by Rob Bagchi
Sandor Balogh, the manager of Hungarian side Ujpest Dozsa, whose team Leeds annihilated 4–1 in the home leg of their quarter-final, was quick to endorse United’s favourable continental impression: ‘I thought the way, right to the end, that the whole team was running about both in attack and defence was simply fantastic’ By the time the away leg came around, Revie’s men were so knackered that he had to cancel training. A brisk morning walk along the banks of the Danube was deemed sufficient and this welcome relaxed approach left them limber enough to secure the tie with an undemanding 1–1 draw.
For the semi-final Leeds were back on the Peninsula, drawn against Real Zaragoza. Leeds stuck to an overly cautious gameplan: Lorimer and Terry Cooper were dropped even though both had scored in the previous round, and this most awkward of matches was chosen for Greenhoff and Eddie Gray to make their European debuts. Conscious that Leeds had made all their running in the competition to date at Elland Road, Revie concocted a 4–5-1 system designed to allow only the two wingers to get forward in support of the isolated Jim Storrie. Most reporters thought these tactics a bit of a dog’s dinner. The idea was to stifle the opposition’s five-strong forward line, and it nearly worked, but after Leeds had lost a goal and seen Giles sent off, it needed Johanneson to score in a one-on-one with the keeper to save Revie’s face. He missed.
Always one to dig his feet in if criticized by those he considered football ignoramuses, Revie picked the same team for the home leg but gave them a more adventurous shape. Johanneson and Charlton scored in a 2–1 victory, and with the away goal rule still a pipe dream, Charlton was summoned to the centre-circle by the referee to toss a red and white disc to decide the venue for the play-off. In front of a jubilant home crowd of over 45,000, Charlton called correctly.
Perversely, the third game, with a place in the Final at stake, drew a smaller crowd to Elland Road than the previous fixture. Revie’s confidence was high but a spot of off-field gamesmanship beforehand spectacularly rebounded on him. According to Eddie Gray, who was now dropped to make room for Lorimer’s return, the manager had become convinced that Zaragoza would struggle in heavy conditions, so a few hours before kick-off he arranged for the local fire brigade to saturate the pitch. After only fifteen minutes United had conceded three goals. It was a classic case of the biter being bitten. There was no way back from such a defeat, and Leeds’ first European Cup campaign was over. Revie refused to moan, however, and accepted that a superior team had outclassed his inexperienced lads. ‘We gave all we had but it was nowhere near good enough,’ he admitted sadly. It was far better than anyone had predicted. He had learned a lot, his players adored the whole European experience and he vowed that next year they would go further.
To his intense disappointment the next season’s European jaunt turned out to be another staging post in a convoluted learning process rather than the culmination of his strenuous efforts to transform his contenders into winners. Over the course of three seasons, Leeds would laboriously drag themselves from Fairs Cup semi-finalists to finalists to winners – first bronze, then silver, finally gold. Imagine the fortitude this feat took, the sheer resilience of Revie and his team, cursing their luck but never each other, overcoming the desolation with a freakishly detached appreciation of the progress they had made and their faith in the principles and methods that had carried them thus far. It was a lot to endure without the abuse on top. It was one thing to fall short after an arduous campaign: that was something he could correct. It was quite another to be called muffers, bunglers, lemons and Jonahs for doing so, with that hint of a psychological frailty impossible to rectify. Revie, revealing his superstitious side, maintained that the club was cursed with bad luck. It made him all the more adamant that he would not change, and if a ‘fuck the world’ attitude was occasionally discernible in his team’s play, it was entirely understandable.
The route to the final in 1967 would be remarkably similar to the season before, encompassing another trip to Valencia, a much heralded return to Italy, the fortuitous spin of a disc and complete mental and physical exhaustion. The team hadn’t changed much either. After Collins had failed to make an effective comeback, Charlton, wearing lightly the celebrity England’s World Cup win that summer had bestowed upon him, assumed the mantle of senior professional. His colleagues respected him and probably had more genuine affection for him than they had for Collins, but they didn’t defer to him and definitely weren’t frightened of him. Indeed, the practical jokes at his expense continued apace. Leeds were very much a team of equals now, and it took a while for them to assimilate the responsibility that this demanded.
