We Are the Damned United

by Phil Rostron

  Speaking immediately after his lively Rangers side had sent United toppling 1–0 to their second defeat in five days, Jago told me: ‘Leeds are still a great side and they will be there or thereabouts in the chase for honours – make no mistake about that.

  ‘They were lacking several top players, and we expected them to be a bit desperate following their defeat at Stoke and because they would be wanting to please their new manager.

  ‘That desperation showed as the game went on. They threw plenty at us, but we dealt with it well.’

  Despite the fact that several Leeds first-teamers were unavailable through suspension, illness or injury, Jago was highly delighted with his side’s 1–0 victory even though they received help on the way to that success from a most unlikely source – goalkeeper David Harvey.

  Normally one of the soundest keepers in the business, Harvey allowed a 30-yard shot from Rangers striker Gerry Francis, which he appeared to have well covered, slip from his grasp for the ball to go into the net.

  Disappointed Harvey said afterwards: ‘I feel terrible about it, especially as it cost the lads the match. The ball must have “kicked” right at the last minute.

  ‘Mick Bates said it definitely swerved to the right very late, but I should have got my body behind it. It’s the worst mistake in my career.’

  There was some comfort however for Harvey from manager Brian Clough. ‘My sympathies went out to David Harvey. I felt sorry for him. It is essential however, that he forgets it,’ he said.

  Although that one error brought the only goal of the game, Harvey should not be made to shoulder the entire blame for this setback.

  United did not play as well as they can do. This was one inescapable fact. They lacked the rhythm and confidence that led them to becoming worthy champions last season.

  And Harvey redeemed himself later with some splendid work, notably when he raced out to save bravely as Givens rushed onto a poor back pass from Paul Reaney.

  Then a fine diving save to stop a shot from the same Rangers player further helped to make up for that first-half blunder.

  Though United are not at their best yet, there was a greatly encouraging display from Terry Cooper, who showed several glimpses of his skilful left-wing raiding, which helped make him the best attacking left-back in the country before he broke his leg.

  Also on the credit side was a sound display from defenders Gordon McQueen and Paul Reaney.

  Duncan McKenzie looked fitter than he did when he made his league debut on Saturday, and he went close on a couple of occasions to scoring that elusive first goal for Leeds.

  Clough named John O’Hare as substitute, but he gave Bremner’s vacant midfield role to Mick Bates in preference to his other Derby signing John McGovern.

  Bates worked hard, but again United lacked luck in front of goal, especially in the final 20 minutes when they launched a hectic assault on the Rangers goal.

  Attendance 31,497

  Leeds United: Harvey, Reaney, Cooper, Bates, McQueen, Cherry, Lorimer, Madeley, Jordan, Giles, McKenzie.

  QPR: Parkes, Clement, Gillard, Venables, Mancini (Busby), Webb, Thomas, Francis, Abbott, Back, Givens.

  Referee: Ralph Lee (Cheadle).

  Don Warters, Yorkshire Evening Post

  * * *

  John Wray says: ‘The immediate thought when Leeds got beaten 3–0 at Stoke in the first league game of the season was: “Are the players playing for him or aren’t they?” There was that sneaking suspicion that they might not be, although I cannot go entirely along with that because those players were proud men and proud of their own performances and abilities. They would not want to let themselves down. But there is such a thing as going the extra yard and there is the question of where those players would have gone, and did go, the extra yard for Don, were they prepared to do that for Cloughie? Don’t forget the lead-balloon stuff of orders to throw their medals away and the accusation of them being cheats. The second league match was a 1–0 home defeat by Queens Park Rangers in a match missed through suspension by Bremner, Clarke and Hunter. My match notes include: “Harvey let Francis’s shot slip through his hands for a soft winner.”’

  8

  PERSPECTIVES

  Don’t send me flowers when I’m dead. If you like me, send them while I’m alive.

