by Phil Rostron
11
THE HACK
If you think of a killer phrase that sums up your story, the media will swoop on it like vultures. Keep them fed and you’ll keep them at arm’s length, with you in control.
Brian Clough
Brian Clough’s last days at Leeds were charted by wordsmith John Wray for the Bradford Telegraph & Argus as follows:
ONLY ONE WAY TO END THOSE DOUBTS
No one hung out a ‘Welcome’ banner when Brian Clough reported for duty as Leeds United’s new manager last month. Predictably, his arrival was greeted with stony silence by the apprehensive players. It was the sort of welcome a stepfather might expect from his newly acquired family. The decision of trainer Les Cocker to accept an offer to become assistant to England team manager Don Revie spread still more gloom in the dressing-room. Lesser mortals than Brian Clough would have bolted for the door within minutes of arriving.
LEEDS HOLD MEETING TO CLEAR THE AIR
Leeds United chairman Manny Cussins called a clear-the-air meeting with the players and manager Brian Clough today. Cussins decided to arrange the get-together despite an assurance from the manager that the players were giving him full backing. Clough said: ‘I have never been more convinced that I have the full support of every player at Leeds United.’
GILES: LEEDS BOARD DECIDE ON MONDAY
Leeds United will not make a decision until Monday on whether to appoint Johnny Giles as their new manager following last night’s sensational sacking of Brian Clough. ‘If the terms are right I’ll take the job,’ said Giles. Now player power has overthrown Clough. ‘No club can be successful unless the players and staff are happy,’ said Cussins. ‘The players were critical of his methods.’
DIRECTOR LASHES CLOUGH SACKING
Leeds United director Mr Bob Roberts – the only member of the board not present when the decision to sack Brian Clough was taken last night – reacted angrily to the news today, saying: ‘It’s absolutely shocking. Clough hasn’t had a chance. He’s not been there five minutes.’ Speaking from his holiday hotel in Majorca, Mr Roberts said: ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there to take part in the discussions, but I have not heard a thing from Leeds. If there was a crisis, they could at least have asked me to return. I still think we got the right man and it is a loss to Leeds United in my opinion.’
IT TOOK COURAGE TO SACK CLOUGH
Don’t castigate Leeds United’s board of directors for showing Brian Clough the door after only 44 days in the job. They had no alternative! Drastic measures were called for to prevent internal ill feeling from destroying the club. The differences between Clough and his players were too deep-rooted to be solved by moderate methods.
BREMNER HELPS TO PICK TEAM
Suspended Leeds captain Billy Bremner was called in today to help with the selection of the squad for tomorrow’s league game at Burnley. The squad of 13 was chosen by assistant manager Maurice Lindley and chief coach Syd Owen, in consultation with Bremner. Significantly there is no place for any of Clough’s signings since he took over the job at Elland Road – John O’Hare, John McGovern and Duncan McKenzie.
BREMNER HITS OUT AT CLOUGH REMARKS
Leeds United’s suspended captain Billy Bremner lashed back at Brian Clough today after the fired Leeds boss accused him of trying to run the club. Clough, in a recorded interview for the ITV programme On the Ball, said: ‘When Bremner called me boss it meant nothing. He’d got to call me boss and believe it. What Bremner has to establish is that he is not the manager of Leeds United. I was.’ Bremner rapped back: ‘Nothing that Brian Clough says or does surprises me. Although I don’t want to be drawn into a dispute with him, his remarks make me very annoyed. It is ridiculous to say I tried to manage the club. I have my own opinion of Mr Clough.’
Given the sequence of events Wray describes, it comes as no surprise that the opening chapter in his book about Leeds United is entitled ‘When Brian Clough Was Mr Angry’.