Much of the speculation around the city at this time centred on Revie’s strange reluctance to give his team one last shove towards success by signing someone of Collins’ calibre to replace the erstwhile captain. He believed his players already had everything it would take to win trophies and, with Matt Busby’s advice as his touchstone, had based his team on a strong core of homegrown players. His view of teamwork was that it only thrived in the absence of ego. The fear that this could be diluted by the injudicious purchase of an outsider, someone not schooled in the Leeds way, made him hesitant. He recognized that he was in a dangerous position. Just one bad signing at this point could upset everything if the bad habits the player brought with him proved to be infectious among Revie’s still impressionable squad. For now, he preferred to keep Reynolds’ money in the bank.
Every season for the past four years one or more of the young professionals in the reserves had been promoted to the first-team group, most of them achieving ‘regular’ status within a few months of their debuts. In 1966 it was the turn of Eddie Gray and Paul Madeley to graduate from cameo or understudy appearances to holding down their places. Madeley, Revie’s model pupil, was an immaculate presence in the dressing-room and arguably the most important player in United’s squad. His elegant athleticism, unhurried and apparently effortless, earned him Revie’s nickname of ‘The Rolls-Royce’. In four years Revie had reaped seven first-team regulars – Sprake, Reaney, Madeley, Hunter, Lorimer, Gray and Cooper – from Cocker and Owen’s prodigious nursery. As if to emphasize how much the situation had evolved at Elland Road, Leeds’ inactivity in the transfer market demonstrated the move away from the short-termism that had dominated the early part of Revie’s tenure, to the placid, patient confidence of the middle part. It was only later, when he had grasped that the 1966 vintage was the last great year before the blight set in, that he decided to solve the problems in Leeds’ attack by more conventional means.
Revie’s perfect centre-forward would have to meet some pretty exacting criteria. Perversely, the manager wasn’t looking for a predatory goalscorer, someone from the Jimmy Greaves mould. He wanted someone who was prepared to sweat, to keep running, with the physique to shield the ball; someone who was dominant in the air, courageous, unselfish and, above all, persistent. He knew that the others in his team, mainly the midfielders but also Charlton, would continue to score, so he needed someone as much to help them score more as much as to grab 20 goals a season himself. In Greenhoff and Belfitt he had two players who together combined all the attributes but individually fell short of Revie’s ideal.
Belfitt was the workhorse personified: a strong runner with a neat first touch but who lacked pace, power and consistency. Greenhoff was a languid, graceful striker who seemed to glide through games. The fans loved him, as they always love those whose skills are unattainable. Some looked at Belfitt and thought, ‘I could do that.’ Everyone knew that what Greenhoff had was out of their reach. Nonetheless, their records were similar and though, of course, Greenhoff went on to have a good if not great career, it was Belfitt who came closest to fitting Revie’s requirements. He was the prototype Mick Jones.
Their limitations notwithstanding, both men featured strongly in Leeds’ second Fairs Cup ordeal. A bye in the first round meant that it was a more compressed event for the team that year, and by walloping DWS Amsterdam 8–2 in the second rou
nd, United had the luxury of concentrating on domestic affairs until mid-January. A makeshift Leeds team sealed the return tie with Valencia in Spain, with Terry Hibbitt, deputizing for the injured O’Grady and Johanneson, giving an impressive performance on the left wing in a 2–0 victory. Having only played four games, two of them walkovers, Leeds strolled into their quarter-final tie with Bologna in irrepressible form.
After an FA Cup replay on the Monday night, Leeds took the 5.30 a.m. Tuesday flight to Italy. Revie had argued that the Fairs Cup should take precedence and the Cup game be postponed, but much to his exasperation the FA’s view that forty-eight hours was ample preparation time prevailed. To say that the team were jaded would be an understatement, but they rallied well, with Bremner and Giles toiling splendidly to provide defensive cover and Cooper, on the wing, providing an effective outlet to give the midfield and defence an occasional breather.
