The Unforgiven

Everyone who knows anything about football - wherever in the UK they live - has heard of Billy Bremner and Jack Charlton: two of the greatest and grittiest footballers Britain has produced. Don Revie was not only a controversial England manager but also, above all, one of Britain's finest club managers and one of its most idiosyncratic, if not downright eccentric individuals. How Revie turned Leeds from a struggling Second Division club into League Champions and UEFA Cup winners is the tale of how one man invented modern football as we know it. Revie's legendary Leeds team took no prisoners, pioneering a ruthless, win-at-all-costs professionalism symbolised by the legendary scything tackles of Norman Hunter. And Leeds' unfashionable, outlaw status was hardly unearned, given Revie's bizarre way of running a football club. Team-building sessions meant taking players like Johnny Giles, Terry Cooper and Paul Madely for endless rounds of bingo and carpet bowls. The manager's superstitious rituals included a pre-match stroll to a certain set of traffic lights in Leeds and the exorcism of a gypsy's curse on the ground.
But whenever his side were let of the leash - toying with Southampton, for example, to inflict a 7-0 defeat now enshrined in "Match of the Day" mythology - their sheer brilliance made for a spectacle to compelling it was almost cruel. Now the authors of this book, both lifetime Leeds supporters, tell the full story of one of the most defiantly unconventional sides in British football.