by Rob Bagchi
More sympathetic observers, like the journalist Phil Brown, tried to put the Board’s policy in perspective. One only had to look at the club’s finances, he explained. On payment of Charles’ £53,000 fee, the club’s total borrowings would exceed £200,000, ‘a record in the history of professional football in this country’. This was ‘a terrible load for even the wealthy men who compose United’s Board to shoulder for too long without substantial relief’. The problem was that when they had rallied to the club’s rescue, no one had thought their loans would have to be repaid so quickly. What was supposed to be long-term investment, priming the pump for the club’s expansion, was in reality nearer, in Brown’s words, to ‘the gambler’s last throw’. Due perception is everything: the Board members were thought to have accepted the plaudits for rescuing Leeds, only to claw back their cash at the first opportunity. What else were people going to think? Far more cunning chairmen would have let the fair-weather fans in at the old prices for the opening games to gawp at Charles in the hope of hooking them first and diddling them later.
For a brief period, Harry Reynolds became the most loathed man in Leeds. Most people in this predicament would now stop digging, but Reynolds’ pride was dented since his integrity had been questioned. He chose this moment to launch another ill-advised offensive. Reluctantly reversing the directors’ decision to make the first two games of the season all-ticket (the idea of collecting the gate money for ticket sales more quickly than normal had spectacularly backfired, with less than 6000 pre-sales for each game), he couldn’t resist taking a swipe at his paying public as ‘these nigglers, people who haven’t been interested before’. It was these ‘summat for nowters’, he went on, who were the guilty men in Leeds’ decline. ‘If they do not want football in Leeds, what’s the use of trying?’ Abusing one’s customers is a singularly unorthodox approach to marketing.
While the local papers were receiving a record post bag on any issue in their history, Don Revie was attempting to assimilate a patently unfit John Charles into the new Leeds United set-up. The previous year he had given the Board two options. Either they wait three or four years for their policy of youth development to reach maturity, or they could go for broke sooner. For much of 1961 and 1962 the former had been the agreed way forward, and Revie had begun to offload the likes of McConnell, Cameron and Humphreys while signing coveted fifteen-year-old kids like Jimmy Greenhoff.
With the purchase of first Collins, then Charles, the blueprint had subtly changed. In the summer of 1962 promotion was back on the agenda. Having had to prop up the club in its relegation spell, the Board felt that they had compromised their original design anyway, so the signing of Charles was meant to reinforce their switch to the fast-track route back to the First Division. In economic and playing terms, they’d gone back to boom and bust. In his final press briefing before the first game of the new season, Revie was careful to rule out all talk of promotion. ‘I do not build castles in the air,’ he said. With less than two weeks of pre-season training to get Charles fit after months of inactivity, he was right to be circumspect.
On paper, Leeds looked to have a fair chance. Revie’s ideal line-up was starting to come together: two pacy wingers in Johanneson and Bremner; steely guile at inside-forward with Collins and Storrie, and a world-class centre-forward in Charles. The rest of the team, from Younger in goal to Smith in midfield, was rather more prosaic, but as a whole, they were as good as anything else in the division. If the defence could gel and the individual players began to assert themselves more, United’s attacking unit would intimidate most teams. Understandably, therefore, the game plan was pretty rudimentary. They would play to their strengths – get the ball wide, give it to Charles and trust that Collins and Storrie would exploit any uncertainty caused by Charles’ metaphorical and physical stature. If Charles could unlock defences coached by Helenio Herrerra, what difficulties could Walsall pose?
The Board, moreover, had agreed to Revie’s proposal to improve the player’s conditions, if not their pay. No more apartheid on trains: they would travel in first class with the officials, and the standard of hotels for away fixtures was to be radically upgraded. Revie’s whole outlook was, as Jack Charlton revealed, that ‘Leeds United is a lump of ground. It’s the team that matters.’ Once again, he was proving to them that, for him, they were worth fighting for. Once again, preseason training was rounded off in a restaurant; but this time the players, now furnished with swankier single-breasted club blazers and redesigned ties, treated their besieged Board to dinner at the Parkway Hotel, to ‘thank them for the encouragement given when things looked blackest’. The ‘club spirit’ Revie had talked about so often was demonstrably thriving.