In a pulsating home leg Giles’ eighth-minute penalty levelled the aggregate score. Both sides, uncharacteristically, went all out for the winner, but even in extra time the decisive goal never came. Although penalty shoot-outs to decide deadlocked games have lost all their lustre since England’s travails in the 1990s, at least they have an element of skill attached to them. Leeds v Bologna came down to the toss of a disc, not this year to decide the venue for the replay, but actually to settle the match! Bulgarelli, the Bologna captain, after three and a half hours of exertion, made his first mistake. He called ‘red’; the disc landed white side up and for the second year in succession Leeds’ progression was down to good fortune – not a bad record for a supposedly jinxed club!
The Fairs Cup semi-final against Kilmarnock took place on the Friday night before the FA Cup Final. In the space of 30 minutes Rod Belfitt produced the finest performance of his spasmodic Leeds career by scoring a hat-trick. The Scots managed to scramble two goals back, but when Giles scored Leeds’ fourth, the tie was essentially over. With such a commanding lead, United casually strangled the away leg, blockading their own goal with ease to ensure their place in the Final. The old football mantra ‘if you can’t win, make sure you don’t lose’ was not welcomed by observers who preferred teams to entertain – the journalist John Rafferty dismissed them as ‘a team which plays sternly but unattractively, who hope to win but above all do not want to lose’.
Were Leeds stifled by their manager’s wariness? As the great Sir Humphrey Appleby put it to Jim Hacker in Yes, Minister, ‘A cynic is what an idealist terms a realist.’ A fixture backlog throughout Europe had resulted in the Final being postponed until the beginning of the next season. Unlike some of his sanctified contemporaries, Revie felt no obligation to the game in its wider context. He couldn’t afford such affectation. All that mattered to him was that his players embarked on their holidays with a Cup Final to look forward to. He wasn’t frightened of losing, as so many of his detractors maintained: he hated it.
The Final was against the powerful Yugoslavian side Dinamo Zagreb, the pride of Croatian nationalism. No team likes playing such important games at the beginning of the football season, but even Revie had to admit that by August, Leeds were in far better shape than they were in May. After seven weeks’ holiday and five weeks’ training, tiredness was no longer a plausible excuse. The problem this time was momentum. UEFA weren’t quite as unsympathetic as the FA would probably have been, and scheduled the final ties for the last week in August, allowing Leeds three league games to find some form. Having been such good starters in the past, however, United chose this moment to stutter. They could manage only one goal in a wretched run of a draw and two defeats that preceded the away leg of the Fairs Cup Final.
Stuck in this rut, Revie had instructed them to keep it tight for the Final and play on the break, but two Dinamo goals, more than Leeds had ever conceded away in Europe, rendered his strategy useless. The omens for the home tie a week later were also inauspicious. Though Leeds had managed the first victory of the season in their home game with Fulham on the intervening Saturday, Bremner had been sent off and sections of the crowd, renowned more for its tetchiness than for its savagery, erupted in a full-scale fight with opposition fans and the police. There had been a few isolated incidents before: one arrest for a serious offence – throwing a beer bottle at a Sheffield United player the previous season; several more for trivial stuff like swearing and throwing toilet rolls; and one for a fan who pelted the Sunderland bus with biscuits. The Fulham game marked a significant escalation in violence. After United’s capitulation in Yugoslavia, the home leg of the Fairs Cup Final hardly helped matters. Dinamo Zagreb cannily held out for a 0–0 draw, with the same tactics Leeds had flirted with in the first game, and United were consigned to their fourth runners’ up spot in three seasons. It was becoming difficult to tell who was getting more frustrated, the team or its supporters.
There can be no doubt that the crowd’s behaviour had deteriorated over the past five seasons. On the back of their strong showing, Leeds had begun to attract a sizeable teenage crowd keen to associate itself with success. When this did not materialize as quickly as anticipated, the hostility shown to opposition players and referees increased, in place of the sportsmanship that had so charmed Torino. This intensified the atmosphere at Elland Road, a trend not helped, arguably, by the conduct of some of the players.
