Revealed: Don Revie’s dossier - The Athletic 28/5/20

Don Revie, England, Leeds United, dossier, tactics, analysis

By Phil Hay

The fictional aspects of The Damned Utd — the parts of David Peace’s novel that swim in artistic licence — ring no less true in spirit. On his second day as Leeds United manager, Brian Clough takes an axe to Don Revie’s desk and sets fire to the wood in the car park at Elland Road. “I light a cigarette and take a couple of drags before I throw it on the pile and watch it all bloody burn,” he says. An old era, up in smoke.

Regardless of the accuracy of that tale, you can imagine Clough being sorely tempted. Revie’s aura was everywhere at Leeds and Clough wanted rid of it. “All the photos and the files, all the bloody dossiers,” he thinks to himself. “Every other fucking thing in that office. Burn, burn, burn.”

Nothing had more of Revie about it than the dossiers. This was England in 1974 and everyone knew about them, friend and foe. Page after page detailed the ins and outs of opposition teams and the files were an extension of Revie’s personality: ambitious, visionary, tinged with paranoia and laced with a compulsion to turn over every stone. Each Leeds game yielded typewritten paper, neatly prepared by his faithful secretary, who waited each week for the latest batch of notes to arrive.

As Revie’s players learned, the significance of individual matches was incidental to his appetite for knowledge. He tried not to make exceptions when it came to scouting ahead. “The dossiers could be useful, especially in Europe, where the teams were unfamiliar,” Peter Lorimer once told me, “but when it came to games against lower-league players, cup ties and so on, they could make the full-back you were playing against sound like the best player in the world. I knew he was nowhere near that good. Just let me go out there and beat the arse off him!”

Football today is firmly on Revie’s side of the fence. The depth of his analysis and intelligence-gathering was modern thinking, decades before the birth of Prozone and the arrival of data scientists at professional clubs.

Last week, The Athletic was passed the contents of a dossier written for Revie while he was in charge of England — a document which has never been seen before. It covers the European Championship third-place play-off between Holland and Yugoslavia in 1976 and consists of more than 10 pages of typed and hand-written observations. I show some of them to Brian McDermott, the ex-Leeds manager, who works as a senior scout for Arsenal. “Honestly,” he says, “if you stuck that in a dressing room in 2020, it wouldn’t look out of place at all. Put that in front of any current player and they’d get it.”

Revie wanted to know everything he could about the teams he might face; everything and more. He wanted information on individual players, the tactical variations used by other managers, drills employed at set-pieces and specific strengths and weaknesses, irrespective of how minor the findings were. The part in The Damned Utd where Clough chastises Maurice Lindley, Revie’s assistant, for producing a dossier for a pre-season game against Huddersfield — “it’s a bloody testimonial. A fucking friendly!” — inadvertently acknowledged Revie’s devotion to his craft. Those of us who sat through Marcelo Bielsa’s “Spygate” press conference last year and listened to Bielsa saying that excessive analysis controlled his anxiety could almost hear Revie speaking.

The 1976 dossier was compiled by Les Cocker, a coach who Revie grew to trust unconditionally at Leeds and who went with him to the England camp in 1974. Revie’s backroom team at Elland Road — Cocker, Lindley and Syd Owen — shared scouting responsibilities and Cocker would sit up until the early hours after a midweek game, using the same LP cover to lean on and jot down his thoughts. The Hit Makers cover, which his family still has, is covered in doodles drawn by Cocker as he went. Not one of Revie’s lieutenants was prone to cutting corners.

The production line was organised and efficient. A handwritten version of a scouting report would be passed to Jean Reid, Revie’s secretary, to be reproduced with a typewriter. Revie retained Reid’s secretarial services after he quit Elland Road for the England job. The document from 1976 is marked “LC/JKR” (Les Cocker/Jean Reid) and dated July 5,  two and a half weeks after Cocker sat through Holland’s win over Yugoslavia at Stadion Maksimir in Zagreb on June 19. Cocker came home from the former Yugoslavia with 11 pages of observations, some of them scribbled on headed paper from the Hotel InterContinental where he was staying. Holland, who had lost to eventual winners Czechoslovakia in the semi-finals, earned a 3-2 victory in extra-time.

Revie’s England team had been eliminated in the qualifying stages for the Euros but were scheduled to play Holland in a friendly at Wembley the following February. There were no plans to meet Yugoslavia but football in eastern Europe was on an upward trajectory, so Cocker outlined everything about them regardless: the 1-3-3-3 system in which Josip Katalinski played as a sweeper, the team’s reluctance to man-mark, full-backs committing too high up the pitch and a lengthy paragraph spelling out the quality of each player.

His comments range from cutting to complimentary but offer insight either way. He describes Drazen Muzinic as “a joke at left-back” but reminds Revie that Muzinic normally plays in midfield or the centre of defence. Danilo Popivoda is a “good, fast attacking player whose runs must be picked up” and Jovan Acimovic is “a real fatty” who is “struggling to play” due to his physical state. Cocker has his ear to the ground and can predict which of Yugoslavia’s players might fall by the wayside before the World Cup in 1978, the next major tournament aimed for by Revie until he and England acrimoniously parted company in 1977. Branko Oblak is one. “Will not be around for 1978, according to the grapevine,” Cocker writes. And the midfielder did, indeed, retire from international football before the World Cup.

