All-Time Premier League: Leeds United

Down the Leeds Road we go, making the journey to Leeds itself. It’s a short trip, and one which would not be necessary had Hilton Crowther had his way. When the original Leeds City club was expelled from the Football League for financial irregularities in 1919, its players were auctioned. Within hours of the auction taking place, a meeting of the club’s supporters had resulted in its dissolution and reformation. Crowther, the chairman of Huddersfield Town, bought the new Leeds United club with the intention of amalgamating the two. To be precise, the former, financially struggling club was to be liquidated and its players packed off to Leeds. The townspeople of Huddersfield foiled that plan, and Crowther had to concentrate on creating a new team instead of moving an old one.

The Leeds supporters might well have looked enviously down the road at first; for while Huddersfield Town went on to dominate the next decade, success was somewhat slower to come to the club that could have absorbed it. It would be almost fifty years before Billy Bremner lifted the League Cup, the club’s first major trophy; but if any of those who had been at the Salem Hall meeting in 1919 lived long enough to see the late sixties and early seventies, it must have been worth the wait. With seven major honours in a six-year spell, Don Revie’s “Peacocks” earned a place among English football’s most decorated teams. Since that time, only two more trophies have been added to the collection; and, like the Huddersfield team in the previous chapter, the Leeds United all-time XI relies heavily on those who played for the club during its most successful period. Yet there are tough choices to be made even among these, and there are players from other periods who cannot be ignored.

1. Goalkeepers Gary Sprake and David Harvey, who each won Championship medals during the Revie era, are a case in point. Sprake, a Welsh international, was famous for his egregious errors, which included once throwing into his own net, but his handful of high-profile mistakes went with more than 200 clean sheets. In ’68-’69, he played all 42 League matches as the last line of defence in a team which won the Championship with a record 67 points. They scored just 66 goals in the process, becoming the lowest-scoring League Champions and the first to score more points than goals; but with Sprake between the posts, they conceded just 26, a record for a 42-game season. Harvey, his long-time understudy, took his place in ’71-’72 and kept the green jersey for the next seven years. It was he who guarded the goal in ’73-’74, as his team went unbeaten for 29 League matches, falling one short of the record set by Burnley in 1920-’21. Sprake made 506 appearances for the club between 1962 and 1973, Harvey 446 in two spells between 1965 and 1985. Sprake, born in Swansea, was the youngest-ever goalkeeper to play for Wales when he won the first of 37 international caps. Harvey, although a native of Leeds, played for Scotland 16 times, including 3 games in the 1974 World Cup, when he was rated the best goalkeeper in the tournament. I’m not sure which was the better goalkeeper, but either would have a case as the club’s best ever.

Jimmy Potts bounced between the First and Second Divisions between 1926 and 1934 without winning anything. Yet he earned a reputation as one of the game’s most sure-handed goalkeepers. Howard Wilkinson, selecting his greatest-ever Leeds team in 1990, picked Potts ahead of Harvey and Sprake. In Wilkinson’s team at the time was John Lukic, who had just returned to Elland Road for a second spell at Leeds. Over the next six years, Lukic would stake his own claim to the title of the Greatest Leeds Goalkeeper, playing a prominent part in the club’s return to glory in ’91-’92. Once David Seaman’s senior in his first spell at Leeds, and returned to store after the younger man arrived at Arsenal, he bookended his career by returning to Highbury to act as a deputy to his old deputy.

But neither Lukic nor Potts ever won full international honours. Lukic came close with an appearance for the England B team in December 1990, when he substituted for Nigel Martyn. Five and a half years later, it was Martyn who replaced Lukic in goal at Elland Road. This time, the transition occurred between seasons, rather than between halves of a game, the arrival of the one coinciding with the other’s departure. By that point, Martyn had already done what Lukic had failed to do at international level, playing for the England senior team three times. Over the next six years, he would win twenty more caps, although he was no more able to displace David Seaman from the first string at international level than was Lukic at Arsenal. He did, however, beat him into the PFA’s Premier League Team of the Year in three consecutive seasons between 1997 and 2000. In the last of those, his outstanding performances against continental opposition played a huge part in Leeds’s run to the UEFA Cup semi-finals. The following year, he helped his team reach the same stage of the European Champions’ League. He was picked for England’s World Cup squad in 2002; but even though he didn’t play, the tournament seems to have contributed to his downfall at Elland Road. Having just been to the Far East, he was reluctant to return there for his club’s pre-season tour; and when the rest of the squad returned, he found that Paul Robinson had become the team’s first-choice goalkeeper. He was sold the following summer; but in 2006, Leeds supporters voted him into their all-time greatest team. I’m inclined to agree. Sprake and Harvey will provide competition.

