by Phil Rostron
The Scots could do worse, Bremner ventures, than to look back on an old icon, Jim Baxter, for inspiration. ‘There was nobody like him when he was at his cocky best,’ Bremner recalls. ‘He actually liked humiliating people. We were set to play Italy in a World Cup qualifier and somebody mentioned he would be marked by their hero, Rivera. “Fucking Rivera? I’m a different class to him,” he said. “If I don’t get six nutmegs on him it’s drinks all round.” In front of a packed Hampden he put the ball through Rivera’s legs after five minutes, turned to me and shouted, “That’s one!” He stopped the count after six, but it could have been twenty-six!’
Just as his instincts were always pin sharp out on the pitch, Bremner’s pre-game analysis of the epic Euro 96 clash that followed was incredibly accurate – a demonstration of how well he understood his art, how accurately he could read the game of football and, above all, the passionate and intelligent character who stood at the heart of the squad Clough saw fit to deride.
Stirling-born Bremner has been voted Leeds United’s greatest player of all time and is a member of both the Scottish Football Hall of Fame and the English Football Hall of Fame. Having been rejected by Arsenal and Chelsea because of his diminutive stature, he was brought south by Leeds in 1959, signing for the club the day after he turned 17. He appeared for the first team in 1960 and was rarely left off Revie’s team sheet thereafter. His goal-scoring was quite prolific for a midfielder and that goal I witnessed against Manchester United was just one of four winners he came up with in major semi-finals. Bremner was at the heart of Leeds’ renewal in the early 1960s. As the decade wore on, the team became more and more successful, with Bremner an inspirational leader.
A heart attack claimed Bremner’s life, aged 54, in early December 1997. On the tenth anniversary of his death, Ron Yeats, who captained Liverpool to two championships and an FA Cup final victory over Leeds in the 1960s, recalled:
I’ll never forget a picture of the two of us tossing up before a big game at Anfield. I was 6 ft 3 in. and Billy was about 5 ft 3 in. We looked like Little and Large. But although he was only a wee man, he was a heavyweight player. He had the heart of a lion and he was a tremendous leader. He never gave up. He was an inspiration and he led by example. He expected the whole team to follow and they did.
Like most of Revie’s players, Bremner gave his soul to Leeds United and to a coach who needed every fighter he could find when he jumped into the hot seat at Elland Road. The same was true of Norman Hunter, as The Independent’s Brian Viner reported in a 2004 profile:
In Revie’s first full season as player-manager, 1961–62, his task was not so much to get Leeds out of the old Second Division into the First, but to prevent the drop into the Third. The notion of not only gaining promotion but building a side that would win European trophies, and come within a goal of winning the Double, must have seemed ludicrously remote . . . But Revie did just that, thanks not least to the promise he saw in a skinny Geordie, on whom he forced a daily glass of sherry with a raw egg mixed into it. And not just any old sherry, but Harvey’s Bristol Cream. ‘But there were still times when it made me throw up,’ says Hunter . . .
The Hunters live in a nice detached house in a genteel northern suburb of Leeds. His playing style, of course, was neither detached nor genteel. I ask whether it ever bothered him that his reputation was that of a hard man with an uncompromising tackle? After all, he was the inaugural Players’ Player of the Year in 1974, so he certainly had the respect of his peers.
Yet among the fans, he was cast as little more than a highly effective bruiser. When I interviewed the old Liverpool enforcer Tommy Smith, he grumbled that he was never given the credit he deserved for his ability to play. But Hunter claims to have suffered no such frustrations.
‘I was never concerned about anyone outside the Elland Road dressing-room,’ he says, ‘except maybe for Alf Ramsey.’ Even inside the dressing-room, Revie would only half-jokingly cast him as a one-dimensional footballer, reminding him that his job was to secure the ball and distribute it to the play-makers. ‘And he was right. Win it and give it to [Johnny] Giles or [Billy] Bremner. That’s what I did.’
