Post by Macmoish on Nov 14, 2010 9:09:15 GMT
So which QPR Players today and in the past had the "Moral Courage" and who would be the "Sunshine Boys"?
The Observer
John Giles on the Damned Utd, Leeds's reputation and Brian Clough
Don Revie's great No10 looks back at the tarnished image of the team he served so well
* Paul Hayward
* The Observer, Sunday 14 November 2010
Johnny Giles John Giles was 'the brain' of the great Leeds side that flourished under the management of Don Revie. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Bob Thomas/Getty Images
A measure of how deeply The Damned Utd invaded the psyche is that when John Giles speaks of Leeds in the Don Revie era his phraseology fires you straight back into David Peace's book. The outlaw ambience conveyed in Peace's "factional" novel finds an unexpected echo in the great Irish midfielder's admission: "Our attitude was – an eye for an eyelash."
Now a genial 70-year-old who admires Barcelona and calls football "a game of wit and cleverness and brain", Giles would hate to validate Peace's use of sinister intonation to memorialise the Leeds team of the 1960s and 70s.
Annoyed by Peace's supposed portrayal of him as a "winking, scheming leprechaun" – the term he uses in his new autobiography – Giles dismisses both book and film as "rubbish". He will not budge in his insistence that authors should not fictionalise around real events to locate an essential truth.
But the language he employs to recall the Revie age works with a vivid retrospective force Peace would appreciate. He calls the "manipulation" Leeds used as a tool, "a game within a game", and says of the violent tackling of that period: "In my day there was the code of the west. There was some honour."
For younger readers who never went to Elland Road during Revie's reign (1961-74) this tight, economical vocabulary conjures up the dark power of a side who mixed majesty with Machiavelli to win the league title in 1969 and 1974, the 1972 FA Cup and the Fairs Cup – the Uefa Cup's predecessor – in 1968 and 1971, a run of success that began with the 1968 League Cup. There could have been much more: they were runners-up in the league five times and lost five cup finals. The year after Revie left, under Clough's successor Jimmy Armfield, they lost a controversial European Cup final.
Giles, though, wants the mythology rebalanced. He says: "What Don did at Leeds was unbelievable. Don didn't revitalise a team. Leeds had no history. So he had to create it from nothing. It was a rugby league area. For my first match, when we were in the Second Division, there were 15,000 people there."
He also wants the aesthetic quality of those Leeds teams to be acknowledged alongside the machismo Brian Clough thought he could eradicate in his disastrous 44-day stay after Revie had taken the England job.
"After a while everything becomes fashionable again," he says of the current rash of Leeds-related literature. "Andy Gray did an article recently where he picked the 10 best teams of the last 40 years. And he picked Leeds as one of the 10. The opening line was – 'A lot of people won't like this.' He was apologising. Because everybody says: 'Leeds were a bad lot,' nobody wants to challenge it. If you give a dog a bad name …
"I try to make the point in the book: do you think Leeds went and bullied everybody? How do you go to Chelsea and bully Chopper Harris, Eddie McCreadie, Peter Osgood. Or at Everton – Jimmy Gabriel, Johnny Morrissey. Same at Burnley – Gordon Harris, Brian O'Neil, Andy Lochhead. We were meant to be bullying all these?
"We were no angels, don't get me wrong. The first thing, in England, was to say: 'We've got to get into this lot.' The culture of the game was different in the 60s and 70s – but it was accepted. There was no protection from referees. But we didn't have the diving and the feigning of injuries. I played against Peter Storey [of Arsenal] a lot. Peter was a good player. And Peter was an animal. Tough lad. Never said a word on the pitch. He was the hardest I played against because he was a good player as well. He never got me booked – and I never got him booked. It was tough – and it wasn't right. But it wasn't Leeds against a gang of angels.
"We were involved in some rough matches. But not every week. It was occasionally. Look at the videos where we played Manchester United or Southampton and it was some of the best football I've seen anywhere. Eddie Gray, Peter Lorimer, Allan Clarke, Norman Hunter, Big Jack [Charlton], Terry Cooper – all individually brilliant players.
"I don't mind if someone says to me: 'You were a dirty little bastard.' I don't mind that. But please say: 'You could play a bit.' Same with the Leeds team. I wouldn't mind if they said: 'You were a dirty set of bastards, but you couldn't half play.'"