Today, explaining how he came to follow the club so closely, Wray says: ‘I’d been brought up on rugby league rather than football. I failed my 11-plus miserably – on the maths side, I hasten to add – but fortunately my parents moved house so that I could get into the comprehensive school in Leeds rather than the dead-end of the local secondary modern. I was a late developer in a school that played rugby union, but while I preferred the 13-a-side game, union came a good second. There was football, cross-country and athletics as well, so I did do a bit of sport and ended up getting my school colours. I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do career-wise, even though I always got top marks in English and it should have seemed natural to marry sport and English together. Then a friend of my mother’s saw an advert in a local paper, the Pudsey News, seeking somebody keen on sport to write for them. I applied and got the job and it turned out to be that of sports editor! I was straight in at the deep end, planning pages and subediting all the submitted reports, and, as you did in those days, I ended up getting a grounding in everything. Paid-for papers covered everything that moved – the town council, all the courts and even funerals and local dramatic society reviews. There were also the obligatory visits to the vicars.
‘From a sport point of view, it was great because it meant that I could cover Bramley Rugby League Club. That was a joy. I would travel everywhere with them, and I became really good friends with all the players, who were part-timers. A lot of them didn’t have cars and would travel to games on buses. I became particular friends with a player called Dave Horn, a big prop-forward whose job was as a drayman at Tetley’s Brewery. He was the players’ shop steward. If ever they had a grievance, he would go to the board and argue their case. I would not have liked to have been on that board, because Dave was pretty formidable! He used to score tries with five men on his back – that kind of colossus. They had a social club at Bramley, and I’d go with the team to watch the turns before we’d all pile up to Dave’s house in Pudsey and sink a barrel of beer! By the time we’d finished, I’d have enough in my notebook to last a week. I also wrote about the local non-league football team Farsley Celtic. The first time I covered them, I got a team sheet, but, unbeknown to me, between me being given that team sheet and the team taking to the park, there had been several changes. Of course, I got all the goal-scorers wrong and goodness knows what else wrong, and with everybody knowing everybody else in Pudsey, there were lots of angry phone calls to the editor.
‘I survived that and around this time, the early 1960s, Leeds United had started to do really well in the Second Division under Don Revie. Having been rugby-mad all my life, it was kicking and screaming that I was dragged by a few school chums along to Elland Road to watch a few matches in the old Scratching Shed, but I thought, “OK, it’s not bad this.” I liked Jim Storrie, who scored lots and lots of goals for Leeds but who was bow-legged and didn’t have a lot of skill. He was, however, always in the right place at the right time and the ball would go in off all parts of his body. He scored some vital goals and the fans loved him. This developed a grain of interest, and after a couple of years at the Pudsey News, I thought we should be writing about Leeds, if for no other reason than it would get me into the press-box. To start off with, I did something a bit different, an early version of a form report, consisting of a little write-up and a rating out of ten for each individual player. I can’t claim that anyone copied it, although today, of course, it’s the norm.
‘Also around that time, I got a call from a guy called Victor Railton, the main soccer writer for the now long defunct London Evening News, asking if I would cover the London teams when they came up to Leeds. Soon after, when Leeds were doing well in Division One with a team of household names, the Evening Standard made the same request, only they wanted coverage of Leeds whenever a story broke. These were my first tastes of freelancing, which I eventually became involved in permanently. I reached the end of my five-year indentures as deputy editor of the Pudsey News, and the logical next step was to move to an evening newspaper. I was offered the editorship
when the editor left, but I was only in my early 20s, and although it was flattering, I felt I didn’t have enough experience. I still don’t know if I made the right decision but when I think about all the experience covering Leeds United brought me – the travelling throughout Europe, rubbing shoulders with interesting people and so on – I think I was right to join the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, who anyway offered me a couple of pounds more to be a news reporter than the Pudsey Times were offering me to become editor.
‘I thought my first day with the T&A would be just a gentle introduction, but on that particular day there had been a shooting in Farsley. A nightwatchman and a police inspector had been shot dead, and a massive manhunt was on for the killer. It became big national news. I was sent out on the story, and, instead of a nice little nine-to-five, I was on duty for the best part of twenty-four hours, mostly at Pudsey police station after knocking on doors and doing an atmospheric piece. The headline was “Doors Knocked in Village of Fear”, and it was on the front page, so I was well chuffed with my first day! This was when papers were papers. You didn’t have to wait until the next day to get your story into print; you rushed it through from a payphone.
