it ended two-apiece – the first-ever Wembley Cup final draw. At the end of this pulsating encounter, the two squads jogged round the pitch in a joint lap of honour. As agent and fan, I knew my team had been let off the hook. As a romantic, I thought, maybe destiny beckoned.
Unlike so many Wembley occasions, before and since, this tussle was terrific – a real nail-biter that had the supporters of both sides roaring their heads off for the entire 120 minutes.
Don Revie had a dour, almost forbidding image – well, he seemed dull to us soft Southerners anyway – but he came out with an unusually succinct quote, laced with irony, in the dressing room at the end: ‘Just think what sort of game it would have been on a pitch!’
Views on Revie, both as a man and a manager, veer from the complimentary from fans in his old stamping ground of Elland Road to the outright insulting, from lovers of the game in other parts of this green and pleasant land.
Respected journalist Michael Henderson summed it up best in his volume 50 People Who Fouled Up Football: ‘Don Revie should be regarded as one of the towering figures of the English game. Instead, beyond a few parishes in Yorkshire, where keepers of the flame maintain a lonely vigil to defend a reputation that curdled long ago, elsewhere he is considered a deeply flawed man who made his club’s name mud and betrayed his country.
‘Neutrals took against Leeds for perfectly sound reasons. They kicked like mules, and cheated like Sicilian bandits.’
Harsh stuff, but thousands of fans in the early 1970s would have shouted ‘Hear! Hear!’ if such language had been used over forty years ago: as it was, many of Leeds’ ‘robust tactics’ were dismissed as just part of the game. After all, ‘it was a man’s game, wasn’t it?’
After the dust had settled and the moans about the pitch had continued apace, the Football Association decided that the Wembley playing area was in such a deplorable state that Old Trafford would be used for the replay in eighteen days’ time.
Talk about fixture congestion! The FA had decreed that the season should reach its climax in April. There was sensible reasoning behind this decision; the idea being that as World Champions, England, should be in a position to properly prepare for the World Cup by having an early acquaintance with the vagaries of a Mexican summer.
The upshot of all this was that Chelsea’s programme resembled some kind of endurance test. On Saturday 4 April, 45,000 fans at the Bridge saw them beat Spurs 1–0, thanks to a Tommy Baldwin strike. Seven days later they were, of course, embroiled in the Leeds marathon. Two days after that there was a trip to Stoke and another victory, Ian Hutchinson netting one of the goals in a 2–1 score line. Only another for
ty-eight hours elapsed before the King’s Road boys were on the road again, this time to Turf Moor where they found Burnley in unforgiving mood in a 3–1 defeat. Their league campaign ended on 18 April with a 2–1 home win over Liverpool, Osgood scoring both goals.
Such an-end-of-season treadmill prior to an FA Cup final replay would have the likes of Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger spitting blood in this day and age, but footballers back then were made of sterner stuff, and to be fair the pressure that managers had to endure was nowhere near the often ludicrous and over-the-top matter-of-life-and-death attitude which currently exists, and will continue to exist until the media reassesses the values of the game and some semblance of perspective returns.
However, on the upside, there was now an eighteen-day gap before hostilities were to be resumed – enough time for aching limbs and knocks and springtime tiredness to be manipulated and massaged and generally treated. As Charlie Cooke pointed out: ‘There was a lot of time to work up to it and think about it, so it was unusual in that sense.’
Thankfully, the fact that the rematch was at Man United’s ground, which had a capacity of just over 62,000, as well as being scheduled for a Wednesday evening, put paid to most of my litany of ‘ticket scroungers’.
My own travel plans for the match were, to put it mildly, chaotic (as indeed was so much of my life during those heady days), but I was eventually given a lift by Striker editor Tony Power. The journey itself was a talking-shop as we were both high on FA Cup final fever. Well, actually I was high on more than that, having downed the odd Mandy or two in the morning. I am not sure about Tony, but he did enjoy the odd snort of Colombian marching powder.