Nonetheless, Hunter finds it remarkable that his name is synonymous even now with the turbo-charged tackle.
‘It’s quite amazing, really, why all those reputations should stick around from our era. The famous football hard men, even now, are Nobby Stiles, Tommy Smith, Chopper Harris and Norman Hunter, and I wonder why.
‘Even youngsters seem to know about us. There have been plenty of hard men since, harder men than me, but that period just seems to stick in people’s minds.’
I ask Hunter whether he ever intimidated an opposing player in the tunnel before a match, as Smith did. With a few choice words, two of which invariably were ‘effing’ and ‘hospital’, Smith was able, on occasion, to put the wind up an opponent to the extent that he was unable to concentrate on the game.
‘No, I never did that. But Don Revie always used to tell us to go in hard with the first tackle, because the referee would never book you for the first one. We used to call it the freebie. I’d go in hard, pick ’em up, say sorry to the referee, and sometimes you hardly saw the player again. Jimmy Greaves was one who didn’t like it, although having said that, he scored against me almost every time we played, did Jimmy. That was a brilliant era for forward play, and most of them hunted in pairs: [Alan] Gilzean and Greaves, Jeff Astle and Tony Brown, Denis Law and Georgie Best. I used to love playing against all those guys. I was never the quickest, and always had to give myself a start against a fast lad, but I could read situations.’
However, he got the script badly wrong in England’s infamous World Cup qualifier against Poland, in 1973. It is often forgotten that Hunter was part of England’s 1966 World Cup squad, and by 1973 he was still very much on the international scene. But he it was who lost the ball on Wembley’s halfway line, whereupon Poland cancelled out Allan Clarke’s opening goal. A dazzling performance by the Polish goalkeeper, Jan Tomacewski, ensured that England, world champions only seven years earlier, were denied a place in the following year’s World Cup finals in West Germany, which in turn caused Big Ben to stop chiming, and Admiral Nelson to fall off his column in Trafalgar Square. At any rate, a shocked nation mourned.
Not, of course, that Hunter needs any reminding of the implications of that unhappy 1–1 draw. ‘It’s funny,’ he says, with admirable lack of rancour, ‘I played over 700 games for Leeds, 120-odd games for Bristol City, and I’m remembered for three things: Norman bites yer legs [famously emblazoned on a Leeds United banner at the 1968 League Cup final], the punch-up with Francis Lee, and that goal against Poland. I was never even given a chance to forget about it, because every fourth year, when we tried to qualify for the World Cup, who did we draw in our group? Bloody Poland. And so the television clip of me missing the ball on the halfway line, Barry Davies commentating, them scoring, kept being shown again and again. Unbelievable.’
He proclaims it unbelievable, too, that his mentor, Revie, might ever have been involved in match-rigging. But he is aware of the rumours, which surfaced again recently when Bob Stokoe died. Stokoe loathed Revie, largely because he insisted that the Leeds manager had tried to bribe him, when he was manager at Bury.
‘I’ll defend Don Revie to the hilt,’ Hunter says. ‘My father died before I was born, I went there when I was 15, and he was a father figure to me. I got on extremely well with him, about as well as a player and manager could. He may have bent the rules a bit, and I noticed certain things myself, but I still think he was the best manager I’ve ever seen.’
Hunter’s praise for Revie is hardly unexpected; not so the implication that the great man may indeed have been corrupt. What does he mean by saying that he ‘noticed certain things’ himself? ‘Well, I heard those things that Bob Stokoe said, and there’s no smoke without fire,’ he says, disingenuously.
‘But he was a fantastic manager. Nobody paid more attention to detail than h
im and Alf Ramsey. He had all his famous dossiers on the opposition, and his methods were before their time. When he was England manager he tried to get Admiral to sponsor the kit, and got hammered for it. Look at sponsorship now! He also used to tell us to take the ball into the corner if we were winning with a couple of minutes to go. That was unheard of at the time. Everyone just played until the 90 minutes were up. But not Don Revie.’
