It was my own fault, really. As soon as the FA Cup quarter final draw was made I instinctively referred to Sunday’s opponents as Dirty Leeds. Force of habit, 50 years in the making.
Of course I had to field more than a few “angry from Yorkshire” critics. I was living in the past, get grip, get over it. Not easy when something so horrific is engraved on your memory.
To my generation, and let’s admit you’ve got to be over 50 to have a clue what I’m on about, they will always be Dirty Leeds. And of course today’s Leeds are as wholesome as Hovis, I don’t blame the current club or fans for what happened in the past.
Look, I worked in Leeds, have friends there and my wife was born in Yorkshire! But still, Dirty Leeds still niggles away at the back of my mind.
I feel you had to have lived through the Don Revie era of the sixties and seventies to really understand how much Leeds—in their pomp—were despised. Their cynicism, cold-blooded brutality at times, cheating, time wasting, pushing the laws to the limits.
It shocked the football world. They were cunning and organised, it was a stain on the game. And they changed football. There was even a book and a film about them, The damned Utd. And we had a lot of history with them, we were everything they weren’t.
We were soft southerners, they hated our England captain Bobby Moore for his calm skills. Never a speck of mud on those pristine white shorts, his blond locks and he kept Norman Hunter out of the England side.
We were Ron Greenwood’s softies, they were tough as nails, hard-faced Yorkshire grit. And they won titles and cups, domestically and in Europe and we were bottle jobs from the south. It’s hard to explain just how much we differed.
And then we beat them 7-0 in a League Cup tie under the Upton Park lights, just to rub it in. That game, 7 November 1966, goes down as one of the greatest performances in our modern history.
If you were there, you know what I mean. Leeds were a fine side, no question. With great players from Billy Bremner to World Cup winner Jack Charlton. From the immaculate Paul Madeley to the gifted Johnny Giles in midfield to the thunderous shooting of Peter Lorimer.
But West Ham’s elegance and skills blew them away that night. John Sissons got a hat-trick in half-an-hour, Geoff Hurst added three of his own and Johnny Byrne was unplayable. For me and many of my generation, that game floods the mind every time you mention Leeds United.
And that’s how it was a couple of weeks back when we were drawn together in this season’s FA Cup.
We’ve all got out memories of that night in ‘66. Mine is leaning on the Chicken Run wall, up close to Bremner as he screamed at his team for more effort. He was fuming and they were six down at the time.
All around me our fans fell about laughing and Bremner, to his credit, turned and looked at us and laughed along. That summed up Leeds, a truly great side but one that still enraged fans across the country with their hated tactics, time wasting, punches thrown.
It was a new form of intense professionalism that Revie introduced to the masses. And we’ve never forgotten. I don’t recall anyone being that clinical.
Revie, that night, is reputed to have stood in the away dressing room and told his side “we will never let West Ham do that to us again.” And they never did. It’s said the team, in their London hotel, talked long into the night about what had been inflicted on them.
From then on there was plenty of animosity. Clashes for the next few years were brutal. They even managed to get Harry Redknapp sent off for kicking out at Brenner at Elland Road in 1968. I mean, ‘arry, who couldn’t kick the skin off a rice pudding.
Leeds won both league games after that 7-0 mauling, they seemed to reserve their very worst for us. I can recall one game at Upton Park when the crowd, on all sides, were so enraged by their tactics, people were trying to get onto the pitch. A dressing room window was bricked after another game.
I recall Paul Reaney suffering a horrendous broken leg in one match and Clyde Best had to go in goal after Bobby Ferguson was carried off with a neck injury in another game. There was always something, some serious edge to proceedings. Not to put it any other way, we hated each other. We were polar opposites.
When Revie left the England job in 1977 under a cloud to move to the UAE, negotiating behind the FA’s back, it was Greenwood who the FA turned to. A safe pair of hands, no controversy, honest as they come, to take over the national team.