2. Throughout Martyn’s tenure at Elland Road, and for six seasons either side, the Number 2 shirt belonged to Gary Kelly, the only Leeds player from outside the Revie years to make more than 500 appearances in the club’s colours. Signed as a striker from Dublin’s Home Farm club in 1991, Kelly made his first-team debut for Leeds later that year as a substitute wing-forward in a League Cup match; but his defensive skills, combined with a ruinous injury to Mel Sterland, soon led Howard Wilkinson to convert him into a wing-back. He made the right-back position his own in ’93-’94, playing in all 42 Premier League matches; and by the end of the season, he had played his way into Ireland’s World Cup squad. Eight years later, slower but smarter, he was still in his national team as Ireland once again reached the second round. As an Anglo-Irish schoolboy rooting for the incredibly long shot of an Anglo-Irish final, I admired Kelly as much as a Manchester United supporter could bring himself to admire a Leeds player; and I can still see him in my mind’s eye – positioning himself between a winger and the ball near the by-line, and tightly turning under pressure to transform defence into attack.

But the starting spot at right-back goes to a man whom my father, a Swindon Town supporter who adopted Leeds as his favourite First Division Club, grew up watching in the seventies. Paul Reaney, like Kelly, broke into the first team at the age of seventeen and lasted another sixteen years; and his 745 appearances in the club’s colours exceed Kelly’s impressive tally by more than 200. He made his debut early in the ’62-’63 season, joining a Second Division team that had narrowly escaped relegation to the Third a year before. By the time he left Elland Road in 1978, he had won every honour in the English game at least once, and would have had several more winner’s medals were it not for his team’s unfortunate habit of coming a close second. In ’64-’65, the newly promoted Peacocks missed out on a League and Cup double by the narrowest of margins, losing the League Championship on goal average and the FA Cup Final in extra time. After winning the League in ’68-’69, Leeds qualified to compete for the European Cup; but ’69-’70 would be a heart-breaking season. Reaney, who had been selected for England’s World Cup squad, broke his leg during the run-in; and Leeds, now pushing for three different prizes, ended up winning none. He fought back from his injury, and played a part in all the triumphs and near misses of the next five seasons. He was one of the less heralded members of Don Revie’s star-studded team; but his dangerous crosses, disciplined man-marking and clever covering were a vital element of the team’s play. He was known to be one of the few defenders capable of containing George Best – a fact which Best himself acknowledged. He takes the Number 2 shirt, with Kelly available as a backup.

Honourable mentions go to Bert Sproston, a star of the inter-war period who briefly displaced George Male as England’s first-choice right-back; and Mel Sterland, a First Division Champion in ’91-’92. Sproston won 11 international caps, 8 more than Reaney; and Sterland’s 20 goals for Leeds are five times the 4 scored by Kelly. But neither Sproston nor Sterland lasted long enough at Leeds to make as many as 200 appearances. Each, at his peak, may have been as good as Reaney or Kelly, and possibly better; but in terms of longevity, it’s no contest.

3. Grenville Hair, a multi-sport athlete whom Frank Buckley persuaded to concentrate on soccer, is only one place behind Trevor Cherry on the club’s appearances list, with 474 to Cherry’s 484; but most of his were in the Second Division, and he never won international honours. After sixteen years of service, Hair retired in 1964, just as the Whites were about to enter their golden age. He had been replaced by Willie Bell, who would play a part in the near-miss double the following year and play twice for Scotland in 1966 before leaving for Leicester City and eventually becoming a celebrated coach at Liberty University, the Christian fundamentalist school founded by Jerry Falwell. Bell’s replacement, Terry Cooper, won more trophies than any left-back in Leeds history. Having been a wing-forward when he first showed up at Elland Road to ask for a trial, he retained his aggressive attacking instincts after being converted into a full-back. Capable of cutting inside to shoot from long distance as well as overlapping to cross, he scored 11 goals in his 350 games for Leeds, and it was his volley that settled the 1968 League Cup Final. More than three decades after his departure, the club’s supporters voted him into their greatest ever XI.