The players at Elland Road in 1974 understood Revie’s management implicitly, in a way they never would Clough’s. The feeling was mutual, and Clough was adamant that changes at Leeds were necessary.
Peter Hampton says: ‘What became evident over Clough’s career was his total abhorrence of cheating in the game. I well remember playing against his Nottingham Forest side for Stoke, at Stoke, and the ball going out for a throw-in right by where he was standing. Probably 99 out of 100 managers in the game would pick it up and hold onto it until he was sure his own players had taken up their marking positions or kick it several yards down the track, but not Cloughie. As quick as a flash he threw the ball to me, an opposition player, so that I could take the throw. I was genuinely surprised by that, but in one gesture he had made something of a statement. He appeared to have got it into his mind before he joined Leeds that he did not like them for what might be termed their professionalism and I think that cleaning up their image was number one on his list of priorities.’
Hugh McIlmoyle adds: ‘He was a stickler for fair play. When I had finished playing football, I went to Forest to watch them play Arsenal and the home crowd, for some reason, were right on the back of the Gunners forward Charlie Nicholas. It was aggressive, brutal stuff and Cloughie came out of his dugout, turned to the fans, put his index finger to his lips and pushed down his hands in a hushing gesture. They suddenly went as quiet as mice.
‘That was the degree of Clough’s authority. On this occasion, he was a one-man crowd controller, and we all remember his cuffing of a couple of fans who ran onto the pitch after a cup tie and his subsequent apology. He was a truly remarkable man and the certainty is, in these days of political correctness, with the high-powered business world that football has become and with behavioural standards constantly under the microscope, we shall never see his like again.
‘I’m only guessing, but where he went wrong at Leeds was to have gone in there with the attitude “I’m going to show these bastards”. All he had to do was nurture what he had inherited.’
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I’d ask him how he thinks it should be done, have a chat about it for 20 minutes and then decide I was right.
Brian Clough on disagreements with players
With the inevitability of night following day, an incoming manager will bring changes to the club at which he is newly in charge, and Clough wasted little time before trying to stamp his mark on Leeds. He splashed out £240,000 on striker Duncan McKenzie from Nottingham Forest, £50,000 on Derby County centre-forward John O’Hare and £75,000 on Derby midfielder John McGovern, prompting local journalist John Wray to note: ‘Brian Clough has spent half as much inside a week as Don Revie paid out in 13 years as Leeds United’s manager.’
In another life, McKenzie could have made a highly successful career as a stand-up comedian, an actor or a circus performer. Born in Grimsby in the summer of 1950, the man who could mimic people so well, jump over a Mini car and throw a golf ball the length of a football pitch instead chose to be a footballer, and he was pretty good at that too. So good, in fact, that those who were privileged to see him in action still marvel at his silky skills. Having been hauled into Elland Road, McKenzie would be the only one of Clough’s signings to subsequently flourish at the club. Once he was a fixture in the Leeds side he soon became a high-profile member of the team, though it wasn’t until the 1975–76 season that he established himself as Allan Clarke’s striking partner and scored 16 goals in 39 matches. McKenzie was a hugely talented individual who could make mugs of the best defenders.
However, despite his skills, he could be an immensely frustrating player to play with. While he reserved his finest moments for big games, he was often anonymous against lesser opposition, and it was this inconsistency that caused him to be sold to Belgian side Anderlecht at the end of the 1975–76 season.
McKenzie believes that it was an FA Cup tie against Manchester City in January 1974 that earned him the lucrative move to Leeds. He played the starring role and scored as Forest inflicted a 4–1 defeat on the visitors in front of more than 40,000 fans. He says: ‘No one had really heard of me until one particular game, but then I had some luck. It was when there was a power strike, and Forest were playing an early game on a Sunday. It was the only game that was on, and all the number-one sportswriters were there to see it. It was one of those matches where I could have played well with my eyes shut, with everything going right. But I felt I deserved it because I had laboured long and hard without getting a break, often under conservative management. Knowing Cloughie, he would have probably been there watching that match.’
