The Gentle Giant meets Inspector Clouseau — The Square Ball 3/5/24
STILESY FOR PLATINI!
Written by: Rob Conlon
With four league games remaining of the 1987/88 season,
Elland Road had seen enough of Leeds United. A crowd of just over 24,000
watched Leeds lose 2-1 at home to Millwall at the start of April, already well
down on the season high of 36,000 that saw Leeds beating Bradford on New Year’s
Day. United had started the season as favourites for promotion, after reaching
the final four of the FA Cup and losing the play-off final the previous year,
but not even manager Billy Bremner could convince the public there was much
hope left after losing to Millwall. In the remaining fixtures at Elland Road,
the highest attendance was 13,671.
Yet even though there was little interest inside the city,
when Leeds next returned to Elland Road they were beamed to a huge television
audience in Italy. In a break from Division Two, United were playing Everton in
a joint testimonial for John Charles and Bobby Collins. While Charles was
inside the ground, chatting in fluent Italian to one of the many reporters who
had flown over for the game, a BBC reporter was chatting to one of the few
supporters preparing to come through the turnstiles. Asked what had made him
come to the game, the fan, looking distinguished in a grey three-piece suit,
sheepishly replied: “Well, I’m not going to say.” A more casually dressed Leeds
supporter beamed to the cameras: “It’s Ian Rush’s dad!”
Rush was one of four guest players adding a touch of
much-needed class to the Leeds team, and one of three representatives honouring
Charles from Juventus, where Il Gigante Buono remained revered. Gaetano Scirea,
a winner of both the European Cup and World Cup, started in defence and
presented Charles with a silver salver ahead of kick-off. Pulling the strings
behind Rush in the Leeds attack were Michel Platini, who had retired the
previous year, and Liverpool player-manager Kenny Dalglish.
For the regular members of the Leeds squad, it was a
disconcerting experience. Simon Grayson had just started to emerge on the
fringes of the first team that season, playing twice in the first half of the
campaign. Still just eighteen, he had grown up wearing a France shirt, keeping
it untucked to look like Platini.
“Michel Platini turned up with his boots in a plastic
carrier bag,” Grayson told me. “They were still caked in mud from whenever he’d
last played, and he just said to one of the other apprentices, ‘Do us a favour,
will you get the mud off them?’ Back in the day that was our job as well. We
were boot boys. We were cleaning boots every day, and I think all the other
lads that weren’t actually playing were in a rush to go clean them, because
then they had the claim to fame that they’d cleaned Michel Platini’s boots.”
Glynn Snodin, who worked as Grayson’s assistant manager at
Leeds twenty years later, had joined United from Sheffield Wednesday at the
start of that season. He had almost 400 league appearances to his name by that
point, but was no less awestruck.
“I remember Platini strolling in,” Snodin says. “Oh my god.
He came into the dressing room and the gaffer was talking to him. He had like
an Inspector Clouseau mac on. He sat down in the changing room with the gaffer
and they got their cigarettes out and were having a smoke. It was getting on
now, closer to kick-off, and he still had his mac on and was having a
cigarette. I’m thinking, what’s he doing? Is he playing? Has he just come
along? He must be injured. Then all of a sudden he took his mac off and I thought,
oh, he is playing then. You ought to have seen his boots. They were sludged up.
He’s smashing them on the floor to get all the mud off. And then he comes out.
He’s spraying balls around here, there, everywhere. I thought, wow, what a
legend. Half an hour earlier he was still sat there having a cigarette, not
even bothered.”
As boyhood Leeds fans, the significance of the evening was
not lost on either. “What two legends they were,” Snodin says. “And two great
men. John was still a king in Italy. Every Leeds player that we grew up
watching, they always say that Bobby Collins was the man that got them at it,
got them going, you know.”
Playing for Bremner was likewise a privilege. Snodin had
previously been coached by Bremner at Doncaster before being signed by him at
Leeds, while Grayson was an apprentice at Leeds when Billy took over as manager
at Elland Road. Both still refer to him as ‘the gaffer’.
“It was brilliant — the stories that you could get just from cleaning around his area,” Grayson says. “And then he’d join in training with us apprentices. You would just listen to him, even if you were on a different table at lunch and stuff like that. You’d be just listening to him and the stories he’d be telling from the glory days. It was just such a fascinating experience as a Leeds fan. But even the other lads who weren’t Leeds fans, who were apprentices together, they were just mesmerised by the whole situation.
“I always remember one time when he was watching us
apprentices train. He’d been in a board meeting just before, so he was watching
in his suit and his shoes, and then fifteen minutes after watching, he was
joining in, playing in his suit and shoes. And it’s like, wow, not only are you
playing with the gaffer, but also he’s actually in his suit and his shoes and
still looks the best player. Norman Hunter would pop in quite frequently to
join in the seven-a-sides on a Friday and a few of the other players as well.