Again, the West Ham/Leeds connection. But it all stemmed from the 7-0, teams didn’t do that to Revie’s sides. It did, of course, highlight a remarkable couple of months in 1966 for West Ham, recent champions of Europe, we’d just won the World Cup too.
Maybe it was the closest to the mythical West Ham way. In a week we scored 17 goals against Fulham, Leeds and Spurs. Geoff Hurst scored eight of them. A few weeks later there was the 5-5 draw at Chelsea and two four goal routes of Blackpool.
Eleven games over 48 days, beaten twice and scoring 42 goals. Hurst, in all, got 16. They really don’t make spells and days like those any more.
But this was West Ham. Hurst scored 41 goals that season and we ended up 16th, losing seven on the trot at the end. Leeds were fourth. Manchester United were the only side to score more goals than us, and they came to Upton Park to win the title with a 6-1 victory.
It was, as they say, amazing while it lasted, has there ever been a West Ham sequence to match that? I doubt it.
Leeds, of course, were soon to see Revie walk away and Brian Clough in charge for 44 days. His first act was to call Revie’s rebellious side together to tell them to throw their medals in the bin because they’d cheated to win them. The Damned Utd was born.
Now all that means very little to the bulk of our fans, you have to be as old as me—and I had another unwelcomed birthday at the weekend—to have clue what I’m on about, or care. It’s history.
But it was so different then. Match of the Day was the only televised football and pundit panels were in their infancy. And Clough and Revie fumed at each other every week.
Maybe I dwell on our past too much. It happens when what I’m watching now is so rank bad. The long wait in the international break, coming after a disheartening, distressing defeat at Aston Villa just sparked my desire to look back, maybe in anger, at what we were and what we are now, deep in debt with one of the worst sets of accounts in the country, and facing relegation.
So here we are, with me boring everyone no doubt with my tales of the good old days. Two games now in a week that will define our destiny. An Easter Sunday clash in the Cup with Leeds and another of those hated Friday night games, this time at home to Wolves. The Easter game is a pain. It used to be a big family day, not necessarily a religious one, but respected.
But we are forced to play on that day, European demand on all the other three ties means it’s us with the short straw. No care or thought these days about the fans, those in particular from outside the M25 ring who have next to no train service.
The Wolves game is no better. It's impossible to get a train home to the Midlands or the north, another pain to organise. Clubs are supposed to have a maximum of five games on the Friday or Monday TV rota. This will be our sixth with another to come at Crystal Palace. I think we’ve all given up on the thought that TV and the football authorities care about fans one jot.
The international break could not have come at a worse time for us, smarting from the defeat at Villa, with Nottingham Forest winning and Spurs about to end their seasonal panto by appointing a sensible - if volatile - coach. They are due a new manager bounce, so we just have to beat Wolves to exert any sort of pressure on our relegation rivals.
A Cup victory, and a semi-final at Wembley to look forward to, would be just the boost needed to our flagging morale. But the desperate need is for Cry Summerville to return to fitness and Matty Fernandes to return from the US where he’s with Portugal squad without any sort of injury.
We lost Summerville to a lengthy injury getting past Brentford in the last round and it has cost us, revealing as if we didn’t already know just how paper-thin our squad is, certainly up front where we have three new signings—all provided by the same agent—who are costing us £200,000 a week in wages and providing precious little impact on our relegation fight.
We’ve only played Leeds once in the Cup in the last 90-odd years, a 2-0 win at the London Stadium in 2022. Prior to that there was a couple of ties in the good old days; in 1923 we lost a second round tie 1-0 in a replay, and in 1930, Vic Watson scored all four in a 4-1 fourth round tie. Two years later we were relegated, and out of the top flight until 1958.
You see, it’s so easy to sink back into the glorious past when the current manifestation of our club is so distressing. Now we are in the quarter finals for the first time in ten years and the not-so-dirty Leeds have our destiny in their hands with a last-day-of the season clash with us to come.
I think I may well need my history books again!
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