We Are the Damned United

by Phil Rostron

  Leeds, their spirit broken, lost 2–0, and the game ended with all the see-sawing emotions of a nerve-shredding season reflected in rioting at the Leeds end of the stadium. As a result, the club was barred from European competition for two years, a punishment that the club, going through a time of great change, would struggle to recover from.

  In a 2008 interview with Armfield, the Yorkshire Evening Post’s Phil Hay offered a trenchant analysis of his time in charge:

  Armfield was the man charged with redressing the disorderly regime of Brian Clough at Leeds United . . . and for that alone he deserved a medal . . . Armfield, as history shows, did not receive a medal at Leeds. A contentious defeat in the 1975 European Cup final saw to that. In so nearly becoming the first English manager to win the continental trophy, however, he displayed the traits of a man who liked to see what life could offer him.

  While a member of the squad at Blackpool, the only league club he would play for, Armfield would regularly undertake shifts at his local newspaper, the Evening Gazette, to train him for a future career in journalism. When Leeds United dispensed with him in 1978 after four years as their manager, he did not look for another managerial position but instead accepted a job with the Daily Express.

  It was a sabbatical from which he never returned and next year will begin his third decade in radio, an industry which currently employs the 72-year-old as one of BBC Radio 5 Live’s matchday summarisers. ‘I’m what you’d call a busy person,’ Armfield said. ‘There was always something on the go. Back in the 1960s, while I was still playing, I took my FA coaching badges at a time when they weren’t really in vogue. I would also spend three evenings a week at the Evening Gazette because in my mind I imagined that once I finished playing I’d become a journalist. That was the plan.

  ‘But Bolton Wanderers asked me to be their manager in 1971, and a short while later I took the job at Leeds. I’d turned down a different offer to manage Everton. It’s a long time ago now, and a different part of my life, but I look back on it fondly. I’ve got a soft spot for Leeds as a club and I liked the city; the people were very good to me. And in the main I thought I did well.’

  Armfield was United’s antidote to the poison spread through Leeds by the most ill-conceived managerial appointment ever seen at Elland Road. Clough presided over the club for 44 torrid days, working in the shadow of Revie for as long as he could stand it. For all his precocious talent, the idiosyncrasies of Clough were not compatible with Elland Road and Armfield was appointed in October 1974 with Leeds submerged near the bottom of the First Division. To his eternal credit, United finished the 1974–75 season eight points behind the league winners, Derby County, and navigated their way to the European Cup final by disposing of Anderlecht and Barcelona in earlier rounds.

  Armfield has discussed United’s 2–0 defeat to Bayern Munich in the final too many times to relive it again but the city of Leeds, and more besides, believed the club had been critically hindered by the ineptitude of the match referee. Supporters at the Parc des Princes in Paris ripped out seats from the terraces, and United were subsequently banned from European competitions for two years. Armfield would have been the first Englishman to manage a European Cup-winning team, an honour which fell instead to Clough with Nottingham Forest four years later. By then, the mess Clough had left behind at Elland Road was a more faded memory.

  ‘The first job for me was to get the Leeds team back on its feet,’ said Armfield. ‘That didn’t actually take a great deal of doing. The players were very experienced, and they knew their way around England and Europe. I’d won a number of England caps and I had more international experience than some of them, but when it came to European experience, they all had more than me. I was working with a squad that should have been doing much better than they were under Brian. We got to the European Cup final, and I’ve always felt we were robbed on the night. What should have been a great day wasn’t such a great day in the end.

  ‘I then had the difficult job of breaking up the great team that Don Revie had built. I brought in guys like Tony Currie from Sheffield United and Brian Flynn from Burnley, and I also signed John Hawley from Hull City. John’s a player who sticks out in my mind because I never actually saw him play for Leeds. He came to us in 1978, and the board decided to let my contract run out later that summer. Personally I felt that we were going along nicely, but the club thought differently. I remember after one defeat, when we’d dropped to around seventh in the division, the chairman called a board meeting for the Monday morning. The gist of the discussion was him asking me what on earth was going on and whether the team had had it. I was slightly amazed, to say the least, and I said, “You do lose in football, you know.” After four years there, my contract wasn’t extended.’

  Remarkably, United’s selection for Armfield’s successor was to prove as great a misjudgement as that which brought Clough to Leeds in 1974. Jock Stein, like Clough, seduced the board at Leeds with his impeccable history and his successful association with Celtic in Glasgow, and a deal was brokered in August of 1978. Two months later, and after a reign which ran for just a day longer than Clough’s, Stein uprooted abruptly and accepted an offer to become Scotland’s manager.

  ‘The Leeds job wasn’t for Jock,’ said Armfield. ‘I thought that when he took it, but at that point he didn’t have a job. He phoned me to ask me about Leeds and I basically told him that the club was ready for him to walk into. There was nothing to do except pick the team up and carry on. I suppose the biggest task for me had been to get rid of the sour feeling that existed at Leeds when Brian left.’

  15

  UPS AND DOWNS

  They [the Football Association] thought I was going to change it lock, stock and barrel. They were shrewd, because that’s exactly what I would have done.