Revie had always intended that Bremner would eventually be captain of Leeds United, but Collins’ injury and Charlton’s reluctance to give up his superstitious ritual of always being last man on the pitch – an example of how Revie’s bizarre notions were spreading through his squad – thrust the arm-band on Bremner prematurely. He had everything a good skipper should have – ‘for the sake of Leeds United’ as the song ‘Glory, Glory Leeds United’ put it, ‘he would break himself in two’ – but he was also easy to provoke, quick to argue and could rarely resist retaliation when kicked. Watching the home tie against Zagreb, Arthur Hopcraft identified a correlation between Bremner’s performance and the new viciousness abroad at Elland Road. ‘The affection for Bremner among the Leeds crowd,’ he wrote, ‘is the most vivid current illustration of one of the most constant aspects of football addiction: the fans’ appointment of villains to be cherished for their personality. Bremner is a highly gifted player but he draws most approval from the crowd when his temper breaks into, and overtakes, the game.’
It is easy to see why Bremner remains the supporters’ favourite ever player. This tendency to lose control when riled was always indulged by the fans – because most of them liked to imagine themselves reacting in the same way. He was the supporter on the pitch. Crowds always respond to players who wear their emotions so openly, but he can’t be blamed for their lack of control. The exasperation at Leeds’ predicament ate away at them both. He had given everything for the cause for eight long years and was always involved in everything that went on. Failing again aggravated the tense and volatile sense of perpetual anti-climax that the club just could not shake off. The incitement was mutual.
So much work, so much improvement, yet the breakthrough looked as remote as ever. The catalogue of misfortune in Europe was mirrored at home: runners-up in the league in 1965/66, followed by two fourth-placed finishes and, more heartbreaking still, back to back FA Cup semi-final defeats in 1966/67 and 1967/68. The loss to Chelsea in 1967 was the most galling. Although Revie was sporting his lucky blue suit, a garment as fabled in Leeds as the golden fleece is among Antiquarians, United still lost 1–0 after a pernickety decision by referee Ken Burns. The dapper Don’s favourite outfit was a plain serge, single-breasted suit usually complemented in the midst of winter by the ubiquitous sheepskin jacket. It seemed to comfort him to wear it but the luck didn’t always rub off on his team. Lorimer had ‘scored’ from a free-kick in the dying moments, but since Chelsea’s wall had not retreated the full 10 yards, a rule more honoured in the breach than the observance, the ‘equalizer’ was expunged. Even Kenneth Wolstenholme, a man not noted for his scorn for referees, was moved to remark in his telev
ized commentary, ‘You’ll have to look in the rules book backwards to find a reason.’ Leeds surrounded the referee but the prolonged protestations proved fruitless. The free-kick was retaken, easily cleared, the game lost and another entry found its way onto Revie’s long ledger of grievances with the FA and its officials.
So often when it came down to the referee’s discretion at crucial junctures, Burns here, Tinkler in 1971, Michas in 1973, not to mention Kitabdjian in 1975, Leeds lost out. Like the old joke, some maintain that Don Revie wouldn’t have been so paranoid if those buggers hadn’t been out to get him! But the referee’s decision was not the main reason why Leeds lost to Chelsea. They were outplayed on the day, with Tony Hateley having a field day in the absence of Jack Charlton. Banging on about bad luck avoided the issues – Leeds hadn’t had a centre-forward to speak of for nearly two years and their centre half was injured. United’s continued inability to cash in when things were going well was making the club and its supporters neurotic.
As the 1967/68 season progressed, the urge to silence the critics, to ram their doubts back down their throats, became Leeds’ over-riding motivation. To do it, Revie had to sacrifice his sentimental dream of a team made up from homegrown stock and finally acknowledged the gaping hole in his side. In late September, on the back of profits approaching £150,000 in the previous two seasons, he broke the club’s transfer record and signed Sheffield United’s Mick Jones. Jones would become the unsung hero of Leeds’ golden period: his tirelessness and extraordinary, some would argue foolhardy, courage gave a fluency to the team that had been absent since Peacock’s demise.
At first, the centre-forward’s ungainliness seemed to suggest that Revie had made a spectacular misjudgement, but the one-on-one sessions he put Jones through and the extra classes run by Owen and Cocker quickly brought results. By the middle of the season, after such a dour, defensive dormancy, the team sprang into life, wreaking an awesome 7–0 revenge on Chelsea, a team in farcical disarray after Tommy Docherty’s resignation.