But I’ve gone with Cherry, who replaced Cooper in 1972 and remained in the team for a decade. He had been signed from Huddersfield with a view to his replacing Jack Charlton at centre-half; but when Cooper suffered a leg injury, the versatile Cherry took his place. When Charlton retired a year later, it was Gordon McQueen who took over at Number 5, allowing Cherry to stay at 3 for most of the Championship-winning ’73-’74 season. The following year, he helped Leeds to the European Cup Final, marking Johan Cruyff out of the semi-final against Barcelona. In 1976, he took over the club captaincy following the retirement of Billy Bremner and won his first international cap. He would be a regular in the England XI for the next four years; although the national team’s failure to qualify for the 1978 World Cup meant that unlike Cooper, he never got the chance to play on the biggest stage. His 31 goals for Leeds, which set a club record for a left-back, bear witness to the fact that like Cooper, he could be as assertive in attack as he was diligent in defence; and unlike Cooper, he could also play in midfield. The modern role of the so-called “inverted full-back,” effectively a revival of the pre-1930s wing-half, is one to which he would take instantly.

Cooper takes the substitute’s spot, but three others should be mentioned before we move on. Frank Gray, another attacking left-back-cum-midfielder whose career overlapped with Cherry’s, surpassed his goals tally with 35 scored in two spells at Elland Road between 1972 and 1985. He played 32 times for Scotland, including 3 at the 1982 World Cup. Ian Harte, an Irish dead-ball specialist who formed a familial full-back partnership for club and country with his uncle Gary Kelly, outscored Gray with 39 goals in 288 games between 1996 and 2004. He, too, played in a World Cup, helping Ireland to reach the second round in 2002. Between Gray and Harte, there was Tony Dorigo, a naturalised Australian who wasn’t much of a goal threat but could cross from the wing with menace and was good enough to play for England 15 times between 1989 and 1993. From 1991 to 1997, he defended the left flank for Leeds, winning the last First Division Championship before the Premier League was established and earning a place in the new competition’s first Team of the Year.

4. Willis Edwards, signed from Chesterfield at the age of 21 in March 1925, became Leeds United’s first international a little under a year later when he lined up for England against Wales. Strong, skilful and scrupulously fair, he won fifteen more caps over the next three and a half years. “From 1926 to 1930,” wrote Ivan Sharpe,” he lent dignity, as well as the highest grades of skill, to England’s half-back line.” Had he not accepted a contract to forecast in newspapers the results of forthcoming matches, thus drawing the disapproval of the FA selectors, he might have won several more caps. At club level, he continued to play for another decade, enthralling the Elland Road crowds with his footwork, headwork and passing range. On one occasion, more than half a century before Rene Higuita performed his “scorpion kick” at Wembley, Edwards executed the same play at Elland Road. He made 444 first-class appearances for Leeds before the outbreak of the Second World War, and another 24 guest appearances over its first four years.

But no-one can be surprised about the first choice at right-half. Billy Bremner was not as gentlemanly as Edwards; but few players can rival his importance to the club’s history. In the sixties and seventies, “King Billy” was to Leeds United and Scotland what Roy Keane would be to Manchester United and Ireland thirty years later. A tenacious tackler, and sometimes downright dirty, he had a temper as fiery as his bush of curly red hair; and the scrappy side of his game is summed up in the two images of him that most easily come to mind: a still photograph of Tottenham Hostpur’s Dave MacKay grabbing him by the collar after he had targeted his compatriot’s twice-broken left leg, and a piece of film footage showing a fist-fight with Liverpool’s Kevin Keegan in the 1974 Charity Shield. In 1975, another fight, alleged to have happed off the pitch, put an end to a distinguished international career in which he had won 54 caps, captaining his country at the 1974 World Cup. But Bremner was much more than a brawler. Far better with the ball at his feet than the caricature suggests, he rarely failed to play the right pass at the right time, with the reverse pass a particular speciality. He had the stamina to seemingly cover every square inch of grass on the pitch every time he played; and although he was usually the more defensive member of a midfield pair, he got forward frequently enough to score several goals. With 115 in his club record 771 appearances, he is ranked fifth in Leeds United’s all-time scoring list. “If every manager in Britain were given his choice of any one player to add to his team,” John Arlott opined in 1970, “some, no doubt, would toy with the idea of George Best; but the realists, to a man, would have Bremner.” Arlott’s appraisal of his all-round ability was shared by his colleagues in the FWA, who voted him their Footballer of the Year.

Nine years after leaving Leeds, Bremner returned as a manager. By then, the club had slipped into the Second Division; and although Bremner’s time in charge failed to bring promotion, it did see the emergence of David Batty. Seeing a midfield man made in the same mould as himself, Bremner built up Batty’s strength on a diet of raw eggs and sherry until the younger man was ready for first-team football. Batty would go on to make 373 appearances for Leeds in two successful spells at the club. But it was during the years in between that he played his best football. He won 42 England caps, but 23 of them were earned while he was playing his club football elsewhere. He was selected for the PFA Premier League Team of the Year three times – once while playing for Blackburn and twice for Newcastle. Edwards, a one-club man, takes the substitute’s spot.