  Brian Clough

  While Jimmy Armfield steadied the ship at Leeds United and Brian Clough rejoined the managerial circuit with Nottingham Forest, Don Revie was continuing to turn his hand to the job that had lured him away from Yorkshire and instigated so much change at Elland Road. In succeeding Sir Alf Ramsey on a five-year contract worth £25,000 a year (several times what Ramsey had received, in part an indication of the esteem in which he was held by the FA), Revie, who had won six England caps and scored four goals in a landmark twelve months from October 1954, provided something of a contrast in personalities to Ramsey. Where his predecessor was viewed as cold, aloof and secretive, the new incumbent adopted a more friendly and open attitude.

  Bringing in Les Cocker from Leeds United as his assistant, and with Bill Taylor as his trainer, Revie got off to a flyer in the qualifying campaign for the 1976 European Championships on 30 October 1974, with a 3–0 win against Czechoslovakia at Wembley, and followed up three weeks later with a 0–0 draw, also at Wembley, against Portugal. A successful first season as England manager saw the team undefeated after nine internationals but when, early in the 1975–76 season, England were eliminated, Revie’s stock was already on the slide.

  The nine wins included a convincing victory over West Germany, the World Cup holders, and a 5–1 trouncing of Scotland. However, the England team became more and more inconsistent, perhaps reflecting a lack of confidence in Revie on the part of the players. The former Leeds manager, whose first team had been set practically in stone at Elland Road, changed the team sheet constantly, leaving the squad unsettled. To give just one example, Alan Ball of Arsenal captained the team for six games in 1974–75 only to be suddenly and controversially dropped and never picked again. Revie’s discarding of both Ball and Alan Hudson was seen as a critical error of judgement, and when losses to Czechoslovakia and Portugal put England out of the championship, Revie’s critics had gathered ammunition.

  * * *

  It took some time, but in July 1976, two years after they had last worked together, Clough was rejoined at Nottingham Forest by Peter Taylor. Together, they transformed Forest’s fortunes within a few seasons. In 1976–77, they were placed third in the Se
cond Division, winning promotion. They were to take Division One by storm, being crowned champions in 1978, seven points ahead of Liverpool, whom they also beat to lift the League Cup. This was a tremendous achievement for Forest, but also a personal landmark and a vindication of sorts for Clough, as he became the first manager since Herbert Chapman (Huddersfield and Arsenal in the 1930s) to have won the league championship with two different clubs.

  Ironically, long ago in history, Chapman had had his own controversial spell at Elland Road. In the 1912 close season, he was offered the chance to manage Second Division Leeds City, who had finished 19th in the previous season and were forced to apply for re-election to the league. Chapman was a central figure in their successful campaign for readmission. He engineered a sixth-place finish in 1912–13 with attendances at their Elland Road home rising from 8,500 to 13,000 in appreciation of a rejuvenated side who were playing attacking football and netted 70 goals in that season alone. Chapman strengthened the side’s defence and City did even better the next season, reaching fourth place. The club looked certain to win promotion in 1914–15. However, larger forces put paid to these hopes with the declaration of war. Attendances were down as men enlisted in the forces, and Chapman lost his confident touch, struggling to pick a first team that he was satisfied with. City finished the season in a disappointing 15th place, and league football was suspended for the rest of the war.

  Leeds City continued to play in regional competitions, but many of the pre-war squad were serving their country or had left as a result of the drop in salaries accompanying the suspension of the league. Chapman left in 1916 to manage a munitions factory, coming back to the club only when the war was over. He resigned suddenly and without explanation in December 1918, and during the 1919–20 season, an ex-Leeds City player made allegations against his former club, claiming that during the war there had been financial skulduggery involving payments to guest players. Leeds were thrown out of the Football League in October 1919, and Chapman, along with four other officials, was banned from football for life. The club was dissolved and their ground, Elland Road, taken over by the recently formed Leeds United. Chapman managed to have his ban overturned within a few years and went on to success at Huddersfield and Arsenal.

  Unencumbered by such constraints as players going off to war, Clough was about to take a leaf out of Jimmy Armfield’s book of fairy tales and animate the stage with sweet romance, swashbuckling adventure and pure fantasy.

  Forest’s assault on the football world, and the senses, was ignited by the arrival of Peter Taylor. A year after his return to Clough’s side, the club gave the pair a vote of confidence when it extended their original four-year contracts by another year, and together they set about building a squad that was to embark on the most dramatic of voyages. They signed Kenny Burns, Larry Lloyd and Peter Shilton, and it looked as if Forest were really going places.

  Clough and Taylor thought they saw potential for a great centre-half pairing in Lloyd from Liverpool and Burns from Birmingham, and they were right, which was particularly impressive given that both players had struggled to make it into the first team at their respective clubs. Shilton was signed in 1977, after Forest had gained their place in the top flight, but even so, he was an expensive choice. The deal cost Forest £270,000, but Taylor argued, rightly, as it turned out, that: ‘Shilton wins you matches.’ Forest conceded remarkably few goals in 1977–78 and Shilton was a key figure in their league success. Another two vital signings were Garry Birtles, a bargain from non-league Long Eaton, and, by contrast, Trevor Francis, in Britain’s first-ever million-pound transfer.

