by Rob Bagchi
He saved his catch-all condemnation till the end. ‘I might as well tell you now,’ he said, as if there had been much room for misinterpretation. ‘You may have won all the domestic honours and some European honours, but as far as I am concerned you can all throw every one of your medals in the bin. You never won any of them fairly.’ With that he was gone, back up to his office with the brand new furniture and new secretary, Maureen Holdsworth, he had insisted on. It was to become his haven for the next five weeks even if, somewhat ominously, his nameplate kept falling off the door despite several attempts by the club’s handyman to glue it back in place.
Clough had a week after his outburst to prepare the team for the Charity Shield against Liverpool, a week that passed without further explosions. However, his lack of punctuality and habit of making the players wait around until he was ready to train continued to rankle and probably inspired more of the kicks he received during training than the memory of the previous Friday’s tirade. Discussions about squad strengthening continued with Cussins, but the price of his principal target, Leicester’s Peter Shilton, frightened the board, who were aware of the popularity of the incumbent, David Harvey, and were still labouring under the traditional English prejudice that goalkeepers were not worth huge fees. Shilton moved to Stoke instead for £325,000 and Clough had to settle with the £250,000 the board gave board gave him to spend on Nottingham Forest’s mercurial forward Duncan McKenzie.
After a meeting at a Sheffield hotel where McKenzie was greeted by the sight of his new manager walking towards him with a cigar clenched between his teeth and a bottle of champagne under each arm, the enigmatic striker became Leeds’ record purchase. A few days after signing his contract, Clough made contact again, this time asking him to be his eyes and ears in the dressing room. McKenzie, only the club’s second ever six-figure signing and faced with the prospect of trying to become the first outsider immediately to make it as a first-team regular since Allan Clarke four years previously, thought his mission already daunting enough and turned Clough down.
Previewing the Wembley match, Hugh McIlvanney interpreted the significance of the signing of McKenzie for those who were new to Clough’s approach. ‘His opening flourish of spending,’ he wrote, ‘has not surprised those who know him well, for it was obvious he could not come in behind Don Revie without announcing by the most tangible means that the firm was very definitely under new management.’ Striding out of the tunnel two paces respectfully behind the departing Bill Shankly, leading the team he had denounced for ‘violent behaviour, both physical and verbal’, symbolised, Clough hoped, that decisive break with the past. The match itself, however, usually the season’s prologue with little to recommend it, became synonymous with what the Observer’s Julie Welch called ‘a horrifying sustained period of aggression’. Leeds having hauled themselves back into the game with Trevor Cherry’s equaliser in the second half, the scoreline was overshadowed by a fight between Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan which only ended when both were sent off.
It had been a niggly game throughout, with both Liverpool’s Tommy Smith and United’s Giles being booked. When Keegan obstructed Bremner, who was trying to take a quick free-kick, the Leeds captain kicked him and subsequently found himself on the receiving end of the Liverpool forward’s fist. Their team-mates soon piled in, with Lorimer grabbing Bremner and pulling him away, but both protagonists continued to argue while the referee was in the process of booking them and he lost his patience and instead sent the pair off. They were the first British players ever to be dismissed at Wembley and if that was not disgrace enough they stripped off their shirts on the walk to the tunnel and threw them on the ground. Liverpool went on to win on penalties, but both sides lost by having their best players suspended for a mandatory three games, which was extended by eight more when the disciplinary panel met. Consequently, it was one of only two matches that Bremner, Revie’s talisman, played for his successor and far from signalling a new dawn, in Clough’s mind it epitomised the team’s spiteful nature. Two years earlier he had said he ‘despised what they stood for’; now it was his job to transform them and rebuild Leeds to reflect his own ideals. The only way he could do this was by changing the way they were perceived while they continued to win things. Without results, though, he did not stand a chance.