Contrary to all pessimistic expectations, thousands of extra fans poured through the turnstiles to witness John Charles’ homecoming. The only problem was that they were Stoke City fans. Leeds kicked off the 1962/63 season at the Victoria Ground in front of 27,000 people with an impressive 1–0 victory, Jim Storrie scoring a debut goal. Despite all the acrimony caused by the price hike, surely this start would help to swell the gate for Leeds’ first home fixture? The club certainly thought so: kiosks adorned with John Charles posters were opened in the city centre. Rotherham United were hardly a big midweek draw at Elland Road, but even so, the attendance of 14,119, barely 500 above the previous season’s abysmal average, sent Reynolds into an apoplectic rage.
Still worse, though Charles scored, Leeds contrived to lose 3–4, with the defending particularly poor. Reynolds wondered if many ‘genuine’ fans were still on holiday: the next opponents, Sunderland, a fairly local rival, would, he said, present a better test of the new pricing structure. Thanks largely to travelling Wearsiders, Reynolds got his wish. The gate shot up to 17,753 and Leeds managed another 1–0 win, but it was obvious that the experiment had run its course. Immediately after the game the Board reversed the swinging price rises, Reynolds graciously apologized for all the offence he had caused and announced more modest prices for the rest of the season.
Yet if the fans who thought they had defeated a monumental injustice now refused to pay for John Charles, then Leeds United, with imminent payments due on Collins, Lawson, Storrie and even McAdams, couldn’t afford the luxury of keeping him. After five months of expensive wooing and only three games, the word was discreetly put out, principally to the Italian media. When less than 15,000 people from a city of over half a million were prepared to stump up to see Charles play, it was time to cash in and revert to Plan B. Perversely, it always takes time to make a quick change. Leeds picked up only one point from their next three games, even though Charles scored twice. The attendance for Leeds’ first home game after Reynold’s volte-face was a healthy 28,312, their highest crowd for more than two years. It came too late, however, to justify the financial gamble the club had taken on Charles. By far the most noticeable thing about these games was Collins’ performances as he stepped up to lead the team in the absence of Goodwin. The injured Goodwin also relinquished his place in the long-term future of the club, as Revie’s progressive inclination replaced him with Willie Bell.
Although Collins, the ‘Pocket Napoleon’ of Goodison Park, probably wouldn’t merit a place in Leeds’ best ever XI, he was nonetheless the best captain Leeds have ever had. Even Bremner, his only real rival for that honour, deferred to Collins: ‘I always felt confident that so long as Bobby was in the team, he would bully, coax, cajole, cool us down when we were in danger of losing our heads, encourage and praise us whenever we did anything good, and generally look after us like a father.’
Or, to put it another way, he was an intense little bugger who refused to let anyone intimidate him and demanded resilience from his colleagues, even if he had to petrify them into it.
Like Dave Mackay at Tottenham, Collins led by example; but it always helped that both men’s team-mates were, in a sense, terrorized by the fear of falling short of their volcanic captain’s standards. To Collins, nothing was sacrosanct. ‘If you steppe
d out of line in training,’ said Everton’s Colin Harvey, ‘then he would do you no danger, but having said that, you looked up to him because of his ability.’ Eddie Gray recalls being smacked about the head for being duped in a running competition, and even Jack Charlton was a little apprehensive around the midget firebrand. ‘I got on all right with Bobby, but I didn’t like to play against him. Even when we were playing five-a-side, you never knew what he was liable to do because he wanted to win so much.’ Collins, the cliche had it, would fight with his mother over a game of dominoes. Most important of all, he hectored the other players throughout the whole game; it taught them the value of communication he had so assiduously learned at a higher level. Had Revie persevered with his line-up of ‘seen it all’ professionals, their silent complacency would probably have diluted Collins’ influence. Now, therefore, Revie gave his indomitable drill sergeant more impressionable minds to mould.
Though Revie had been in his post for nearly two years, and despite all the money he had recently spent, after six games Leeds had played six, won two, drawn one and lost three, a mirror image of their opening six fixtures of 1961/62. Then, his solution was to pick himself. This time he jettisoned half his team.