  The new English champions were now aiming even higher – at the 1978–79 European Cup. The first fixture, however, was not, on paper, encouraging. They were to meet Liverpool, who were the holders and widely tipped to retain the cup. Many wrote Nottingham off, but, their confidence bolstered by Clough, who assured them they could win, they defied expectations winning the home leg 2–0. Before the trip to Liverpool, Clough went further, offering each player a £3,000 bonus for a place in the next round. They drew at Anfield, with Shilton conceding nothing.

  The second round saw Forest travelling to Greece, gaining a 7–2 aggregate win over AEK Athens before beating Zurich’s Grasshopper 5–2 for a semi-final place. They were to meet German champions FC Köln. They drew the home leg before heading to Cologne to attempt what seemed a near impossible task. However, Forest did their manager proud. Peter Shilton made some outstanding saves, while Tony Bowyer succeeded in getting the ball past Harald Schumacher and into the back of the net.

  Before the final against Malmö, Clough made the surprise decision to drop Martin O’Neill and Archie Gemmill, bringing in recent signing Francis. Malmö, not able to play their ideal team due to injuries, played defensively and the match was less than thrilling, at least until Robertson beat two defenders and crossed to Francis, who headed in the match’s only goal. ‘It wasn’t a great game,’ commented a triumphant Clough, ‘but they were a boring team, Malmö. In fact, the Swedes are quite a boring nation. But we still won, so who cares?’

  If winning the European Cup once was a dream for a small-city club like Nottingham Forest, then retaining the glittering prize surely belonged in the land of fantasy. But Clough, Taylor and their merry men had got a taste for it now, and there was to be no stopping them. Early successes against Öster of Sweden and Arges Pitesti of Romania were followed by a quarter-final defeat of Dynamo Berlin and a semi-final conquest of Ajax en route to a final date at Real Madrid’s Bernabéu Stadium with a Hamburg side featuring Kevin Keegan. John Robertson’s squeezed-home 21st-minute shot was enough to land the spoils and hand Forest back-to-back European Cup final victories.

  * * *

  The tables had turned. While Clough was triumphing at the City Ground, Revie was struggling at the FA. England’s next big target after failing to qualify for the European Championships was the World Cup in Argentina in 1978. They were competing against Italy for qualification, and from the start it looked bad; Revie’s side lost to the Italians by two goals in November 1976. The former Leeds manager still struggled with team selection, yearning, perhaps, for players in the mould of Bremner and Giles to run the midfield engine room.

  Given the deteriorating relationship between the manager and the FA, it seemed that Revie and England were destined not to enjoy the tournament together in any case. Revie had particular difficulty with Alan Hardaker, the Football League secretary. Hardaker would not bow to Revie’s request that First Division matches scheduled for the Saturday before an England international be postponed. This was very frustrating for Revie, who was adamant that the squad needed to spend as much time together as possible, that this was a vital part of big-match preparation.

  Furthermore, his relationship with the FA’s chairman Sir Harold Thompson, an autocratic former Oxford don, was unsalvageable. When Revie asked the chairman to desist from referring to him by his surname, he replied, ‘When I get to know you better, Revie, I shall call you Don,’ to which Revie retorted, ‘When I get to know you better, Thompson, I shall call you Sir Harold.’

  If his dealings with the other officials were problematic, his relations with the players were barely less strained. The detailed dossiers on the opposition that Peter Lorimer had come to hate at Leeds United were ridiculed and his faith in non-footballing bonding activities such as bingo and indoor bowls and golf to foster team spirit was not appreciated either.

  In February 1977, a Johan Cruyff-inspired 2–0 friendly defeat to Holland at Wembley – England were so comprehensively outclassed that journalists compared it with the infamous 6–3 defeat by Hungary, captained by Puskás, in 1953 – was the turning point. Revie struggled on for a few months, but in July, convinced he was about to be replaced by Bobby Robson, then manager of Ipswich, he announced, via a story in the Daily Mail, that he was leaving the post, stating that he couldn’t continue feeling that ‘nearly everyone in the country seems to want me out’. Being England manager,
he said, had caused him and his family too much pain. But the day after it announced his resignation, the Mail revealed that Revie had signed a lucrative deal to manage the national team of the United Arab Emirates. However, the circumstances surrounding his defection gave rise to allegations of financial misdealings, and Revie was charged with bringing the game into disrepute. At a disciplinary hearing, he was suspended by the FA for a decade, and although he succeeded in having the ban overturned at the High Court, the judge had harsh words for him. He was replaced by Ron Greenwood.

  In 1983, when Revie left the Middle East, where he lived in Dubai and apparently enjoyed the sunshine and the golf, he was only in his mid-50s, yet he never worked in English football again. Meanwhile, Clough, for all the chaos of his reign of Leeds, was once more situated at its epicentre.