Remembering a night when we thought we’d win the World Cup

Country Living with Francis Farragher

FOR my sins as a young lad growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I started to support the Leeds United soccer team. There probably was no big reason for this other than the fact that during that era they were the leading soccer team in England . . . the same as a Liverpool, Manchester City or Man. United of today.

It was, though, shockingly hard in those times to source any TV coverage of your favourite team, given that at best the only television source of sport was one RTE channel.

The FA Cup Final or the odd international soccer match were the only occasional highlights that could be accessed.

Into the mid-70s, I remember a venue in Salthill – possibly The International – putting on Monday night specials of Match of the Day and ITV’s The Big Match from tapes sourced in the UK.

So, it wasn’t easy being a Leeds United supporter in more than one sense of the word. While being at, or very close to, the top of the English soccer tree, they always seemed to lose more crucial matches than they won, but the appetite for ‘big-time soccer’ had been whetted.

Newspaper, soccer magazines and, in earlier days,boxes of player pictures were also used to fill the void left by the absence of TV coverage that most of us endured in the West of Ireland.

Leeds too, of course, had Johnny Giles in the centre of midfield, while in Saturday’s Evening Herald of the time, revered manager Don Revie wrote a column  (I presume ghost written) about the ins-and-outs of the game.

Apart from Giles, the Leeds team of that era had many class players like Terry Cooper, Paul Madeley, Billy Bremner, Eddie Gray, Peter Lorimer and Allan Clarke, but there was a steely edge to this team too, most notably in the heart of their defence where Normal Hunter was something of a smiling executioner.

Then, there was this gangly centre half, who I noted from the brief TV snippets that we saw, who must have been the ultimate goalkeepers’ nightmare.

Whenever Leeds got a corner, he always positioned himself in front of the opposition ‘keeper, backing into him, standing on his toes, shoving out his elbows, and generally making a right nuisance of himself.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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