Hitherto, the Yorkshire Evening Post had only mentioned the Leeds reserve team in order to bemoan the cancellation of a scheduled bus service to its games owing to poor demand. Now, however, it was taking notice of a sequence of wins by a team that included eight players under the age of nineteen. Contrary to the accepted version, this first wave of young professionals had actually been signed by Jack Taylor as apprentices at the age of fifteen, but under the tutelage of Owen and Cocker and with Revie’s motto – confidence, concentration, courage – guiding their education, several of them had started to exhibit the required maturity for first team conflict.
In the meantime, Revie was constantly adding to their ranks by signing up the best schoolboy talent, particularly from Scotland. Following any report of potential from his Scottish scout John Barr, Revie and Maurice Lindley would decamp in Revie’s blue (lucky blue, of course!) Ford Zephyr to assess the players themselves. If they ‘fancied’ the player, a long courting process would be instigated involving many repeat trips, ‘gifts’ for the family, telephone calls and ‘holidays’ in Yorkshire, culminating in the boy signing apprenticeship forms on his fifteenth birthday. All clubs essentially have the same approach to convincing young talent that theirs is the ideal club, so Revie must have had something unique to entice so many to sign for Leeds in the face of offers from more famous clubs. Most of the Scottish lads and their families have admitted that until Revie appeared on their doorsteps, they’d never even heard of Leeds United. Once he was inside their home, they seldom went elsewhere.
The secret of his technique was his affable empathy with working-class families. He was prepared to chat away for hours, drinking endless cups of tea and charming the grannies with his confident yet unflashy manner. For someone perceived as insecure and prone to occasional bouts of John Prescott-like incomprehensibility, he was a master of this seduction process. He was always sincere with the parents, ready to outline his vision for Leeds and their son’s role in it with a painstaking attention to detail. ‘He continued to visit my parents in Scotland whenever he was up there,’ says Eddie Gray, ‘and did the same for Peter Lorimer’s … He did a fantastic selling job.’
And if all this failed, he could always sort out a little extra cash for the player, which would naturally find its way home: sign the player on amateur terms and arrange an undemanding little job in the vicinity of Elland Road for quadruple the regular £7 per week maximum. All part of the service! Taking advantage of the amateur loophole was hardly an uncommon practice in the game, and though officially scorned, it was highly effective in securing kids from less well-off families. Leeds signed both Eddie Gray and Peter Lorimer as amateurs, even though they had apprenticeship offers from Celtic, Manchester United, Chelsea and over twenty other clubs. These two recruits at fifteen, straight from the Scotland schoolboy XI, were still a bit green for first-team action, even under the current circumstances. Their older colleagues in the reserves, with the assurance of youth and better footballing habits than many first teamers, were just about ready to graduate.
At the time, picking three seventeen-year-olds and one eighteen-year-old was seen by sympathetic commentators as Revie’s attempt to ‘do a Cullis’ and emulate Wolverhampton Wanderers’ successful youth policy; others saw it as a strange and potentially lethal gamble. It has subsequently been interpreted as the defining moment in the club’s history. The four players in question – Gary Sprake, Rod Johnson, Paul Reaney and Norman Hunter – were all contemporaries of Bremner and had played in the same youth sides. Only Sprake had ever played for the first team, when he’d been flown to Southampton on the morning of the game the previous season and unhappily conceded four goals. On the Thursday before Leeds’ seventh game of the 1962/63 season, the four players were called aside after training and told, ‘underneath the main stand’, as Hunter recalled, that they’d been picked for the first team. Hunter, Reaney and Sprake were selected in the positions they would hold for at least the next ten years, while Johnson, a quick, slight forward, deputized for the injured Charles up front.
Astonishingly, Leeds won 2–0 with, according to the Yorkshire Post, the youngsters ‘bringing a zip the side has badly needed’. The most impressive debutant, Rod Johnson, scored one of the goals, but it was the other three who cemented regular first-team places. Hunter, incredibly, would not miss another league match until April 1965. Near the end of his life, in an interview with John Motson looking back on his career, Don Revie paid a highly emotional tribute to each of his lads. Hunter, he said, was so consistent that he got a level of ‘about 85 per cent’ from him each week. If this seems an unwitting damnation with faint praise, what Revie actually meant was that Hunter wasn’t a ‘form’ player, that right from his debut he effortlessly reached a standard which kept him in the team for fifteen years. Back then, Hunter was a ball-playing midfielder with good stamina and a good range of passing with his consummate left foot. It was only later that the ferociousness of his tackling, celebrated in the famous ‘Norman bites yer legs’ banner, began to overshadow his more creative attributes.