To reduce Giles's career to a seminar on brutality would be to obscure his talent as a central midfield orchestrator: the more gifted half of a formidable double-act with Billy Bremner. After coming from Dublin to Manchester United as a boy, Giles found his greatest motivation in rejection after Matt Busby, he claims, lost faith in him during a game between United and Tottenham Hotspur.
Giles, 21, was overwhelmed by the Spurs trio of Danny Blanchflower, John White and Dave Mackay and never recovered, in Busby's eyes. He was sold to Leeds in 1963 and stayed until 1975 before a spell as player-manager of West Brom and managerial stints with the Republic of Ireland (1973-80), West Brom (again), Shamrock Rovers and Vancouver Whitecaps.
He was 25 before he came in from the flanks to claim the central midfield role he had coveted since watching Johnny Haynes redefine the job of inside-forward for Fulham. Haynes rewrote the rules on positional discipline by roving around the pitch to dictate the play. Asked if there is a Haynes or John Giles out there today, Giles says: "Only one. Paul Scholes."
Now a popular pundit with Ireland's RTE on a show that puts some of our controversy-phobic TV pundits to shame, Giles is caught in a familiar contradiction between his own conduct as a player and the behaviour he finds disagreeable today. The line, though, is clear enough in his own mind.
"I saw [Cristiano] Ronaldo last week rolling on the ground and holding his face and remonstrating with colleagues. In my opinion great players don't do that," he says. And yet: "There was definitely pressure on referees [in his time]. It was a game within a game. The referees didn't always know what was going on, you know? It sounds cruel, but you have to get into the mentality of players. Players don't think about moral wrongs. It was a battle. Football is a hard game. Footballers are not philosophers.
"Definitely the Leeds lads were a little bit more cynical than the others, but that was exaggerated. When Jack went under the bar with the goalkeeper everyone would say – that's not fair. Everyone else was doing it. We used to hold the ball in the corner with five minutes to go. 'Cynical time wasting' people called it. Everyone was doing it."
Then he offers one of the most compelling definitions you are ever likely to hear of strength of character in a footballer: the winning spirit so often spoken of only in abstract terms: "I call it moral courage. There is a saying in the game about 'the sunshine boys'. You're three-nil up with 10 minutes to go and they're saying: 'Give me the ball!' They can't get enough of it. At one-nil down, it's: 'Don't give me the ball.'
"The strong characters are the guys who would be demanding the ball when it was tough. Bobby Charlton was like that. He wouldn't have been regarded as a hard man by any means but he had moral courage. I've never seen Bobby in any match where he ducked it.
"Fellow players know you better than anyone else. They're asking: 'Are you still looking for it, regardless of the score?' If I'm looking for the strong character it wouldn't be the one shouting. It would be the one demanding the ball when you're one-nil down at home against a team you're supposed to beat and you're not playing well."
A gang of sunshine boys is not what Brian Clough faced when he finally called a team meeting three days into his calamity at Leeds. In his memoirs Giles, who had been passed over for Revie's job, writes: "I have seen it reported, in fact and fiction, that he opened with the word 'Gentlemen' but that was not the case."
What Clough said was, according to page 251 of Giles' book: "Right you F***ing lot, as far as I'm concerned you can take all the medals you have won and throw them in that bin over there."
To Norman Hunter, Clough added: "Hunter, you're a dirty bastard and everyone hates you. I know everyone likes to be loved, and you'd like to be loved too, wouldn't you?"
The reply: "Actually I couldn't give a F***."
Thirty-six years on, Giles reflects: "I'd say he was very, very nervous. The first day he came in he had young Nigel [his son] with him, right? My missus knows nothing about football, but she said to me: 'That shows total insecurity. I can't believe that.' I heard afterwards he wasn't the most secure of guys, despite being bombastic. He was a rude bastard, and arrogant, but again that was part of his genius.
"He never got off first base, never had a chance to work his magic, which he had. I could feel something. I was playing for him, and didn't get on with him, but played well for him, as best I could, and I wanted to please him. I was confused, myself. I didn't even like him, but I wanted to please him.
"When he went to Derby and said: 'You're a load of rubbish,' they were. That's where he could work his magic. He came to us: we had just won the league in 1974, and we were strong characters, and not young. Billy, Norman … We were proud of ourselves. Hard pros who wanted to win, And this guy was saying: 'Chuck your medals in the bin over there.' So he never got off first base.
"I used to think: If he'd come in and said this is what I believe, let's give it three months, he'd have had a much better chance. Looking back on it now, I don't think there was ever a chance. We were from different planets."