5. Jack Charlton stands second in the club’s appearances list, behind Bremner by nine games; and although he played primarily as a stopper, his 95 goals make him its ninth-highest scorer. Born in Ashington into a famous family of footballers, he and his brother Bobby grew up to found their own wing of what would become the Milburn-Charlton dynasty. In 1950, while Bobby prepared for his future playing for Matt Busby’s Manchester United, the fifteen-year-old Jack followed the more familiar path to Elland Road. Two of his uncles, Jack and George Milburn, had played for Leeds United in front of Jack Potts. A third, Jim Milburn, was currently occupying the elder Jack’s old left-back position and had recommended his nephew to his employers. The younger Jack initially turned down the offer of a trial, deciding that he would prefer to follow his father into the local colliery, but it wasn’t long before he changed his mind about mining. Belatedly accepting the offer from Leeds, he applied in the meantime to join the constabulary; and when his police interview clashed with his trial match, he decided to fulfil the latter.

The gamble paid off. He had failed his eleven-plus, but this more practical entrance examination proved passable. He signed amateur forms after the trial, joining the Elland Road ground staff, and turned professional two years later. In the last game of the ’52-’53 season, he graduated to the first team, filling in at centre-half when John Charles moved up to centre-forward. His National Service restricted him to one appearance over the next two years; but when he returned to full-time football, he was ready for the role of a first-team regular, a role he retained for the next eighteen years. He didn’t have his brother’s ball control or creativity; but he was a strong tackler and a power in the air, and could cover for and organise his fellow defenders expertly. By his own admission, his strengths lay less in playing football than in stopping centre-forwards from playing, by fair means or foul; but he could make a nuisance of himself going forward, even if he looked awkward doing it. In 1967, he was good enough to be voted Footballer of the Year. Alf Ramsey and Don Revie both recognised the security he gave to a team, the former picking him for England’s World Cup-winning team in 1966 and the latter giving him the headship of the Leeds defence as the team developed from Second Division nobodies to serial Championship challengers. It’s difficult to imagine the transformation occurring without him, and it’s just as difficult to imagine omitting him from the Leeds United all-time XI. I should, however, briefly mention his struggles with dementia, probably brought on in part by his heading of the heavy balls used in his day. The BBC has made a documentary on the subject, and I can recommend it to every football fan with an interest in the game’s safety.

Lucas Radebe, a considerably more cultured player but one who had a far shorter shelf life, is on the bench. He wasn’t expected to achieve much when he arrived at Elland Road in 1994, having been signed from the Kaizer Chiefs only to keep Phil Masinga happy; but it was Radebe who turned out to be the better investment, providing composure at the back for the next eight years. (As far as I know, no Yorkshire-based pop group have ever been moved to name themselves the Mamelodi Sundowns.) Radebe, a midfield player in South Africa, will find a kindred spirit in fellow backup Ernie Hart, whose career spanned the transition from the pivot to the policeman. A contemporary of Edwards who played alongside him for club and country, Hart made 472 appearances for the former and 8 for the latter.

Gordon McQueen, Charlton’s replacement, who spent five and a half years at Elland Road before departing to join Manchester United; and Rio Ferdinand, who followed the same well-worn path after just a year and a half; are ineligible. Chris Fairclough, a solid stopper in the ’92 team, cannot find a place.

6. Wilf Copping, a craggy-faced former miner who took to the field unshaven in order to make himself look even more frightening than his boxer’s build would have done on its own, played on the left of two of the most famous half-back lines of the thirties. From 1930 to 1934, he teamed up with Edwards and Hart at Elland Road, doing the dirty work to which the elegant Edwards would not descend; and during this time, he attracted the attention of the England selectors, playing in six consecutive internationals. But it was after he moved to Arsenal, joining Jack Crayston and Herbie Roberts, that he really reached his highest heights, winning two League Championships and an FA Cup along with thirteen more international caps before returning to Leeds in 1939. He played out the end of the ’38-’39 season with Leeds and won one more international cap before the Second World War cut short his career. He made a handful of appearances in wartime competitions before retiring in 1942.