‘The T&A had an excellent editor called Peter Harland, who went, I think, to the Sunday Times eventually. He decided that although he was editing a Bradford paper, Leeds United were doing so well that they merited coverage. Don Warters was presented with this task, and in 1970, when Phil Brown of the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds retired, Don moved over there and opened the way for me in Bradford. The first game I covered was a friendly at Doncaster, and the first proper game I covered was against Manchester United at Old Trafford, which was memorable for Mick Jones scoring the winning goal.
‘Don Revie was so welcoming. Three of us journalists were allowed to travel to away matches on the team coach, which was great, because we had access to the players. However, anything you overheard that was not supposed to be in the public domain was fully expected to remain on that team coach. You were put on trust, and, of course, that trust was never to be compromised. It was clear that any transgression would result in your being kicked off the bus double quick, never to return. It was an unwritten law, really, that you heard all, saw all and said nothing. I did once get banned for a couple of days over something I’d written. Don had been criticising referees and was in trouble with the FA. After this particular match, I think at Sheffield United, there were questions as to how well his team had played. He bristled at this, saying, “Look, you shouldn’t be criticising my players. The man you should be criticising is the man in black.” This, of course, was an obvious story because of his brushes with the authorities, and I couldn’t ignore it. Had I done so, the editor might have read it elsewhere and would have wanted to know why I had chosen not to mention it.
‘The following day, unfortunately, Don was driving through the centre of Leeds and the T&A had placed a newsbill just outside the railway station. He saw it. “REVIE SLAMS ANOTHER REF”, it screamed, so without even reading the story he rang the editor and told him, “You can tell that John Wray that he will not be welcome at this club any more.” My boss called me into his office and said I really should have realised that Don potentially could have been in serious trouble over this and did I not think I should have gone a bit easier on him. I was really surprised at this reaction, though I realise in hindsight that Don could be very forceful and had clearly made his point. The editor asked me to produce my shorthand note of Don’s observations, which, thankfully, I was able to provide, and a couple of days later Don rang me and said, “Sorry I had to do that, but I really had to cover my back with the FA and deny what I’d said.” Thereafter, there were no problems between us whatsoever.
‘Players of the time would tell you that if they had a grievance or were seeking a pay rise and they had to go to see Don, they would knock on his door with trepidation, almost trembling, at what the reaction might be. He could be a fearsome figure at times, but at others he was a charming, caring father figure. This latter side he showed largely to the players, which was how he got such immense loyalty. If, however, he had a grievance with the press, which he often did, more with the national papers than the locals, then they knew about it and would be castigated in no uncertain terms. But by and large, he was terrific to deal with. Many a time if we were in a hotel he’d insist on putting your meal on his room account and if he didn’t have a story he would make one up for you, perhaps concerning a player he might be interested in signing or something like that.
‘At that time, publicity was expensive if you had to pay for it through advertising, and Don realised that a story in the local paper every night was wonderful free publicity and space you couldn’t buy. He made sure we had plenty of stories. Don’s big pal over at Liverpool, Bill Shankly, was similarly well inclined towards the local press. You could ring Liverpool and sometimes Bill would be passing by and answer the switchboard phone himself! You always knew you could get hold of him if you needed to. If Leeds were playing Liverpool and you wanted some quotes from him for your match preview, you’d ring between 8.30 and 9 a.m. and be guaranteed a result.