John Giles – A Football Man, The Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton £19.99) is out now
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/nov/14/john-giles-leeds-united
The Observer
John Giles on the Damned Utd, Leeds's reputation and Brian Clough
Don Revie's great No10 looks back at the tarnished image of the team he served so well
* Paul Hayward
* The Observer, Sunday 14 November 2010
Johnny Giles John Giles was 'the brain' of the great Leeds side that flourished under the management of Don Revie. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Bob Thomas/Getty Images
A measure of how deeply The Damned Utd invaded the psyche is that when John Giles speaks of Leeds in the Don Revie era his phraseology fires you straight back into David Peace's book. The outlaw ambience conveyed in Peace's "factional" novel finds an unexpected echo in the great Irish midfielder's admission: "Our attitude was – an eye for an eyelash."
Now a genial 70-year-old who admires Barcelona and calls football "a game of wit and cleverness and brain", Giles would hate to validate Peace's use of sinister intonation to memorialise the Leeds team of the 1960s and 70s.
Annoyed by Peace's supposed portrayal of him as a "winking, scheming leprechaun" – the term he uses in his new autobiography – Giles dismisses both book and film as "rubbish". He will not budge in his insistence that authors should not fictionalise around real events to locate an essential truth.
But the language he employs to recall the Revie age works with a vivid retrospective force Peace would appreciate. He calls the "manipulation" Leeds used as a tool, "a game within a game", and says of the violent tackling of that period: "In my day there was the code of the west. There was some honour."
For younger readers who never went to Elland Road during Revie's reign (1961-74) this tight, economical vocabulary conjures up the dark power of a side who mixed majesty with Machiavelli to win the league title in 1969 and 1974, the 1972 FA Cup and the Fairs Cup – the Uefa Cup's predecessor – in 1968 and 1971, a run of success that began with the 1968 League Cup. There could have been much more: they were runners-up in the league five times and lost five cup finals. The year after Revie left, under Clough's successor Jimmy Armfield, they lost a controversial European Cup final.
Giles, though, wants the mythology rebalanced. He says: "What Don did at Leeds was unbelievable. Don didn't revitalise a team. Leeds had no history. So he had to create it from nothing. It was a rugby league area. For my first match, when we were in the Second Division, there were 15,000 people there."
He also wants the aesthetic quality of those Leeds teams to be acknowledged alongside the machismo Brian Clough thought he could eradicate in his disastrous 44-day stay after Revie had taken the England job.
"After a while everything becomes fashionable again," he says of the current rash of Leeds-related literature. "Andy Gray did an article recently where he picked the 10 best teams of the last 40 years. And he picked Leeds as one of the 10. The opening line was – 'A lot of people won't like this.' He was apologising. Because everybody says: 'Leeds were a bad lot,' nobody wants to challenge it. If you give a dog a bad name …
"I try to make the point in the book: do you think Leeds went and bullied everybody? How do you go to Chelsea and bully Chopper Harris, Eddie McCreadie, Peter Osgood. Or at Everton – Jimmy Gabriel, Johnny Morrissey. Same at Burnley – Gordon Harris, Brian O'Neil, Andy Lochhead. We were meant to be bullying all these?
"We were no angels, don't get me wrong. The first thing, in England, was to say: 'We've got to get into this lot.' The culture of the game was different in the 60s and 70s – but it was accepted. There was no protection from referees. But we didn't have the diving and the feigning of injuries. I played against Peter Storey [of Arsenal] a lot. Peter was a good player. And Peter was an animal. Tough lad. Never said a word on the pitch. He was the hardest I played against because he was a good player as well. He never got me booked – and I never got him booked. It was tough – and it wasn't right. But it wasn't Leeds against a gang of angels.
"We were involved in some rough matches. But not every week. It was occasionally. Look at the videos where we played Manchester United or Southampton and it was some of the best football I've seen anywhere. Eddie Gray, Peter Lorimer, Allan Clarke, Norman Hunter, Big Jack [Charlton], Terry Cooper – all individually brilliant players.
"I don't mind if someone says to me: 'You were a dirty little bastard.' I don't mind that. But please say: 'You could play a bit.' Same with the Leeds team. I wouldn't mind if they said: 'You were a dirty set of bastards, but you couldn't half play.'"
To reduce Giles's career to a seminar on brutality would be to obscure his talent as a central midfield orchestrator: the more gifted half of a formidable double-act with Billy Bremner. After coming from Dublin to Manchester United as a boy, Giles found his greatest motivation in rejection after Matt Busby, he claims, lost faith in him during a game between United and Tottenham Hotspur.