Twenty years later, a left-half who could have been copied from Copping made his debut for Leeds. Norman Hunter would have agreed with Copping’s dictum that “the first man in a tackle never gets hurt;” and Copping’s nickname of “The Iron Man” had its equivalent in a banner held up at the 1972 FA Cup Final, proclaiming that “Norman Bites Yer Legs.” Like Copping, Hunter found that his aggressive attitude paid off. He made at least 35 appearances across all competitions in each of the sixteen full seasons he spent at Elland Road, playing in all 42 League games on four occasions. Like Bremner, he was present in the team for the entirety of the glory-glory-Leeds-United years, when Don Revie’s men really were “the greatest football team in all the land.” Although best known for his crunching tackles, he could also bring the ball forward with composure; and his all-round game was good enough to win him 28 England caps, in spite of the fact that his career was contemporaneous with that of the great Bobby Moore. He never won the FWA’s Footballer of the Year award; but in ’73-’74, he became the first man to be given the PFA’s equivalent, making the Bremner-Charlton-Hunter half-back line the first such trio whose members had each won one or the other. To this day, that achievement has yet to be matched; and even with the entire history of Leeds United Football Club at my disposal, I cannot conceive of a combination to beat that which existed in real time.

Paul Madeley, their contemporary, never had a settled position of his own in that star-studded team, but that wasn’t in the least because he was not good enough. Rather, it was because he was, to quote his colleague John Giles, “seven top-class players in one.” The club’s official song for the 1972 FA Cup Final went further, referring to “The eleven Pauls;” and if this was an exaggeration, it was only by one. Capable of filling in without a hitch for any member of the first XI who found himself indisposed, and content to spend his career doing so, the Leeds-born Madeley spent eighteen years helping out his home-town team in any way he could. He made 724 appearances for the club, playing in every outfield position. Whatever his position, he played it expertly, with a graceful style that moved Don Revie to call him the team’s “Rolls Royce.” His primary position, insofar as he had one, was that of a defender, in which capacity he won most of his 24 England caps and was selected for the PFA Team of the Year in three consecutive seasons; and I can’t close the book on the defence without finding a place for the perfect utility player. He won’t be the first choice at any position; but with his versatility, he’ll get plenty of playing time.

7. Looking at the players of Leeds United’s golden age, one is struck by how long the members of Revie’s team stuck together. The recently deceased Peter Lorimer, a distant relative of Don Revie’s wife Elsie, is yet another who was present for the entire duration. As the club’s youngest-ever player when he made his debut in 1962, the fifteen-year-old hot-shot from Dundee had a long career ahead of him, and he would make the most of it. It would be almost another seventeen years before he left Leeds, by which time he had become the club’s highest goal-scorer. A false winger with excellent play-making skills and a shot once measured as the hardest in football, he had scored 219 goals for the Peacocks in 618 games, smashing the record set by John Charles. Several of them, long-range drives which whizzed past goalkeepers like rockets, would live long in the memory of those who saw them, although he would perhaps be best remembered for two goals that he hadn’t scored – one shot which provoked a superlative save from Sunderland goalkeeper Jim Montgomery in the FA Cup Final of 1973, and a wrongly disallowed effort in the European Cup Final two years later. He won 21 caps for Scotland, three at the 1974 World Cup, and would have probably had more had he not been suspended for skipping a summer tour in 1971 to moonlight in the South African League. Eight years after that adventure, he left Leeds for the North American Soccer League. He spent four summers playing in Canada, first for the Toronto Blizzard and then for the Vancouver Whitecaps, interspersed with two winters playing for York City and University College Dublin, before returning to Elland Road to finish his career. In three seasons, he scored 22 more goals in 80 games for what had, in his absence, become a Second Division club. After hanging up his boots for the last time, he became a publican in Holbrook, serving drinks to several of those who had once cheered his goals.

He would watch as another Scotsman took over his old position. Unlike Lorimer, this one arrived at Elland Road as a fully-formed footballer - an experienced international with a hatful of honours to his name, albeit one whose best days could reasonably be believed to be behind him. In the spring of 1989, he was 32, and his form had been disappointing in recent seasons. Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, had offloaded him before he declined further. But at Leeds, he found a new lease of life, rediscovering the form of old. Appointed club captain, he helped his new team to win promotion in his first full season at Elland Road, playing in a midfield partnership with Vinnie Jones. In his second, he was pushed out to the right wing and responded with what may have been the best football of his career. He was voted the Footballer of the Year, becoming the first player to win the award in both England and Scotland. His team-mates disagreed, giving the club’s Player of the Year award to David Batty; but two years later, it was Strachan who scooped that prize. In between, he got his revenge on Ferguson as Leeds beat Manchester United to the Championship. Age eventually caught up with him, and he lost his regular place in the team in ’94-’95. Halfway through the season, he left to become an assistant manager at Coventry City, commencing a successful coaching career which would become as famous for his quotes in the interview room as for anything his teams did on the pitch.