‘Another memorable thing about Don was his superstitious nature. One morning he had left his home for the ground and realised he had left his briefcase behind. So he returned and asked Elsie, his wife, to pass the briefcase through the window to him because it was “bad luck” to leave the house twice to make the same journey. Then, of course, there was the lucky blue suit, of which Brian Clough observed, “It must have ponged a bit after all those years and all those matches he’d worn it!” Perhaps most famously, though, he persuaded himself during a run of bad results that a curse had been put upon the Elland Road ground and duly called in a Gypsy woman from Scarborough to lift it. She apparently crouched down and peed on all four corners of the pitch. It must have worked because Leeds went on to great things. Some of the players had superstitions too. Jack Charlton had to be last out of the tunnel, for instance, and others had to tie their left boot before the right or vice versa.
‘Happy days. But one of the drawbacks of travelling on the team coach was that Billy Bremner was a chain-smoker with nicotine-stained fingers and every time I got home after partaking in Billy’s card school, my wife Helen complained that I stank of cigarette smoke and insisted that my clothes go to the dry cleaner. The cleaning bills were astronomical! It was the same when Billy became manager. He was just the same at cards as he was on the football field – he simply hated to lose. And if you’d played a wrong card two or three tricks back he would know about it and haul you over the coals.
‘You got to know the board members too. Manny Cussins was head of John Peters, the furniture company, and even though he was a millionaire, he would go onto the shop floor and sell suites himself. Helen and I would go in looking for something to smarten up the lounge and he would be there. He’d shoo away the salesman, ordering, “Leave this to me!” He couldn’t wait to sell you an item. And if Leeds were playing away, he would pay a visit to one of his shops – they were a national chain – to check out his staff. A few weeks into the Brian Clough micro-era, I said to him, “You’re not looking very well, Chairman. Are you OK?”
‘“No,” he replied, “I’m going into hospital to have a couple of Clough ulcers removed!” Only a joke, but the stress must have affected him. He had been very much in favour of bringing Clough in.
‘During the period from 1970 to 1974, I was privileged to watch possibly the finest football team this country has ever produced. They were not given the credit they deserved, with so many people focusing on the physical side of their game. They were accused of having kicked their way out of the Second Division, and that detracted from the real issue of how brilliant a team they were – brimful of talent. Giles and Bremner were simply magnificent in midfield, with Giles able, in old money, to land a ball on a sixpence from fifty yards with either foot. Before that, there was Bobby Collins and his banana shot from free kicks. If Leeds got a free kick
anywhere near the penalty area, it was a goal, guaranteed. Bobby was one of Don’s most inspired signings.
‘So many of Don’s players grew up together and, with a great sense of loyalty, stayed at the club. Everyone could recite the Leeds team for years. It tripped off the tongue: Sprake, Reaney, Cooper, Bremner, Charlton, Hunter, Lorimer, Clarke, Jones, Giles, Gray. Injuries necessitated the odd change, of course, and then you’d get Madeley or Yorath coming in, but Bremner would have had to have broken his leg to keep him out, and even then he would have volunteered to play. He played when he was black and blue. A lot of players paid for that level of dedication in later life, though. They were given injections to get them through the pain barrier, and there were repercussions health-wise when they stopped playing. Norman Hunter, a neighbour, remains in very good health, and he always puts the fact that he got through so much football without too many injuries down to his mother’s broth strengthening his bones! Football today contrasts greatly with the old days, in that players rarely have the same sense of loyalty to a club or to each other. Back then, there were loads of testimonials for players who had spent ten years at one club. How many testimonials do you see today?
‘In the build-up to Clough’s arrival at Elland Road, there were persistent rumours first of all that Don was going to Everton, and then the England whispers intensified. He was bitter about the fact that the Leeds United board didn’t immediately say yes when the FA came knocking. He felt his achievements for Leeds over those 13 years should have been acknowledged by the club saying, “OK, it’s a great opportunity for you, Don. Thanks for everything and you go with our blessing.” A wrangle ensued and Leeds ended up being paid compensation, but in Don’s view this was a far from satisfactory way of going about things with such a prestigious job at stake. A few weeks later, I got a letter of thanks “for all your coverage” from Don on FA headed notepaper – I should have been thanking him really – and that was one of my personal highlights in a summer of 1974 that was very lively.