  Brian Clough

  One of the perspectives I wanted to include in this book was on the value of a good relationship between the manager and the players, and between the manager and the board, at a football club. That, or the lack of it, was patently a crucial factor in the short time that Brian Clough survived as Leeds United’s manager. Further, I wanted to illustrate how that relationship might have changed between the 1970s and the 2000s. Peter Reid is the perfect authority on such matters.

  He was signing his first professional playing contract at the same time as Clough was taking over Leeds. By April 1998, he had been boss at Sunderland for three years and chairman Bob Murray was offering him a ringing endorsement, backing him as the club’s manager for the new millennium. He told the Newcastle Journal’s Ian Murtagh, ‘I think he is the new Brian Clough.’ Murtagh’s piece ran:

  On the eve of tonight’s do-or-die showdown against Ipswich at Portman Road, [Murray] compared Reid to the legendary Brian Clough, one of the most successful managers in footballing history. Reid’s contract at the Stadium of Light has 12 months to run, and once Sunderland’s destiny this term is decided, the board are ready to negotiate an extension to his current deal, which would make him the club’s longest-serving manager since Alan Brown in the ’60s.

  Murray said: ‘There are so few talented English managers in the game but Peter is definitely one of them. In some ways, I think he is the new Brian Clough. He can go all the way and I’d like to think it is with Sunderland. I believe the relationship between him and me is to be treasured and valued. Something awful must have gone wrong at Manchester City for them to sack him. I certainly haven’t seen it in his management here. He is in football for life and his commitment is total. We rarely talk about anything else than the game and he never takes holidays. He will do what he wants because he’s his own man but he loves this club and has an affinity with the people and the region.’

  In fact, Reid’s tenure at Sunderland lasted until October 2002. When he departed he had completed almost eight years’ service – a lifetime in modern-day football – and had etched his name forever on football in the north-east of England.

  That affinity with the people and the region mentioned by Bob Murray was something Reid shared with Clough, whose Middlesbrough contract was taken over by Sunderland in July 1961 and who was a great success in the North-east. At Boro, he scored 204 goals in 222 games, and he was equally prolific for his new club until, on Boxing Day 1962, he suffered a career-ending cruciate ligament injury.

  The coincidence of Clough’s and Reid’s involvement with Sunderland was to be repeated with Leeds. After departing Sunderland, Reid was out of work until March 2003, when he was appointed interim manager at Elland Road following the dismissal of Terry Venables. It was against all the odds that he kept Leeds in the Premier League, and he was rewarded with the offer of the job on a permanent basis. Leeds, however, were struggling financially, and Reid was forced to sell Harry Kewell to Liverpool and bring in cheaper players to take his place. Leeds were soon fighting to avoid relegation once more, and before the year ended Reid had been sacked after a 6–1 loss to recently promoted Portsmouth.

  As a player, Reid had few peers as a midfield enforcer. He joined Bolton Wanderers in 1974, gaining promotion to the top flight with them four years later, although they lasted only two seasons in the First Division. Reid, suffering from injuries and therefore commanding a fee of only £60,000, left for Everton in 1982. There, he was a member of the side that won the 1984 FA Cup, the league championship and European Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1985 (they came close to making it a treble but were defeated 1–0 by Manchester United in the FA Cup) and the championship again in 1987.r />
  Reid, who was voted PFA Footballer of the Year in 1985, won 13 caps for England and was outstanding in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. In 1989, he went to QPR on a free transfer before travelling to Manchester City the next season. When he arrived, City were managed by Howard Kendall. When in November 1990 Kendall left to return to Everton, Reid was given his first managerial role, being appointed City’s player-manager. In his first season in charge, the Blues came fifth in the league, beating rivals Manchester United. They finished in the same position the following season, but in 1992–93, they dropped to ninth. Reid was sacked at the beginning of the next season.

  Then, in a surprise move, Reid joined Southampton as a player. The team had been defeated in all but one of their first nine games of 1993–94. Despite playing only eight games, Reid was significant to the team’s revitalisation, and Saints made a partial recovery. When, after a defeat at the Dell at the hands of Norwich, their beleaguered manager Ian Branfoot was sacked, it was suggested that Reid might take the job. He maintained, however, that as Branfoot had brought him to Southampton, he felt that he too ought to move on. He played for Notts County and Bury, but soon retired for good.