Ensconced in my hotel – I cannot for the life of me remember exactly which one, as I ended up eating breakfast at some ungodly hour the following morning with the Chelsea players and a few of the more celebrated scribes in the Piccadilly Hotel – I got ready for the game.
Now we come to the replay itself: described by a host of hacks as ‘epic’ and even ‘iconic’, it was indeed a blood-and-guts extravaganza with lashings of skill and tackles that had people throughout the UK wincing in front of their TV sets.
Noted former referee David Elleray, who refereed Chelsea’s 4–0 1994 FA Cup final defeat to Manchester United, stated categorically that if this game had been played today, six red cards would have been issued plus a massive twenty yellow cards. As it was, referee Eric Jennings booked just one player, Chelsea’s Ian Hutchinson.
After a few minutes the heat was turned up to Gas Mark 5 when Ron Harris kicked the back of Eddie Gray’s knee, thus halving the Scottish international’s potency on the wing. Hunter and Hutchinson then indulged in some fisticuffs. Charlton kneed and headbutted Ossie, and so on and so on. Some of it was X-rated stuff, but what drama; what a spectacle; what a denouement.
Over 28 million watched this football match, the second largest for a sporting event, only bettered by the 32 million-plus TV audience for the 1966 World Cup final. In fact, incredible as it may seem, the Chelsea v. Leeds replay is number six in the all-time list, a mere 1 million shy of the Apollo 13 splashdown, and just under 1 million more than tuned in to watch the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.
Chelsea’s man between the sticks Peter ‘The Cat’ Bonetti was injured when he was bundled unceremoniously into the net by the bustling Leeds striker Mick Jones, and it was the same player who gave Revie’s charges a deserved advantage ten minutes before the break.
But despite this setback, the men from south-west London soon discovered renewed energy levels, and with the charismatic Cooke beginning to weave his magic and link-up more effectively with Ossie, an equaliser looked very much on the cards. But the Chelsea fans, whose support was absolutely out of this world, had to wait until twelve minutes from the end of the match to find parity, and what a goal it was!
It was a flowing move, encompassing as it did all the innate élan, improvisations and talents of this group of players. There he was, the supreme ball artist Cooke on the right; he looks up, and with the blink of an eye, he despatches what is a perfect cross; meanwhile Ossie, all elegance and predatory instinct, anticipates the Cooke cross to find the net with a thrilling diving header.
The Blue section of the ground erupts as Ossie, displaying his full repertoire of matinee idol mannerisms, clutches his clenched fists to his face almost like a child crying to attract its mother. He knows, and we of a Blue bent know: the force is now with Chelsea.
Extra time, and we’re all exhausted, players and supporters alike. It has become a slog, with the tackles still raising a few eyebrows. Then, with a mere sixty seconds remaining, Chelsea had one final chance via a throw-in from surely the longest thrower of a football in the game’s history, Ian Hutchinson.
Hutch possessed a throw that would make the efforts of Stoke City’s rocket-launcher of touchline torpedoes, Rory Delap, look insipid. The movement of his arms, when projecting the ball, resembled a windmill on speed – it was indeed unique.
He held the ball in the manner of some Victorian anarchist cradling a bomb before launching his missile into a packed penalty area. The ball adopted a life of its own as it soared over every single head, eventually finding the head of Charlton, only to fall to the never-say-die Webb, who bundled home the winner.
Talking of Webb, some thirty years later we worked together during his short tenure as manager of Yeovil Town. Club chairman John Fry had given me a part-time consultancy role as PR man and press officer and general media factotum, and I worked hand-in-hand with the former Chelsea stalwart on such aspects of the club as the phone line and match programme. On meeting the colourful East Ender again after so many years, my first words were: ‘You’re my hero! Remember Dave, you are the man who won the Cup for Chelsea for the first time.’
He smiled – he has always possessed a most infectious grin – and said: ‘Gawd bless yer!’