Lorimer vs Strachan is one of the toughest choices there is to be made in this team; but as at several other positions, longevity (or more precisely, time spent at the club) is the tie-breaker. In this, Lorimer has a clear advantage. Strachan takes a place in the second string. Lee Bowyer, the busy-bee bad-boy of David O’Leary’s turn-of-the-century team, is left out entirely.

8. In all of Leeds’s most successful sides, the inside-right played up alongside the centre-forward. Mick Jones top-scored in that role for the title-winning team of ’68-’69; but it was Allan Clarke, whose arrival the summer after that triumph forced Jones into the centre, who became famous for his play in the Number 8 shirt. Clarke arrived at Elland Road with great fanfare, the £165,000 paid to Leicester City for his services breaking the British transfer record set a year earlier when Leicester signed him from Fulham, and he set about justifying the price tag immediately. In his first season, he scored 26 goals and struck up a highly productive partnership with Jones, who scored just as many. At the end of the season, he was selected for England’s World Cup squad and made his international debut in the match against Czechoslovakia. Nicknamed “Sniffer” for the way he seemed to smell goals given even the smallest of chances, he seems to have been almost as happy to help his striking partner score as to stick the ball in the net himself. He set up two goals for Jones in the two games of the 1970 FA Cup Final; and Jones returned the favour two years later, dribbling his way to the by-line and crossing for Clarke to head home the goal that won the Cup. Over the five years they spent together, they scored a combined 188 goals, Clarke getting 106 and Jones 82. After four consecutive campaigns in which they had finished second or third in the League, they fired their team back to the top of the table in ’73-’74, with Clarke making the first ever PFA Team of the Year. Jones was absent from the first team the following season, and would retire early in the next; but Clarke continued to impress. Now playing off Joe Jordan, he led the Leeds scoring list for the fourth time with 22 goals, including 4 in the run to the European Cup Final. However, he declined over the next three seasons, suffering a series of injuries himself. Games and goals became less and less frequent, and he transferred to Barnsley in 1978. He had scored 151 goals in 364 games for Leeds, winning four major trophies, and 10 in 19 internationals.

Clarke plays the role of sprinter-cum-poacher playing off a target man. Eric Cantona, a more subtle kind of striker, played an important part in the ’92 team; but he soon moved on to bigger and better things elsewhere. In this team, if Clarke has to be withdrawn for a deep-playing inside-forward, the manager will have three Scottish internationals from whom to choose. The aforementioned Strachan is joined by Gary McAllister and Bobby Collins. McAllister, a midfield play-maker and dead-ball artist who played with Strachan in the early nineties, was named in the PFA Team of the Year in ’91-’92 and ’93-’94. Collins, a combative yet cultured captain in the mid-sixties, took the principle of getting one’s retaliation in first to extremes. Before a match against Manchester United in ’64-’65, he kicked George Best while the players were still in the tunnel. But he could play; and come the end of that hard-luck season, he was voted Footballer of the Year. Each was more commonly seen in the inside-left’s Number 10 shirt, but each could move to the right without difficulty.

9. The bustling Mick Jones was a fine foil for Clarke, his hold-up play and unselfish running creating several goals for his fellow striker in addition to those he scored himself; and Clarke himself claimed that his career was never the same after Jones retired. It is probably no coincidence that the late-season slip in ’73-’74 which saw Leeds lose four of their last thirteen League games happened mostly with Jones side-lined with a knee injury. Fortunately, with Jones on the pitch, the team had won all of its first seven and lost none of its first twenty-nine. His injury would eventually bring a premature end to his career; but he had at least gone out in style. In the last of his twelve seasons of first-class football, his seventh at Elland Road, he had led his team’s scoring list with 17 goals and been voted its Player of the Year. He retired with 111 goals in 313 games for Leeds and 3 England caps; and although two of those caps had been won while with Sheffield United, it was the Peacocks for whom he had played more games, scored more goals and won all of his seven major trophies.