Cocker’s overview of the Yugoslav tactics looks closely on Oblak, who drops too deep too often and invites Holland to apply a high press. Do that, he says, and you’re in trouble. He picks apart corners and free kicks: how Yugoslavia defend them and how they attack from them. The sweeper Katalinski (whom Cocker is glowing about) is key in both scenarios. Deliveries to the back post are the best way of taking out his aerial dominance. “He’s so big and powerful,” Cocker says. “He’s as big as Ron Yeats (Liverpool’s centre-half).” When Yugoslavia win free kicks, they like to catch you out by taking them from the wrong place. “Referees in this competition allowed that to be done,” Cocker reports. As his career went on, Revie took to analysing match officials, too.

The observations are made in real-time and without any access to video replays. Cocker’s only opportunity to pick Yugoslavia and Holland apart is the fast-flowing game in front of him. “For me, it would be like going back to when I was managing Slough or Woking,” McDermott says. “It’s analysis without any technology to help, which is why it’s so impressive.

“The detail’s incredible and the best thing about it is the simplicity of the language. It’s easy to understand and you can tell it’s been written by a football man — someone who loves the game, knows all about it and knows what his manager wants him to look for. Everything in there is common sense.”

Holland get the same treatment. They’ve fallen short of the European final, so their coach, George Knobel, makes changes for the third-place play-off. Johan Cruyff, Johan Neeskens, Willem van Hanegem and Johnny Rep drop out of the Dutch squad but Cocker notes how the quality of their midfield remains intact. It is also obvious that the entire Holland camp are tuned into one style of play. “The Dutch must be well off for midfield players if these lads are not regulars,” Cocker reflects and that is where they hurt Yugoslavia. Rob Rensenbrink, Cocker warns, will “skin you alive” if he goes one-v-one. He spots that both Ruud Krol and Rene van de Kerkhof are right-footers playing on the left. Stand off Krol and he’ll play square passes all day. “He wants you to have a bite at him so he can go past you,” Cocker says.

There are shortcomings as well. Yugoslavia’s fightback from 2-0 down comes after they throw Katalinski up front and cause havoc with his height. Cockers says this “revealed one of their weaknesses and had the Dutch team on the rack” and he suggests to Revie that England could profit from set-pieces against Holland if the service is good enough. Goalkeeper Piet Schrijvers rarely leaves his line or catches the ball and the back post is always left unmarked. Adrie van Kraay looks prone to leaving space behind him. But Cocker is in no doubt. Holland were excellent, fit and should have put Yugoslavia to the sword in normal time. They can stretch you out wide or through the middle and their performance “could have have been exploited far more than it was in this game”.

The feedback Cocker was able to provide from one 120-minute match in the Eastern Bloc in the mid-1970s is extraordinary, a complete Who’s Who of two of Europe’s stronger nations. Parts of it are particularly perceptive. He is effusive in his praise of midfielder Jan Peters, calling him “a great player on and off the ball”. When England and Holland met at Wembley eight months later, Peters scored twice in a 2-0 win for the Dutch.

Some in the England squad, however, were unimpressed by Revie’s research and analytical brain. To them, the detail was excessive and unnecessary and his team selections had a habit of confusing them. At Leeds, everything worked for him like clockwork. With England, his dossiers were contentious and ridiculed by the media. “The problem for the England boys was that they weren’t used to them,” says Eddie Gray. “All of us at Leeds, we’d grown up with them.”

In the foreword to a biography called Revie: Revered and Reviled, Kevin Keegan — Revie’s England captain — wrote that “75 per cent of the England players bought into the dossier idea but the other quarter didn’t. Unfortunately for Don, the press picked up on the 25 per cent”. But time has been kind and the 1976 report from Yugoslavia shows him embracing analytical techniques that football was decades from grasping properly. Other managers would make notes pre-match but none of their preparation was so complex.

“From the point where I joined the club, it was part of what we did,” Gray says. “Each player would get a dossier before a match and it would tell you just about everything. They weren’t so in-depth at first but they got more and more detailed as the Revie era went on. It could be monotonous reading them but that’s just how it was and I found them helpful in Europe. When it came to Don and England, I don’t think the England boys could see the point. It wasn’t in their make-up.

“I wouldn’t say every player at Leeds loved them either. With Lorimer, you couldn’t have got him to read Sporting Life! He was probably kidding on that he’d taken in all the information. But that was just Peter. They were something different and there were useful bits in them. It was something no other English manager was doing at the time, that’s for sure.”

As a rule, the players at Leeds were receptive wen Revie spent the last couple of hours before kick-off running through his inner thoughts. “Mind you,” says former Leeds striker Mick Jones, “we didn’t think too much about the opposition. We were a top team and we didn’t worry about anyone else. In fairness to Don, he never complicated things too much with me. When I signed from Sheffield United, the only instruction I got, to begin with, was ‘keep doing what you’ve been doing’.

“He’d send Maurice Lindley and the others to watch every team before we played them. Maurice would come back with all the information for Don to dish out. It was all in there but to be quite honest, with the great players we had we expected to beat whoever we played. I don’t think we were a great team because of the dossiers. We were a great team anyway. But Don was ahead of his time.”

A pile of the dossiers survives to this day, many of them in the possession of Cocker’s son Dave. They are rarely disclosed for public consumption. Would current footballers or coaches relate to them? Bielsa might. The Argentinian’s Spygate press conference was awash with laptops, iPads, projectors and video clips but under the main screen beside him, laid out on a shelf, were piles and piles of folders holding paper copies of the information his staff were collating for him — dossiers for the modern day.

The Damned Utd depicted Clough setting fire to Revie’s labours of love. Bielsa, most likely, would have taken them home and read them, every word, cover to cover.