LEEDS UNITED

‘ We all hate Leeds and Leeds and Leeds, Leeds and Leeds and Leeds, and Leeds, Leeds and Leeds and Leeds, we all fucking hate Leeds.’

Popular football song (well, popular at 91 of the clubs in this book)

‘I wouldn’t mind if they said: “you were a dirty set of bastards, but you couldn’t half play”.’

JOHNNY GILES in an interview with the Guardian (they were … and they could)

Let’s start with one of the strangest insights into a football manager’s mind you will ever see. It’s freely available on your laptop, in case you think I’m making it up. In 1974 Leeds United were champions of the First Division. They were one of the most famous clubs in England and abroad. They had a team of world-class players, a massive fan base and that beautiful all-white kit. And, by the looks of a Yorkshire TV documentary called ‘The Don of Elland Road’, a very odd manager.

In just one small segment, Don Revie, the man who had fashioned this success, is seen following his match day routine of walking from the hotel to the traffic lights and back while making sure all his lucky charms are still in his pocket. And they are staying in a hotel because he insisted his players had no distractions the night before a game, by which he presumably meant sex. But if these young men were denied that pleasure, they could at least play bingo. Actually they had no choice. He made them play bingo. All of them. World-class players or not, Friday night was bingo night.

And there’s more. In one almost soft-porn moment, he explains how he likes to relax players while he is giving a deep and soapy massage to a naked Jackie Charlton. Any sentence containing any combination of the words ‘Charlton’, ‘Jackie’, ‘massage’ and ‘soapy’ will be weird to anyone of my generation and it’s also the worst possible metaphor for a club that I still always refer to as ‘dirty Leeds’. Many football fans my age, on hearing the name of Leeds, will automatically add the word ‘dirty’. My mate Dave is from Gloucester, so of course he is a massive Leeds fan, home and away. He knows that when he says ‘Leeds’, I say ‘dirty’. We chant it out; it makes him smile. To be fair, most things make Dave smile, except criticism of badgers. Sadly, his frankly disproportionate anger at any criticism of the stripy little bastards is way beyond the remit of this book, but it does explain why we spend so much time in his company criticising badgers.

And, my word, Leeds were dirty. They were very good, but they were properly physical. That legendary Cup battle with Chelsea (see Chelsea chapter for details) was all in a day’s work for Leeds.

Yes, the game was more physical then, but the likes of Johnny Giles, Billy Bremner and Norman Hunter were brutal. And whatever that soapy massage did to Jack Charlton, it didn’t relax him. He always looked like an amiable, gangly man, right up to the moment he laid out a centre-forward by way of saying hello.

Jack left us recently, but I met him a few times, and he was an amiable, gangly man with a lovely chuckle, which you mainly heard as he told you yet another story that involved someone getting stitches. They all shook hands at the end of the game though, so that’s alright. Hard but fair, etc. Thing is that you couldn’t even say that about them. There was an element of spite about Leeds that may well have come from having to play bingo on a Friday night as all red-blooded athletes must love to do.

One Saturday night in March 1972, I was watching Match of the Day with my dad. He was, and still is, famously mild-mannered. Nothing used to annoy him, which, incidentally, used to really annoy my mum. But that night he was fuming. On the telly Leeds were beating Southampton 7-0, and on the sofa my dad was doing his nut because Leeds were rubbing it in. They were doing backheels, keepie-uppies, head tennis, the lot, and genuinely toying with their opponents. Dad hated seeing anyone mistreated and he was furious at what he saw as unsporting humiliation. Personally, I quite enjoyed it, and I imagine the crowd did too, but for once in my life I decided to keep quiet and wait till he stopped chuntering. Tuesday it was.