McKenzie, who spends much of his time these days as a very entertaining after-dinner speaker, elaborates: ‘I have a slightly different perspective on Cloughie’s time at Leeds in that, unlike the vast majority of the players there, who were part of the furniture and had grown up under Don Revie, Brian bought me. He paid Nottingham Forest £240,000 for my services, and his opening gambit once I had arrived was that he wanted me to mark his card about what was being said in the dressing-room and to be on the lookout on his behalf for any conspiracies or rebellious rumblings. I told him this was an unfair request and there was absolutely no way I was going to get involved in tittle-tattle or being his snitch. In some ways, I was the man in the middle, wanting to repay the faith the boss had in me with good performances out there on the pitch while also nurturing good relations with my new colleagues, most of whom disliked him.
‘It was a very delicate time all round for everyone at Elland Road. Don Revie had expressed a desire for Johnny Giles to succeed him in the hot seat, which was common knowledge, while Billy Bremner had wanted the job equally badly, which was less well known. Neither got it and Brian Clough did, and while there wasn’t exactly a division in the dressing-room, the overpowering feeling was that you had better be very careful what you said to whom both inside the club and beyond its environs. These were Yorkshire folk, suspicious of newcomers and interlopers and possessed to an extent by a sort of private members’ club mentality.
‘One of Cloughie’s signings, John O’Hare, was known to the Scottish contingent, such as Lorimer, Gray and Bremner, through their Scotland international involvement and was anyway a good lad who would have no trouble in fitting in. But they didn’t know me or John McGovern, Brian’s other signing. I was a joker both on and off the pitch and could usually raise the kind of laugh that would lighten the atmosphere and spark friendships. I think this was something they had never really experienced before at Leeds. I quickly made pals of all the players and many of us remain friends to this day.
‘I was in the least biased position of anybody at Elland Road, but I walked in there with something puzzling me. I could not fathom what Brian Clough had been doing with his life recently and could only conclude that he had become involved in a series of mistakes, of which managing Leeds was just the latest. What he was doing taking the job in the first place, I simply had no idea, but prior to this he had walked out on Derby County having won the championship with them, which was surely a misjudgement, and then accepted the job at Brighton. Getting Brighton out of the Third Division would have been beyond the powers of Houdini. Another error. I can only think that with Leeds he would have thought, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, “Yes, I’ll have this. We can have a bit of fun here.”
‘The backroom staff, particularly Syd Owen, despised Clough. During team talks, Syd would express his displeasure at Clough’s presence by deriding almost everything he said. In mocking tones, he would say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and, “Blah, bla
h, blah,” then tut-tut or give a groan, and it was both distracting and disrespectful. It was clear that he was anti-me, anti-O’Hare, anti-McGovern and anti anything else that was no longer Don Revie. Maurice Lindley, by contrast, was more easy-going and happy to go along with whatever was happening. But it was difficult to get away from the fact that here was Don Revie’s flock, into which a few of us had strayed. The Leeds situation consumed the football world at the time with questions such as why Revie had left, why Clough had taken over from him and how deep the hatred they had for each other ran.
‘Within a very short time of my arrival at Leeds, I did think, “This – Clough managing Leeds and Leeds being managed by Clough – isn’t going to last very long.” I was only 24 and a bit wet behind the ears, but I wasn’t so naive as to be unable to work out that they were not made nor meant for each other. The players didn’t like him. They didn’t like his traits of being very arrogant and hugely self-opinionated, nor his threats of how he was going to sort them out. They took umbrage, and I have to say that I could understand and had some sympathy for them when I looked at things from their points of view.