Chelsea had won the FA Cup for the first time in the club’s history, and soon the atmosphere in Manchester was to ape that of a Hogmanay rave in Edinburgh or Glasgow. It was going to be a long, long night, resulting in fat heads and memories that would be impaired forever.
There was one Chelsea player, a King’s Road dandy if ever there was one, who sadly missed out on this momentous moment, and his name is Alan Anthony Hudson. Alan was the one player I craved to sign; the missing link, you could say, in my list of supreme entertainers. But Alan’s career at that stage was very much in the hands of his father Bill, and eventually it was decided that the up-and-coming agent Ken Adam should handle his affairs.
He and Ossie were close; in fact Huddy owned a black poodle called ‘Ossie’. Cooke and Hudson and Osgood – the names just roll off the tongue like a glass of Chateau Lafite. In my opinion, if life had been kinder to the rebel that was Huddy, then he could, and in fact should, have blossomed into one of Europe’s premier players. But don’t take my word for it. Others – legends of the game – lavished more and more plaudits on the young Hudson as his embryonic skills developed and his performances for Dave Sexton went from being seven or eight out of ten to the maximum week-in-and-week-out.
For example, after Hudson had given the fans a masterclass at the Loftus Road FA Cup quarter-final, England manager Alf Ramsey said: ‘There is no limit to what he can achieve.’
The legendary German midfield maestro Gunther Netzer, he of the wild heavy-metal-rock hair, said of Hudson, who made his international debut in England’s 2–0 victory over the World Champions in 1975: ‘where have England been keeping this player? He is world class.’
Equally enthralled by the natural control and elegance of the midfielder was West German boss Helmut Schoen, who made a comparison between Huddy and a national football treasure when he stated that: ‘At last, England have found a replacement for Bobby Charlton.’
Bobby Moore was equally lavish in his praise: ‘Alan Hudson looked like conquering the world, and perhaps for a short while he did.’
The staggering in
dictment of English football during the 1970s was that neither Ramsey nor Revie, who replaced Sir Alf in 1974 as England boss, did mavericks. Marsh, Hudson and Osgood: three of the most talented performers of that era – and indeed any era – mustered a measly 15 caps between them. The ethos of these two coaches epitomised the schizophrenic nature of English football at the time: Ramsey’s intransigence and Revie’s obsession with slide-rule planning.
Hudson ran the show that March evening at Wembley Stadium, and at the still tender age of twenty-three, the world, in the words of Minder’s Arthur Daley ‘was his lobster’. George Cole starred as Arthur in the TV series, alongside Chelsea nut and great mate of Hudson’s, Dennis Waterman. But, as I have already indicated, football was obsessed with this world of robotic runners – no place here for the artists, the poets of the game. In international terms, English football’s slogan should have read: ‘Up the workers!’
By the time of his England bow, Huddy was a Stoke player, having left Stamford Bridge in 1974 for £240,000. Later he signed for Arsenal for £200,000 before moving to America. He returned to both Chelsea and Stoke in the early 1980s, but his career on the biggest stages by this time was over.
Never blessed with the luck we all deserve in life, there is no doubt in my mind that if he played on the Premier League stage today, he would be a shoe-in in the England set up. One journo colleague of mine said of his England debut: ‘He passed the ball better than anyone.’ Oh, that that was the case in 2013!
Some twenty-one years after his stellar display against West Germany, I was sitting with him in Terry Neill’s Sports Bar in Holborn, discussing some publicity angles for his autobiography The Working Man’s Ballet, and he outlined how his life changed on Easter Monday 1970.
‘We were away at West Brom,’ he told me. ‘And having gone for a ball – there was nobody near me at the time – I landed badly, severely tearing my ankle ligaments – the pain was terrible.’
Despite all kinds of treatment, including an Irish faith-healer massaging his ankle – he watched the Wembley confrontation from the touchline. The portents for the replay were a little more positive, and he returned to hospital for seven days of intensive treatment, and even paid to see a distinguished Harley Street practitioner, which irritated the powers-at-be at the club, but it was all in vain.