The League champions began their season against Stoke, the team that had ended their 29-match unbeaten run back in February, and again Leeds were smashed in the Potteries, this time 3–0. It was the first of six League games for Clough, a run that left them with only one win and two draws. Considering they had won the opening seven games of the previous season, the contrast was pretty stark. It was fair to say that Leeds had probably declined in a year but even those who thought Revie had left the team at the right time had to take into account that he had won four and drawn two of his last six games in charge, only three months before Clough took over.
Bremner’s absence through suspension did not help and neither did Clough’s failure to persuade the Peter Taylor to jack in his job at Brighton and come to his rescue. With only Allan Clarke, whom he continued to praise to the hilt, as his ally he was desperate for familiar faces and made a successful £130,000 bid to Derby for John McGovern and John O’Hare, two mainstays of his 1971–72 title-winning side. According to legend the two were thought sub-standard and ostracised on their arrival in the dressing room, but not according to Duncan McKenzie’s account. ‘No one ever thought for a moment that Brian Clough had bought two scrubbers,’ he said. ‘They were accepted and recognised as top-class professionals.’ Clough, however, had spent £380,000 in 10 days, more than Revie had spent in his last ten years at the club, and needed his signings to have an immediate impact.
He got his first victory in his third League match, a 1–0 victory against Birmingham with O’Hare and McGovern in the starting XI, but it was earned in front of a crowd of only 30,820. A defeat and a draw followed and by the time they played Luton on 7 September, they were in 18th place and the attendance had dwindled to 26,450. Sadly, the match took place only three days after the co-architect of Leeds’s rise, Harry Reynolds, had collapsed and died during a reserve game and, though the players wore black armbands in his memory, they couldn’t pay tribute by winning. The game, a 1–1 draw, was marred by the fans’ barracking of McGovern, who was unfortunate to be wearing the suspended Bremner’s shirt. The Scot would go on to have the last laugh by winning the European Cup twice with Nottingham Forest but his style as the ultimate unobtrusive link-player, or ‘water carrier’ as they subsequently became known, contrasted so conspicuously with Bremner’s all-round dynamism that he became a convenient crowd scapegoat. Afterwards Clough, himself a recipient of the bird, said: ‘It was the first time I had felt ashamed to be a Yorkshireman.’
He still claimed to have the full backing of the players, saying ‘I have never been so convinced of anything in my life as that’, but he said the spectre of Don Revie still loomed large over his squad. ‘Every time I go through the dressing room door the players are expecting him to walk in not me,’ he lamented. ‘He is certainly not going to be forgotten in four or five weeks. It will take months and months to forget him.’ Clough couldn’t quite see that the club and its players were so entwined with his predecessor, his values and achievements, that forgetting him was inconceivable.
Getting rid of a few of Revie’s players might have given him greater scope to impose his thinking on them but so many of them had come into the first team at roughly the same time back in the mid-sixties that the club had lumbered itself with a huge backlog of forthcoming testimonials. Offloading them before their payday was proving tricky to engineer. Twice he thought Giles might leave, either as Huddersfield’s assistant manager or as Tottenham’s manager, but the midfielder was enjoying playing too much to abandon Leeds’s quest for the European Cup and wanted the benefit game to which he was entitled. Shortly after the Luton draw Clough struck a deal with Forest to sell Terry Cooper, the England left-back who
had played only four games in more than two years after breaking his leg. ‘I have little choice but to leave,’ Cooper said. ‘Brian Clough has declared his hand in my case. What is the point in staying at a club when it is apparent you are not wanted.’ Unfortunately for Clough, Cooper was still wanted, at least by the board, who used the fact that they had not been informed that his sale had been agreed as a catalyst to address United’s travails. At a board meeting on the Monday night, panicked by low crowds, the hostility of the fans and by the club’s lack of direction, they decided to act. But they wanted someone else to do their dirty work for them.