  It was then that he restarted his management career at Sunderland. The team were struggling to stay in Division One, but Reid succeeded in keeping them there. Next season, 1995–96, they topped the division and were promoted to the Premier League. Reid had won the affection of the fans and that year a group of supporters had a minor hit under the name Simply Red and White with ‘Cheer Up, Peter Reid’, sung to the tune of ‘Daydream Believer’ by the Monkees. Unfortunately, Sunderland were back in the First Division for the next season, which meant, disappointingly, that their new 42,000-seat Stadium of Light, built to replace Roker Park, would initially be a second-tier stadium rather than one hosting Premier League football.

  In 1997–98, Sunderland lost out on automatic promotion by one place and drew 4–4 with Charlton Athletic in a thrilling play-off final at Wembley. Reid’s side were finally beaten 7–6 in a penalty shoot-out, only to come back the next season with a record-breaking 105-point First Division victory. In 1999–2000, Sunderland narrowly missed out on a place in Europe. They made it to seventh in the league, one of the best results ever achieved by a newly promoted Premier League team.

  Reid, who had briefly managed the national Under-21 team at the turn of the millennium, took the team to second in the top flight for a time, raising hopes for Champions League qualification, but gradually they dropped back down the league and ended up once more in seventh place.

  Having left Sunderland for Leeds, Reid had a brief spell in charge of Coventry City in 2004. Then, in 2008, when he had been out of the game for four years, he was appointed manager of the Thailand national team, aiming to qualify for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

  Reid says: ‘You were very aware as an apprentice professional not only of what was going on at your own club but throughout English football – after all, it was your lifestyle and livelihood – and Don Revie’s appointment as England manager and the arrival of Brian Clough as his replacement at Leeds was certainly very big news at the time. Even bigger news was Clough’s departure after only 44 days. What could Clough have achieved in that time? You rarely know the ins and outs of such high-profile events. The reasons for the sackings of football managers down the decades have been many and varied, and have made laughable that cliché of an explanation ‘mutual consent’. As I discovered most recently through what happened to my good friend Sam Allardyce at Newcastle, if a club wants you out, it will have you out.

  ‘Leeds had such great players . . . Giles, Hunter, Lorimer, Gray, Bremner – you could go on and on – but clubs are not necessarily successful through having good players alone. For big things to be achieved, the players have got to have respect for the manager and, in turn, the manager must respect his players. As manager, it’s your job to get the best out of your players and to give yourself a chance of doing that you have got to treat them right. If a player has done something to warrant a bollocking, then he must be given a bollocking but, by and large, I think players like discipline. They like to know where they stand. They’re human beings and, being human beings, if they’re allowed to take an inch, they’ll take another inch and then another. They have got to know where the cut-off point is. And it’s the manager who puts that marker in the sand who will gain the players’ respect.

  ‘They do this in different ways. Howard Kendall, for instance, was a terrific manager who got some great results through tactical awareness, although he had to earn the respect of the players and he got it in the end. The modern-day perception is that you can’t be too much of a disciplinarian with players, but Ferguson, Mourinho and Wenger have given the lie to that.

  ‘The ’70s was a golden era for character managers, Clough among them. Joe Mercer, Malcolm Allison, my own manager at Bolton Wanderers Ian Greaves, who was one of the Busby Babes, Ron Greenwood, Tommy Docherty, Bertie Mee – it was a generation of absolutely outstanding managers. Nowadays, the chairmen, chief executives, directors of football – all the hierarchical figures – are well known, but then it was just the manager at the forefront of affairs.

