In September 1966, I was still a trainee with George Wimpey and grabbed the opportunity to go site based for a year at their housing and seventeen storey apartment complex at Meynell street in Leeds. So it was goodbye to supporting Chelsea and hello to Leeds United. It is impossible to go to almost every home game and not support that team. The season 1966/7 was a pretty good one for Leeds. Fourth place in Division One and reaching the final of the Inter Cities Fairs Cup. But the game that lives long in the memory is the FA Cup fifth round replay against Sunderland. A great atmosphere with the biggest crowd of the season, over 57 thousand.
Pretty much the same team reached the final of the European Cup in 1975 to play Bayern Munich in Paris. By this time I was on site at Bretton in Peterborough for Henry Boot. So when a colleague said someone he knew was travelling to France to buy tickets and did I want one, there was only one answer.
The three of us picked up a hire car in Calais and we made our way to Paris. A bright day at the end of May was perfect. There were thousands of Leeds fans in the city, and we found a fairly quiet bar away from most of them. When we entered the stadium, the atmosphere was unlike anything I had experienced before or since. The noise from the Leeds supporters was deafening and unrelenting, as only a few pints of lager in a foreign land will produce. The game itself was a big disappointment. Leeds were the better team for most of the game, and had a penalty appeal turned down and a goal ruled out in controversial circumstances. Bayern's experience told in the end with two late goals. This was the trigger for a riot by some Leeds fans who tore up seats and threw them on the pitch. The days of the English hooligan. When the riot police came out, it was time to make a hasty exit. All the way to Paris to watch a game of football, and we never saw the end.
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