Cussins and his vice-chairman called a meeting with the players and Clough, ostensibly to get to the bottom of why the champions had fallen so far. ‘Why are things going wrong?’ he asked. After some debate, the taciturn Paul Madeley, the least likely of assassins, stood up and said to Clough: ‘I just don’t think you can manage.’ It gave Sam Bolton, the vice-chairman, who had opposed hiring Clough, the ammunition he was looking for. ‘I told you we should have never hired this man,’ he said to Cussins as the meeting broke up. That night Leeds drew with Third Division Huddersfield Town in the League Cup, a draw only achieved by an 89th minute goal from Peter Lorimer, and on the bus home the chairman invited the manager back to his house for a drink. What was discussed in Alwoodley that night has never been revealed but the following afternoon the Yorkshire Evening Post reported that a ‘vote of no confidence’ from the players had left Clough’s job ‘hanging by a thread’. He was sacked the next day.
Speculation about the cause of his dismissal was rife but the most cited reasons were his semi-detached approach to training, his failure to explain coherently what he expected tactically and keeping his transfer business secret from the board. When Clough left Elland Road on September 12, with a pay-off of £100,000 and his club Mercedes, he grinned for the photographers and let Cussins hang himself with his words. ‘What has been done is for the good of the club,’ the chairman said. ‘The club and the happiness of the players must come first. Nothing can be successful unless the staff is happy.’ Clough walked away with the reflection that what had happened ‘was a very sad day for Leeds and for football’, hinting that player power had caused his demise. Cussins refused to elaborate further and made for his Rolls Royce, saying: ‘We’ve been spoilt by Don Revie.’
Pinpointing the blame is easy in this case. It rests on the one hand with the board, for hiring him in the first place and then professing shock when he acted entirely predictably, at least according to his own previous actions and pronouncements, and on the other with Clough himself, for his graceless impetuosity and lack of commonsense. The one person who can be exonerated is Don Revie, the ghost who bedevilled Clough’s mind. He intervened with neither players nor directors to sack the man who was now steering the club he had built off the edge of a cliff. Not that Clough was going to let him off the hook.
Austin Mitchell, the co-host with Richard Whiteley of Yorkshire Television’s local news programme Calendar and a self-professed Leeds fan, invited Clough and Revie on to the show to discuss the ‘Elland Road crisis’. In a tour de force performance, Clough rattled Revie, forcing the England manager to look brooding and saturnine while his successor sparkled. In the allotted time they argued over the tiniest details – Terry Yorath’s ‘enteritis’, how many players contracts were up for renewal and whether Frankie Gray could play up front, for example – but Clough kept scoring points with well-aimed barbs at Revie’s record. They even got into a strange bout of one-upmanship over who was, literally, the most hands-on with the players after Revie ridiculed Clough’s decision not to have a team meeting on his first day in charge.
Clough: ‘Talk to them? I took the shirts off their backs after they’d finished training.’
Revie: ‘I used to do that and massage them on Thursday.’
Clough: ‘Well that was my approach too, of course.’
Revie looked increasingly uncomfortable the more Clough relaxed into his old self, and was made to look rather silly when saying ‘no, no, no’ to counter Clough’s statement that his ambition had been to win the League ‘better’ than Revie, by losing only three games instead of four. ‘There is no way to win it better,’ Revie glowered. It is a remarkable piece of television but one that should never have happened. Whatever possessed the England manager to parade his hyper-sensitivity to criticism and allow his greatest detractor to expose his vulnerability is beyond comprehension. He had maintained all along that what happened at Leeds now was nothing to do with him but, it seems, he could not resist fighting an old enemy one more time. Whatever Revie had won in the past, even his greatest admirers would concede that Clough, who was far more nimble with words, gave him a pasting on television. It wasn’t the last time that Revie would look mournful in a camera’s glare.
Even when he sacked him Cussins had declared that Clough was ‘the best manager in the League outside Don Revie’. Now, presumably, as Clough quipped, that left Leeds chasing the third-best manager in the country. It wasn’t to be Johnny Giles, who was offered the job by a board split three votes to two in his favour. Learning of the opposition of Bob Roberts and Percy Woodward, he said: ‘The board do not appear to be united and I don’t want any bad feeling to spread.’ Meanwhile United won two and drew two with the caretaker Maurice Lindley in charge before settling on a successor, Bolton’s Jimmy Armfield. The former England captain said the Leeds panel who came to offer him the job ‘were four men in a flap’, and that he was in two minds whether to accept until he received an invitation from Don Revie to go for a chat.
