Terry Yorath

Terry Yorath's autobiography is titled Hard Man, Hard Knocks, and the hard man is what a lot of people remember. A fearsome midfielder, merciless in the tackle, with Leeds United's keep fighting and win at all costs mentality embedded: hairy and growling, and Welsh in all the ways Leeds' current manager, Daniel Farke, loves.

The book itself presents a different picture. In his self-portrait, a hard man is not who Terry Yorath was, but what he did. Hardness was a necessity of his times and situation, but his character and his generation were more disposed to question hardness in ways his predecessors did not. Perhaps that's why he fell a little short of the greatness of Bobby Collins, Billy Bremner or Johnny Giles, in his own eyes and in those of the Leeds supporters who booed and jeered him into a transfer. Perhaps it's a shame to only recognise later that, even if he lacked the ruthlessness that set those three apart, he never needed it to be a great player in his own right.

Yorath was part of the second generation of Don Revie's boys, and for a long time of the second order. United's best team was forged in a matchless winter of 1963, when games were frozen off for months and Bobby Collins seized his chance to teach Billy Bremner, Paul Reaney, Norman Hunter, Gary Sprake, Paul Madeley a course on playing harder than the rest. Raised in an era of post-war deprivation, utterly enthralled by Revie and Collins, they learned his lessons without question.

Yorath was born in 1950 so was seven years younger than Norman Hunter. As a youngster at Leeds he was taken into Mrs Hunter's rooming house, where her son still lived, and inculcated in the ways of professionalism by a player who had been in Revie's first team for four years. Yorath was admiring, but his generation — turning ten at the start of the sixties — was more doubtful of what it was told.

In Hard Man, Hard Knocks Yorath recounts how, when Bobby Collins took over the junior team while he was recovering from the broken thigh he suffered at Torino, he ordered Yorath to 'do' the opposing winger in a match that would decide the junior league. Yorath, strong and eager to please, went straight into a tackle. He broke the other player's leg. He never knew his name, and never saw his face again, and was forever nagged by the guilt of possibly ending a young player's career. All for a youth league title? Bobby Collins had no doubt that was worth your opponent's future. Terry Yorath was not convinced.

It was far from the last time Yorath felt that way. As heir apparent to Leeds United's midfield, he had to swallow his doubts and play as hard as Collins had taught Bremner and Giles. He was lucky not to be sent off at the start of the 1975 European Cup final for a tackle that broke the leg of Bayern Munich's Björn Andersson in two places and tearing his cruciate knee ligament. If Franz Beckenbauer had let Leeds win that night, Yorath would not have savoured his medal. "I'm deeply ashamed," of that foul, he wrote. "It would have been immoral for me to have come out of that match with a winner's medal."

Read my series on the 1975 European Cup final here

Much of football is about mentality and authenticity, but Elland Road would not allow Yorath to play authentically, to his own mind. In what's regarded as his best season for Leeds, when he played 28 games in the 1973/74 title win, he was so frustrated by his role standing in for Eddie Gray that Revie was compelled to ask what was up. Yorath couldn't see how he was any use on the wing. He didn't have Eddie's pace, he didn't have Eddie's tricks. Giles and Bremner, "pass the ball to me and I pass it back to them," he said. Revie, by the sounds of it, didn't contradict any of that. "You're doing a fantastic job for the club," Revie told him. But Yorath's misgivings were a sign of changing times, and the new characters Revie was having to manage: players who asked questions, who weren't content merely to fit in.