Yet however well he fit into Revie’s team, he cannot be more than a substitute for the club’s all-time team. No striker who ever played for Leeds has been able to rival the legendary status of John Charles. Born in Swansea in December 1931, Charles was scouted and poached from his home-town team at the age of sixteen along with his brother Mel. Mel, the younger brother, ran back home at the first opportunity; but John stayed, and before the ’48-’49 season was out, the strapping six-footer had broken into the first team. He came through as an all-round centre-half, a Hart-like hybrid of the stopper and the classical pivot, but he would earn greater glory further forward. Commanding in the air, constructive on the ground, and a model of fair play, he was a worthy successor to the great T.G. Jones in the Welsh national team; but such was his goal-scoring ability that he was equally at home at centre-forward. In ’53-’54, when he first played there for a full season, he scored 43 goals in 41 games. The next season, he was back at centre-half, but he still scored 12 times. Unlike the great players of the Revie teams, he had only one season in the First Division; but in that season, he left no doubt that he could compete with the very best. After captaining the club to promotion in ’55-’56, he led the First Division scoring chart in ’56-’57 with 38 goals in 40 games. Leeds finished eighth; but although they would be in the First Division the following season, their star striker would not – not the English First Division, at least. Juventus paid £65,000 to put him to use in Serie A, almost doubling the British transfer record. He spent five highly successful seasons in Turin before briefly returning to Leeds in 1962. Without him, the Peacocks had fallen back into the Second Division; and this time, he couldn’t help them back up. He lasted just 11 games before being brought back to Italy by AS Roma, where he would end the season before Cardiff City brought him back to Wales.

His selection is a no-brainer. Yes, he played his best football in the days of the W-M formation, where he was the sole striker playing between two advanced wingers; but if he had the intelligence to switch seamlessly between centre-half and centre-forward, he could surely adjust to having Clarke alongside him. Clarke, I’m sure, would relish the prospect of feeding of Charles’s knock-downs. And if an extra defender is needed to protect a lead, he can become that defender himself.

Stars who shone less brightly in later years include Lee Chapman, Alan Smith and Mark Viduka. Viduka, an Australian international who played in David O’Leary’s team, scored more top-division goals than the others, and at a higher rate. He takes the role of third-choice striker. Joe Jordan and Jimmy Hasselbaink, who achieved more with other clubs than with Leeds, are not considered.

10. So, that’s two strikers – three if you count Lorimer coming in from the wing. But who’s going to give them the ball? What withdrawn inside-forward is going to keep that three-barrelled cannon loaded, while helping Bremner control the midfield and protect the back four? And who, of all the eligible players, could do these things well enough to keep Collins, McAllister and Strachan on the side-lines? One name does spring to mind. John Giles, signed in the summer of 1963, spent his first three years at Elland Road on the right wing; but when an injury to Bobby Collins forced Don Revie to reshuffle his team, Giles stepped into the role of midfield conductor and made it his own. He would not relinquish the role until he left Leeds nine years later – a departure whose timing makes it as neat a bookend to the club’s golden age as his arrival. Few, if any, members of Don Revie’s Leeds teams contributed more to the club during those twelve years; and certainly, no other player’s career at the club coincided so perfectly with the period. The Peacocks’ promotion from the Second Division to the First happened in his first season at Elland Road. Their run to the European Cup Final, the closest the club would come to major honours for the next seventeen years, occurred in his last. It was during that run, before the first leg of the semi-final against Barcelona, that the most lyrical of tributes was paid to that Leeds team by one of the most celebrated scientists of soccer, a tribute of which Giles could be particularly proud. “If you give Leeds the ball,” Johan Cruyff warned his team-mates, “they will make you dance.” Giles, the team’s principal puppet-master, had done just that to countless opponents, and the arch-exponent of Total Football knew a worthy opponent when he saw one. In the event, it would be Giles’ driven pass, flicked on by Joe Jordan, that gave Billy Bremner the opening he needed to score the game’s first goal – just one moment among many in which their near-perfect partnership paid dividends worth several times the £33,000 for which Manchester United manager Matt Busby had (to his lasting regret) let Giles go. Loosely speaking, Bremner was the ball-winner and holder and Giles the ball-player and goal-scorer; but each could do either job, knowing that the other would know when to switch. An understanding which, according to Giles, took only five minutes on the pitch to establish lasted Leeds nine years; and its flexibility is illustrated in the individual statistics of its parts. In those nine years, Giles scored 93 goals for the club, and his clever covering allowed Bremner to notch 53 of his own. If Bremner was Revie’s Roy Keane, Giles was his Paul Scholes - clever, creative and as combative as they came. He was said to be capable of landing a ball on a sixpence from a distance of fifty yards, and with either foot; and if a game turned into a fight, the 5 ft. 7 in. play-maker was perfectly capable of standing up for himself. His tactical intelligence and leadership were so respected by his colleagues that when Revie left to take charge of the England team, they nominated Giles for the position of player-manager – a role for which Revie had also recommended him. Although he already occupied the same position in the Ireland team, the Leeds directors did not trust him to do the job. Those of West Bromwich Albion, however, did; and in 1975, after 527 games and 115 goals for the Peacocks, he left to take control at The Hawthorns. Given the decline that set in at Elland Road after his departure, and the improvements he oversaw elsewhere, many Leeds fans would come to consider it a lost opportunity.