What Revie appreciated in a young player was pretty simple. If they had ability, desire and a willingness to work, he tended to sign them without bothering about their size or where they would eventually play: it would work out somehow. Many players benefited from his unblinkered approach. Hunter was an inside-forward who became a midfielder and then an international centre-back; Terry Cooper a winger who mutated into the best left-back in the world; Eddie Gray a central midfielder converted into a winger; Bremner and Giles wingers turned central midfielders. This ‘eye’ for potential has been all the more underrated because it didn’t work when Revie tried it with mature players for England, packing the midfield time and again with central defenders. But this alchemist’s skill with younger players transformed Leeds United.
With the highest paid player in the country now recovered from injury and just about to move into an £8,000-house in the village of Collingham the club had been obliged to purchase for him, John Charles naturally returned to first-team duty for the next match; Sprake, Reaney and Hunter all kept their places. Chelsea, who were to be promoted that season under Tommy Docherty, were thrashed at Elland Road by a Leeds team reduced to ten men after Eric Smith broke his leg in the 4th minute. The few match reports that exist of this unimportant fixture note the excellence of Johanneson’s performance in scoring both goals and significantly point to ‘a new atmosphere abroad at Elland Road’, with the 27,500 in the stands staying behind after the game to applaud the players in ‘a constant fever of excitement’.
Once again the optimism proved premature. Of the next five games Leeds drew three and lost two, and despite home attendances in excess of 25,000, the on-field experiment with Charles, the one thing everyone had been confide
nt of, was just not working. As a centre-forward at least, his capacity for Second Division football was exhausted. If he had scored regularly, he could have justified the transfer even though Leeds could no longer afford to retain him. But with his rickety confidence reflected in his slow and uncharacteristically hesitant contributions, the overtures from Italy were becoming increasingly difficult for club and player alike to resist.
The most trigger-happy element at a football club is usually its fans. It’s even more common at Elland Road, where scores of players over the years have been subjected to withering criticism for not meeting the required standard. Even homegrown kids have been canned off after a couple of games; in recent years a succession of over-priced imports have also suffered virulent abuse. Leeds fans think it’s healthy to do so. They’ve paid their money, and it’s their right, they would maintain, as the true guardians of the club’s spirit, to let the world know that Leeds United expects better. With Charles they made an exception, orchestrating a campaign for the club to show patience in the face of all the rumours concerning his impending departure: the Board should let him reacclimatize to English football, he remained a priceless asset and only needed, as Phil Brown put it, ‘a chance to hoist himself back on his own high pedestal’.
It was a complete misreading of the situation. The reasons for John Charles’ second spell ‘not working out’ are complex. He was actually a thoroughbred centre-half who for many years had masqueraded as a centre-forward – with unparalleled success – but that experiment had reached its sell-by date. Leeds couldn’t really afford him in the first place and they certainly couldn’t afford a £53,000 centre-half even if he was still one of the best around. Their investment was meant to score goals. Most importantly, the Board had gambled on the transfer essentially paying for itself, but the supporters had proved reluctant to bear financially the ‘Charles premium’ and, given Charles’ form, the Board were reluctant to underwrite the deal. Honourable as ever, Charles gave them a way out: ‘I have reached the stage now where I can’t sleep at nights,’ Charles exploded after another poor performance in the 0–0 draw with Derby County, when he had continually drifted behind his support striker Jim Storrie. ‘This is the first time my football has left me so long and I feel shattered. It was a mistake for me to come back.’ Days later Leeds accepted AS Roma’s £65,000 bid and put his still vacant house on the market. In hindsight this was, at last, the turning point. ‘Let him go and cheer on Bobby Collins,’ suggested a lone supportive letter in the Yorkshire Evening Post. ‘A team built around Collins will surely go places.’ Within three years they were in Europe. Roma’s gamble on Charles would be just as shortlived as Leeds’ had been: after only six months he went to Second Division Cardiff, and ended up four years later as player-manager of non-league Hereford.