I am, however, nothing if not fair, and I thought it only right that a Leeds fans should have the right to reply. Ardal O’Hanlon is a very fine comedian and actor, still best known to a generation as the idiot/savant priest Father Dougal in the sitcom Father Ted. He is also very happy to take up the cudgels on behalf of his beloved team: ‘Yes, Leeds were dirty, if by dirty you mean ultra-professional, tactically advanced and really, really good. People often see innovation and success as suspicious or “dirty”, but would you rather have Amstrad or Apple? Okay, they weren’t angels but they were more sinned against than sinning, the victims of evil forces. I cried when they lost the FA Cup final to Sunderland in 1973, the most-one sided game ever, when surely voodoo was involved. I was outraged when they had the European Cup stolen from them in 1975 by a referee who admitted he had been bribed. Leeds were only dirty in the way a “dirty fried egg” is dirty when it is brilliantly enhanced by being fried in bacon fat.’ If there is a better comparison between a football team and an egg, I have yet to hear it.

And if the team were fierce, the fans were too. Elland Road is a big stadium, and it’s normally full even when Leeds aren’t successful (which is a handy summary of their recent history).

In those days, it was not only full, it was full of passion and crackled with energy and aggression and the regional pride of fans who had always been proud of their team and now had something to be proud of. In January 1976, Third Division Crystal Palace were drawn away at Leeds in the FA Cup. For some reason my mum thought this would be a good excuse to see her sister in Bradford and while she was doing that, my cousin Charlie was instructed to take me to the game, to his horror. And to my horror, he did take me. Then bunged me in the home end and left me there. I was 14, looked 11, and had long wavy hair. I was so obviously not one of them.

ARDAL O’HANLON

I decided to style it out, and if any of them did speak to me, I would pretend to be a girl. We won 1-0 and I have never celebrated a goal less. At one stage, as the hardest of hard men, Norman Hunter, was waiting to come on as sub, the crowd sang ‘Norman’s going to get you’. I was convinced they meant me. It was terrifying. Not in one of those roller-coaster, terrifying-but-exhilarating ways. Just terrifying. I was still rocking silently as the train pulled into King’s Cross.

Not long after Jackie Charlton’s soapy buttock rub, Don Revie was involved in another remarkable piece of TV. In July 1974, to the astonishment of the football world, Brian Clough was appointed as Leeds manager following Don Revie being made manager of England. Revie and Clough, both from Middlesbrough, disliked each other intensely and Clough hated Leeds. As manager of Derby he had constantly criticised their tactics and their physicality. On the first day he took training there, he told Don Revie’s players that they should throw all their medals in the bin because they had won them all by cheating. Forty-four days later, with Leeds fourth bottom in the table, Clough was sacked.

That very evening, a local TV celebrity called Austin Mitchell somehow persuaded them both to take part in a live interview on his show. It is still wonderful viewing even today. Clough had been sacked hours earlier after a few weeks managing the team that Revie had taken to success after success, yet it was Clough who took the moral high ground with his claim that, given time, he would have emulated everything Revie had done but with more style.

Much as I love Clough, Revie didn’t deserve that. As Johnny Giles also said, Revie didn’t revitalise Leeds, he created them. It had always been hard to establish a successful football team in a rugby league town. Leeds City gave it a go, then folded, and in 1919 Leeds United were formed to fill the void.

They played in yellow and blue, and they played in lower leagues. Then Revie appeared. He changed the kit to all-white to emulate Real Madrid. That must have seemed hilarious to fans of a mid-table Second Division team, but bugger me, it worked. A decade later Elland Road was full of razzmatazz. The players had neat little tags on their socks, a smiley-face badge, their names on their tracksuits and when they marched on to the pitch they would wave to all four sides of the ground before kicking autographed footballs into the crowd.

They scratched, bit, kicked and soapy massaged their way to titles and cups and were just a few points and goals away from many more. Leeds fans loved it, and the more other fans complained, the more they loved it. There was a bond between the fans, the manager and the player that would have been seriously difficult to replicate. Or, as it turned out, impossible.

Revie’s reputation since has been questioned, but let’s face it, if Brian Clough can’t follow you, you must have been good.

Why You Shouldn’t Support Them

■ Seriously, Elland Road was terrifying.

■ If I thought Roy Hodgson was making Wilfried Zaha play bingo, I would eat my season ticket with embarrassment.

■ Dirty, dirty Leeds.