‘All you have to do with those players,’ Revie said, ‘is send them out on the field. They’ll do the rest. You’ll be able to sit in the stand and pick up your bonus. They’re the best players in the country.’ His endorsement worked and Armfield took the job, thrillingly almost proving that the players were still capable of a glorious swan song, not just by being the best players in the country, but in Europe as well. In the League Armfield’s light touch and Bremner’s return on November 9 after injury and suspension galvanised them and they won five of the captain’s first seven games back to take them well clear of relegation danger. The skipper had missed the first round of the European Cup, a 5–3 aggregate victory over FC Zurich, when Lindley was minding the shop. He was also absent for Armfield’s debut in the competition, the second-round first leg 2–1 defeat of Ujpesti Dozsa in Budapest, but he made a scoring return in the 3–0 home leg victory and proceeded to stamp his mark on the tournament with a series of inspirational performances full of industry and brio.
With Clough gone and Bremner back, Leeds rallied to such an extent that they finished in ninth place in the League, only eight points behind the champions Derby County. Instructively for those who say the side was on its last legs when Revie left and saved themselves for Europe, they had been seven points behind the leaders after six games when Clough was sacked. Had they started the season better, back-to-back titles were not out of the question. They survived humiliation in the FA Cup after drawing with non-League Wimbledon when Dickie Guy saved Peter Lorimer’s penalty, Richard Stilgoe celebrating the feat in a song on Nationwide which mildly took the piss out of Leeds’ decline. But they won the replay and were only knocked out in the quarter-finals after enduring three replays with Ipswich Town. By that point they were already in the European Cup semi-final, having beaten Anderlecht home and away in the preceding round.
The first leg against the Belgians took place at Elland Road in swirling fog. It was was thick enough to leave the South Stand fans imploring the Kop to tell them what was happening whenever Leeds attacked at that end, and at several points visibility was so low the match could and probably should have been abandoned. Even the press box lost sight of the players – like ‘ancient armies lost in cannon smoke,’ wrote David Lacey. The clearest picture came on television and there it was plain to see how Bremner and Giles combined magnificently to open up Anderlecht’s flanks and provide a ser
ies of centres for Joe Jordan and Gordon McQueen to exploit. Both Scots scored, as did Lorimer, and Bremner went on to win the away leg 1–0 with an impudent chip. Small wonder Leeds fans often supported Scotland and that the club attracted so many supporters from north of the border.
Before United’s European Cup semi-final against Barcelona, the League and FA fell back on their established practices and refused to help the club’s preparations, forcing them to play six matches in twelve days. For once, however, this didn’t have its customary effect. The Catalans had not conceded a goal in the competition to date but Bremner soon rectified that, scoring with a forceful drive in the ninth minute. Paul Madeley, playing at the heart of defence in the absence of Hunter, matched Johan Cruyff stride for stride around Elland Road and Leeds created several decent chances in the first half for McQueen and Allan Clarke but could not extend their lead. When Juan Manuel Asensi equalised with twenty-five minutes to go, Leeds looked spent but then Paul Reaney, of all people, grabbed the game by the scruff of its neck, went on a marauding run and crossed for Jordan to tee-up Clarke to score the winner.
Another early goal in the return leg at the Camp Nou, this time from Lorimer after eight minutes, gave Leeds a two-goal cushion which they fought skilfully and doggedly to protect for more than an hour. There was some alarm when Barcelona got one back, multiplied almost immediately by a foul from McQueen who was sent off after whacking the home side’s scorer, Clares so forcibly that he was knocked out cold for almost a minute. Once again Leeds had Billy Bremner to thank for delivering them from danger when he ran behind the reserve goalkeeper David Stewart to kick a shot from Johan Neeskens off the line with only two minutes of the game to go. The reward for his tireless endeavour was to lead the team he had so relentlessly driven on into their first and only European Cup final.