Giles, 21, was overwhelmed by the Spurs trio of Danny Blanchflower, John White and Dave Mackay and never recovered, in Busby's eyes. He was sold to Leeds in 1963 and stayed until 1975 before a spell as player-manager of West Brom and managerial stints with the Republic of Ireland (1973-80), West Brom (again), Shamrock Rovers and Vancouver Whitecaps.
He was 25 before he came in from the flanks to claim the central midfield role he had coveted since watching Johnny Haynes redefine the job of inside-forward for Fulham. Haynes rewrote the rules on positional discipline by roving around the pitch to dictate the play. Asked if there is a Haynes or John Giles out there today, Giles says: "Only one. Paul Scholes."
Now a popular pundit with Ireland's RTE on a show that puts some of our controversy-phobic TV pundits to shame, Giles is caught in a familiar contradiction between his own conduct as a player and the behaviour he finds disagreeable today. The line, though, is clear enough in his own mind.
"I saw [Cristiano] Ronaldo last week rolling on the ground and holding his face and remonstrating with colleagues. In my opinion great players don't do that," he says. And yet: "There was definitely pressure on referees [in his time]. It was a game within a game. The referees didn't always know what was going on, you know? It sounds cruel, but you have to get into the mentality of players. Players don't think about moral wrongs. It was a battle. Football is a hard game. Footballers are not philosophers.
"Definitely the Leeds lads were a little bit more cynical than the others, but that was exaggerated. When Jack went under the bar with the goalkeeper everyone would say – that's not fair. Everyone else was doing it. We used to hold the ball in the corner with five minutes to go. 'Cynical time wasting' people called it. Everyone was doing it."
Then he offers one of the most compelling definitions you are ever likely to hear of strength of character in a footballer: the winning spirit so often spoken of only in abstract terms: "I call it moral courage. There is a saying in the game about 'the sunshine boys'. You're three-nil up with 10 minutes to go and they're saying: 'Give me the ball!' They can't get enough of it. At one-nil down, it's: 'Don't give me the ball.'
"The strong characters are the guys who would be demanding the ball when it was tough. Bobby Charlton was like that. He wouldn't have been regarded as a hard man by any means but he had moral courage. I've never seen Bobby in any match where he ducked it.
"Fellow players know you better than anyone else. They're asking: 'Are you still looking for it, regardless of the score?' If I'm looking for the strong character it wouldn't be the one shouting. It would be the one demanding the ball when you're one-nil down at home against a team you're supposed to beat and you're not playing well."
A gang of sunshine boys is not what Brian Clough faced when he finally called a team meeting three days into his calamity at Leeds. In his memoirs Giles, who had been passed over for Revie's job, writes: "I have seen it reported, in fact and fiction, that he opened with the word 'Gentlemen' but that was not the case."
What Clough said was, according to page 251 of Giles' book: "Right you F***ing lot, as far as I'm concerned you can take all the medals you have won and throw them in that bin over there."
To Norman Hunter, Clough added: "Hunter, you're a dirty bastard and everyone hates you. I know everyone likes to be loved, and you'd like to be loved too, wouldn't you?"
The reply: "Actually I couldn't give a F***."
Thirty-six years on, Giles reflects: "I'd say he was very, very nervous. The first day he came in he had young Nigel [his son] with him, right? My missus knows nothing about football, but she said to me: 'That shows total insecurity. I can't believe that.' I heard afterwards he wasn't the most secure of guys, despite being bombastic. He was a rude bastard, and arrogant, but again that was part of his genius.
"He never got off first base, never had a chance to work his magic, which he had. I could feel something. I was playing for him, and didn't get on with him, but played well for him, as best I could, and I wanted to please him. I was confused, myself. I didn't even like him, but I wanted to please him.
"When he went to Derby and said: 'You're a load of rubbish,' they were. That's where he could work his magic. He came to us: we had just won the league in 1974, and we were strong characters, and not young. Billy, Norman … We were proud of ourselves. Hard pros who wanted to win, And this guy was saying: 'Chuck your medals in the bin over there.' So he never got off first base.
"I used to think: If he'd come in and said this is what I believe, let's give it three months, he'd have had a much better chance. Looking back on it now, I don't think there was ever a chance. We were from different planets."
John Giles – A Football Man, The Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton £19.99) is out now
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/nov/14/john-giles-leeds-united