  ‘In my days at Manchester City, you’d just have the one local radio station coming down for a pre-match interview, but now a manager’s office, or the media centre, is like one huge recording studio, with microphones everywhere. You’ve got to be media savvy. Having said that, even back then Clough, Bill Shankly and Matt Busby were masters of it. There was an honesty about them in front of a television camera or a radio microphone that was somehow disarming. Clough, particularly, was brilliant. You don’t handle players like he did without having a certain amount of intelligence. These days, they put an emphasis on sports psychology; he ordered his players to have a pint, or a glass of wine if they preferred, just before a European Cup final. He made them do it. They had to have one. That’s genius. Clough’s generation didn’t have degrees, but they knew how to handle people. And that’s a gift. When Clough lost it and clipped a fan round his earhole, we were seeing his passion. Today, he’d have been in front of the Court of Human Rights, but then I think most people related to what he was doing and why.

  ‘I managed against him and played against teams managed by him, and it was invariably a pleasure because Clough’s teams played in the right way. He was always a laugh, as well. I remember being injured in one game, and by the time the final whistle had gone I was already changed. I had this blue check suit on. It was a bit loud. He came into the dressing-room and said to me, “Young man, you look like a clown. You should be in the circus.” I said, “You should borrow it. You’d make an even better clown because you’ve got the red nose to go with it!”

  ‘I always got the impression with Clough that he would say something controversial or provocative to his own players to test them, to see what they would come back with. And if they retorted with something amusing or witty, I think he liked them from that moment on. I never played for him, but that was always the impression I got when I was in his company. A big, big personality. With Peter Taylor, I think there were differences of opinion that led to a falling-out. Peter was a big character as well, and maybe, in the end, it was a clash of personalities. Peter would spot the players he knew could be moulded into his and Brian’s ways, and they had a great partnership together. I find it sad that they were never reconciled. Life’s too short for that.

  ‘Under Revie, Leeds had a very decent European pedigree, and they did well on the Continent again during the David O’Leary reign at the turn of the millennium. Some say Leeds have underachieved down the years, but I don’t go along with that opinion. They have had very good sides, but the truly great sides, the ones who win league championships, the domestic cups and the European trophies, invariably have great goalkeepers. This may sound harsh, and I don’t mean any disrespect to them, but I would not class Leeds’ Gary Sprake, David Harvey or David Stewart as being in the same league as people like Pete
r Shilton or Peter Schmeichel or Petr Cech. I believe that with a great, world-class goalkeeper in their ranks the Leeds of old would have won more than they did.

  ‘There are some rude things said about Don Revie sometimes, but there is no denying that he built a fantastic football side. There was genuine affection among the Leeds players for both Don and Les Cocker, who had brought most of them through from being boys into giants of the game. Just like Sir Alex Ferguson has been a father figure at Old Trafford over two decades, so Don was Daddy at Elland Road. I got into the England Under-21 side under Don and so acquired first-hand knowledge of the family atmosphere he was able to create, with his quizzes and card games and the like. The trouble with Clough at Leeds was that he tried to build Rome in a day. He was a man in too much of a hurry.’

  By the third game of the 1974–75 season, and with two league defeats on the board, Clough had every reason to feel a growing sense of urgency.

  * * *

  SATURDAY, 24 AUGUST 1974

  LEEDS UNITED 1, BIRMINGHAM CITY 0

  There was an air of anxiety over Leeds United for much of their game against Birmingham City at Elland Road, but their 1–0 victory took them a step along the road to recovery.

  United began in a way which suggested they might swamp the Blues with powerful attacking play, similar to that in the first half of last season, when they went 29 League games without defeat.

  Yet, when that much-needed early goal failed to materialise, United lapsed into a state of near nervous tension.

  Birmingham had not only been able to deal competently with United’s early intentions but succeeded in making time and space to show off their own attacking ability.

  They succeeded in giving as good as they got, but half-time came with the scoresheet blank and 60 minutes had gone before the stalemate was broken.

  United’s England striker Allan Clarke, playing his first game of the season after a two-match suspension, was the man to score and one could sense the huge sigh of relief around the ground as the ball sped low into the net.