David Peace had a good idea, to take on the old Leeds, indeed so good that the phrase “the Damned United” has entered the language, but in imagining wild stuff about real people he was too cheap to do the phenomenon justice. As a Hollywood lawyer called Fred Leopold used to say, “If you have real people as characters they can have lattes and muffins but they can’t say, ‘Let’s go for a f**k in the bushes’.”
John Giles, for one, was duly compensated, financially and textually, for Peace’s excesses, and I’ve heard him say on Irish radio (I closely paraphrase here) that the book might impress the arty-farty crowd but it portrayed Brian Clough as a maniac and to football pros it was rubbish. (Elsewhere Giles has given samples of the creative nonsense, like holding up to ridicule the notion of Clough destroying Don Revie’s managerial desk.)
Giles was probably right on that audiences score. At the same time, I’ve never bought his self-serving spin on the old days, like blaming the goalkeeper Sprake (discarded years before the Leeds fire blew out) for so many near-misses. Both times they were English champions, it’s striking that there wasn’t a narrow margin involved, and Leeds even lost the 1971 play-off for permanent possession of the Fairs Cup, after having won it twice.
Neither did I ever buy Giles maintaining that the carry-on markedly associated with Leeds was a case of kill or be killed. Eamon Dunphy’s contemporaneous description of Leeds in the Seventies actually doesn’t contain any kicking or elbowing but is full of what is nowadays euphemistically known as playing on the edge.
What’s rather poignant and almost Shakespearean, in contrast, is Giles’ account of visiting a dying Don Revie, who confessed,
I should have let you lads play a bit more.
In other words, it seemed like Revie knew the negative soul of his rule had been in the end a distraction, maybe even a tragic flaw, that usually kept Leeds from getting the benefit of the doubt in a tight finish (it’s what people like to call luck, when it’s not called cheating) and thereby from winning twice as many trophies as they did win.
Last night, the Dickie Guy heroics for the then very lowly Wimbledon at Elland Road in January 1975 formed a memory revisited online (and now in colour) from when I was ten and soccer was something in black and white. On this occasion, two moments from the second minute of injury time stood out, particularly. The first was Frankie Gray having a wild kick at some poor non-league player as the ball ran out of play. Gray may just have been warming up for his fateful Paris challenge on the future tax dodger and jailbird Uli Hoeness, later that year, in the European Cup final. (Hoeness had to retire a few years later at just twenty-seven.) That incident has been overshadowed in the history of the game, and of that sordid (from all angles) match, by Terry Yorath’s earlier godawful foul on Björn Andersson, which was clearly captured on camera.
One can fairly say that, apart from his failure to punish Leeds with a flurry of cards, Paris witnessed a masterly refereeing performance by Franz Beckenbauer. As for the lone Frenchman on the field, the man in black, if der Kaiser had told Monsieur Kitabdjian to eat a lump of dog shit that night, he would have said, Bien sûr! At any rate, the person I feel sorry for is the German TV employee who lost an eye thanks to a missile thrown from the Leeds crowd.
European football competition is often a cesspit and it has sometimes seemed to flourish on a German-Italian axis, as in the lifetime ban given too late to the Greek referee who saw off Leeds on behalf of AC Milan in the 1973 Cup Winners’ Cup final, and in the comically sinister touchline anecdote involving Helmut Haller, Clough’s sidekick Peter Taylor and a German ref, when Derby County were in Turin the same year. That story appears in Jonathan Wilson’s biography of Clough.
Anyway, against Wimbledon, and despite the younger Gray’s kicking practice when the ball was gone, Leeds got the injury-time throw-in, from which Duncan McKenzie got on the end of a header from Yorath. McKenzie would be left on the bench in Paris (“The manager’s indecision is final”) but he scored thirty times in his two years at Leeds (1974-76) and, in this moment, he brilliantly set up the ageing Johnny Giles, whose legs couldn’t do anything with the late, late chance.
Long afterwards I heard Giles on Irish radio dismissing McKenzie as “not a real player” but the latter had already got in a humorous dig at the reinvented grandfatherly pundit. It came in an interview with Danny Kelly on Channel 4’s short-lived Nineties show, Under the Moon.
Broken bones, they’d laugh at things like that… (interruption by Kelly) … Gilesy of course…
McKenzie’s ghosted autobiography (The Last Fancy Dan (2009)) furthermore suggested that Peace had got the mood and atmosphere at the club right, in Clough’s brief spell in nominal charge (1974), whatever about the details. Unfortunately just at the point (p. 79) where he is giving his verdict, a spot of word salad breaks the train of thought (“The film has in a number of errors in to turn it back into a novel…”).
Be that as it may, to me this clip with McKenzie, Giles and F. Gray has all the elements of the twilight of the gods.
Dr. John Flynn 