Comments by "TheVilla Aston" (@thevillaaston7811) on "BBC Archive" channel.

  1. What a find.
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  2.  @dalek3086  Bury v Leeds 1962
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  3. Yep. Anfield, Goodison Park, Upton Park. Also, in my particular case: At Andrews, The Hawthorns, Molineux. Everyone said it about Anfield, except for the likes of Jimmy Tarbuck, John Motson, and so on.
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  4. I think you have it about right.
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  5. He seemed to try to manage England like he had managed Leeds. A big mistake.
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  6.  @ronb5714  Celtic supporters might well argue that Jock Stein had been more successful. Bill Nicholson had won more trophies. I don't know. But how does club management relate to International management? An international team comes from a a number of different clubs, the manager gets them for a few days. How does that sit with Revie's intense management style? I remember Revie's first match for England. It was against Czechoslovakia in a Euro qualifier. England came out in the bog awful Admiral strip, obviously a link to Revie at Leeds. The words of Land of Hope and Glory were printed in the match programme in a goache attempt at patriotism. Wembley Stadium had aquired a weak logostyle like on the front of a SodaStream package. Come the match, England won three-nil. With the next match, against Portugal, it was back to business as usual, with a nil-nil draw. He tried it all: Weekend get togethers for 100 plus players, cancellation of the First Division programme before mid-week England matches, dossiers, and so on. Nothing seemed to work. England had some good options in midfield. Colin Bell was at the peak of his career until he got sythed down by a Man Utd player in a league cup tie. Gerry Francis was really good player. Brooking and Tony Currie also there. Revie placed far too much importance on Kevin Keegan, who did next to nothing for England during Revie's time. Overall, judging by TV interviews with players, and how the team performed, Revie seemed to have too much baggage from his Leeds days. Perhaps the FA should been as radical in 1974 as they had been when they appointed Alf Ramsey, and gone for Clough. Revies might have been the only person who could have eased the likes of Bremner, Giles, and Hunter out of Leeds. Perhaps Revie's appointment was a tragedy for England, and for Leeds. Who can say?
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  7.  @ronb5714  'Liverpool under Bill Shankly never worked on set pieces. Shanks' logic was "If we don't know what we're going to do, how will the opposition?"' This from the National Football Museum: 'Bill Shankly is the formidable Scottish manager credited with transforming Liverpool FC into one of Europe's leading clubs. During a playing career that began at Carlisle United, but saw him established as full Scotland international while at Preston North End, Shankly was known as a 'firm but fair', hard-working Right Half. A commitment to working hard in training, focussing on ball-retention, fitness and set-pieces showed itself during his early management career at Carlisle, Grimsby Town, Workington and Huddersfield Town'. Any idea that Liverpool with their perchant for fitness, work-rate, and aggressive tactics did not worry about set pieces is absurd. 'It's a fallacy to suggest that, because England didn't do well, England weren't capable of doing well.' But it never happened. One major trophy in 57 years, and that was won on home soil. England are by a distance, the biggest underachievers in world football. 'It's also a fallacy to suggest that players who didn't do well with England weren't capable of doing well with England. Kevin Keegan may have only had a moderately productive England career, but he won trophies galore with Liverpool, then headed to Germany and won the Balon d'Or twice.' But they never showed, dispite having pleny of chances: Keegan, 63 caps. McDermott 25 caps. Ray Kennedy 17 caps. And that is just Liverpool... Whatever the players have done in club football, their efforts rarely translates into success in the international game. 'You do make an interesting point about team-building however. Don Revie asked to have the league programme suspended the weekend before international matches. The FA and Football Association refused to support him.' Not so. I well remember what was one of the first, if not the occasion that the FA did this was in October 1976, because Aston Villa arranged to play a friendly against Glasgow Rangers. Symptomatic of the short-sighted approach of the authorities who oversaw English football's decline. Yea, if the FA were a commercial undertaking, they would have closed it down decades ago. Revie's England were the worst England team in modern times. Worse even than Iceland debacle.
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  8. Its not big stuff. Better to get the story out there.
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  9.  @ronb5714  Any England Manager can only work with the English players that he gets to see. The British kick and rush game seemed to be ill suited to success in international football down the decades. I hope things change.
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  10.  @ronb5714  My point is about international football, not European club football. Revie's record with European club football was excellent.
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  11.  @ronb5714  But that was club football, where the players are together, day in day out. They know each other's game, they know set pieces, they have enduring team bonding process. Look at what happened with Egland in the 1970s. They failed to qualify for two world cups, and two european championships. As for Liverpool, for me, they showed how the European Cup could be won with what were by euro/world standards, ordinary players. But what did their English players do for England?
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  12.  @ronb5714  Who can say? Ramsey did not get league fixtures suspended, and yet his teams came 3rd in Euro '68, made the quarter finals of Euro 72, and only just failed to qualify for the 74 World Cup. With England not having to qualify for the 66 and 70 World Cups, the midweek friendlies took on a lot of importance from a team building point of view. When Revie was appointed in the Summer of 1974, it was already eight years since the World Cup win. Many people (Me included) were ready to set aside their doubts about Revie in the hope that he would bring success back to the England team. How wrong we were. There was the bog awful kit, the clumsy attempts to whip up patriotism, the dossiers, the lobbying of the FA for more money, the constant chopping and changing of the players, the over emphasis on Kevin Keegan, who was nowhere near a complete player to build a team around, and so on. Judging by their performances, and interviews in later years, apart from the Leeds players and Keegan, none of the players liked him, or rated him. Compare how Revie's England players spoke about him with how with how Ramsey's players spoke about him. As far as I am concerned, Don Revie was to the England Manager job what Richard Nixon was to the US Presidency. It was bit nasty when the FA failed to mark his passing away, but he did rather leave himself wide open for such a snub.
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  13.  @ronb5714  There was no list involved, it was just the whole Revie England thing. I could have said it in fewer words: Don Revie was a cheat in club football management, and a dead loss in international football management.
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  14.  @kailashpatel1706  'Revie said that when he got the England job he realised the players were not up to scratch' Did he state that at that time? 'Would Clough have done better post 1977?...' Who knows? Not me. England seemed to recover a little after Revie cleared off to the Mddle East. Its only my opinion, but in 1977, the case for appointing Clough to succeed Revie was not that strong. His only real success had been at Derby County, some years before then. Greenwood might well have been a better candidate to put things into some sort or order after the diaster of the Revie years. By 1980, Greenwood was nearly 60, and Clough had by then proved his worth beyond any shadow of doubt. For me, in 1980, with Peter Taylor retiring from Nottingham Forest, it would been a good fit to put Clough and Taylor in the England job, with a two year run to the 1982 World Cup.
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