If you’re a Leeds fan and you’re seeing these people, it was just, wow, is this
really happening? They weren’t like friendly seven-a-sides either. They were as
competitive, however old they were at that particular time, as they were when
they played.”
Snodin concurs: “Billy was brilliant. Me and our kid (Ian
Snodin) loved him to death. He was like a second father to us. He was a genius,
honestly. How many nutmegs he used to get in training was unbelievable. It was
frightening. Those seven-a-sides were like The Gunfight at the OK Corral.
Honestly, tackles flying in and everything. We’d have a game coming up on the
Saturday and it was the OK Corral on the Friday. Nobody wanted to lose,
especially when now and again the gaffer would bring a box of Milk Tray
chocolates in for the winners. Then it would be even worse, just for a box of
Milk Tray, not a medal. You’d hear (growling), ‘Norman’s ball!’ all the time.
Him and Bairdy (striker Ian Baird) had some tussles, I’ll tell you that.”
While Snodin started for Leeds against Everton in the number
3 shirt, Grayson was on the bench, one of a number of young players thinking
they were just there to make up the numbers. He had to come on in the first
half after Peter Haddock suffered an injury.
“I was really, really nervous,” he says. “One, you’ve hardly played in front of big crowds before. Two, the people that you’re playing against — players like Neville Southall. Three, then the actual people that you’re playing with. You’re thinking, well, I hope they give me a decent ball and I’ve got a bit of time and space to control it and then maybe get it back to them and not give it away, because they’re not used to giving the ball away. I think the furthest I passed it was probably about ten yards, about five or six times, just so I could settle into the game and get the nerves out the way. I wish I could say that by the end of it I was calling Michel Platini ‘Plats’, but it was just surreal.”
As if receiving passes from Platini and Dalglish wasn’t
daunting enough, the night was made even stranger for Snodin by the fact he was
playing against his younger brother Ian, who had been sold to Everton the
previous year. “I remember him picking it up once and I just laughed at him and
said, ‘What are you doing?’ He started running as though he would have taken me
on. We were just laughing at each other. That was a first as well.”
“I wish I could say I was calling Michel Platini ‘Plats’”
While the game was played at a testimonial pace, the
injection of class into the Leeds team didn’t take long to show. Rush had
scored just five Serie A goals since joining Juventus, after scoring forty in
all competitions for Liverpool in 1986/87, and was already being linked with a
move back to Britain. Whether it was being reunited with his former partner in
crime Dalglish, or the sight of his old rivals in blue, he quickly rediscovered
his goalscoring touch, completing a hat-trick to give Leeds a 3-1 lead after 52
minutes. His first arrived via a one-two with Dalglish, the second and third
were created by deft chips over the defence from Platini.
‘If his Juventus bosses were watching, they will have
noticed that if you pass the ball to Rushie he quite often sticks it in the
net,’ wrote journalist Jon Culley. In a different report, Scirea, who was
tragically killed in a car accident only a year later and now has a stand named
in his honour at Juventus, was praised for playing ‘as elegant and economical
as ever’. A couple of Leeds regulars also showed they didn’t belong in the
doldrums of Division Two, and it was noted: ‘John Sheridan and David Batty were
determined that they would also sit at the top table.’
The game finished with Leeds 3-2 victors, with one of
Everton’s consolation goals created by Allan Clarke’s little brother Wayne. It
didn’t go unnoticed that once Platini and Rush were substituted off, ‘Leeds
became mere mortals again.’ Rush was replaced by Ian Baird, Platini by John
Stiles. Snodin can’t help but laugh at the reminder that Platini was once
subbed off for his old friend Stiles, remembering a training session at
Doncaster when Bremner was trying to teach Stiles exactly how to deliver an attacking
set-piece. For all he tried, Stiles just couldn’t put the ball on the spot
Bremner desired, or with the required pace, leaving an exasperated Bremner to
show him exactly how it’s done even though he was, once again, wearing a suit
and shoes. “Stilesy said, ‘Gaffer, can I ask you a favour? Can I borrow your
shoes?’ The gaffer replied, ‘I’ll tell you what, if you don’t get this right
you’ll be wearing my shoes and my suit, because you’ll be sat in the stand.’
What a substitution that is, isn’t it, dear me: Stilesy for Platini!”
Snodin can’t help laughing that Platini was once subbed off
for John Stiles
The night raised £50,000 to be shared between Charles and
Collins, at a time when Charles was struggling financially. Grayson only
realised how lucky he had been to share a pitch with such names when he found
some newspaper clippings in his dad’s scrapbook while researching for an
autobiography he’s working on.
“It is something you look back on and feel immensely proud
that you were actually around it,” he says. “We were just happy when it got
announced that we were going to see these people in the dressing room and, as
apprentices, maybe get them a cup of tea or anything like that. But then
obviously to be a little bit closer and then on the pitch playing with your
heroes was unbelievable.”