But never mind what might have happened. What did happen is easily good enough.

11. Perhaps, in some way, football fandom runs in families even when it doesn’t. The similarities between the Leeds United side of the sixties and seventies and the Manchester United team of the turn of the century don’t start and stop in midfield. The most striking parallel between the team which my father supported and the one which won my affections may be the one between the Bremner-Giles axis and the Keane-Scholes combination, but the one on the left wing is almost as strong. What was Eddie Gray, after all, if not the Ryan Giggs of his generation? Loyal and honest, Gray stayed with one club through his whole career, making more than 500 appearances without being cautioned once. A quick, creative Celt with a cultured left foot, he combined a short-term fragility with a long-term durability, suffering a succession of injuries but still managing to last longer in the game than anyone could have expected.

Born in Glasgow in 1948, he signed for Leeds at sixteen years of age, having impressed Jack Charlton so much in a practice match that the soon-to-be senior international stopper entreated his manager to secure the Scottish schoolboy international’s services before he had to face him competitively. Don Revie decided to just that; and within a year, Gray had done enough in the club’s junior ranks to earn promotion to the first team. He made his first-class debut on New Year’s Day 1966; and although he made only five more appearances in what was left of the ’65-’66 season, he became a regular in the next. ’66-’67 was the first of four consecutive campaigns in which he made at least 40 first-class appearances in his club’s colours; and the seemingly easy way with which he skipped past the challenges of full-backs and fed his fellow forwards with chances must have made Albert Johanneson’s injury problems somewhat less painful for the team and its supporters, if not necessarily for the unfortunate South African himself. In ’67-’68, he scored 9 goals, including winners in the semi-finals of both the League Cup and the Fairs Cup, as the club claimed both for its first major honours. In ’68-’69, he helped Leeds to the First Division Championship and earned the first of his 12 international caps. ’69-’70 was probably his best season, but the season in which his luck began to turn against him. He scored 9 goals in 44 matches for Leeds, including two of his best in one game against Burnley, and produced a brilliant performance in the first attempt at the FA Cup Final, a 2-2 draw with Chelsea in which his marker, David Webb, was comprehensively outplayed; but in the replay, a series of illegal tackles by Ron Harris reduced him to a spectator in uniform. He missed most of the ’70-’71 season, and reached the 40-appearances mark only twice more in his career. Between the dirtiest FA Cup Final in history and the controversial European Cup Final five years later, he made only 112 for the Peacocks. He remained a wonderful player on his better days, although those days gradually grew less frequent as his injury problems piled up. “When he plays in the snow,” Revie said of him, “he doesn’t leave any footprints.” Yet when Brian Clough briefly took over from Revie as manager, he told Gray that if he were a horse, he would have been shot. Fortunately, Gray didn’t give up on himself, and Jimmy Armfield did not give up on him, as easily as a stable manager. He fought his way back to full health and kept playing until 1983, moving to left-back towards the end of his career. When, as a player-manager, he did hang up his boots for the last time, he had made 577 appearances for Leeds, the sixth-highest total in the club’s history.

In this league, he’ll have better protection from officials than he had on that day in 1970. Just in case, however, the more defensive Gary Speed, who steadied the left side in the early nineties, will be available in reserve. Albert Johanneson and Harry Kewell will have to miss out.

So, Howard Wilkinson’s ’92 team is left without a single representative in the all-time team’s first XI. But it’s a different story in the dugout as the last English manager to win an English League Championship takes charge. Wilkinson did not sustain his success as well as Revie, but his achievement in leading Leeds back to glory should not be underestimated. He mirrored Revie in taking the club from the Second Division to the top of the First, and accomplished the feat faster. What makes the difference for him is not his absolute but his comparative advantage, not what he did as a manager but what he didn’t do as a player. Revie, the Footballer of the Year in 1955, was as good a player as he was a coach, and such was his success on the pitch in Manchester City’s colours that I’ve kept him in reserve for that club instead. David O’Leary, Arsenal’s record appearance-maker, is similarly unavailable. For Wilkinson, who made a total of 22 top-division appearances for Sheffield Wednesday between 1962 and 1966, the dilemma of whether to classify him as a coach or a player does not exist.

Next: Liverpool