44 Days, Later

"Why Leeds? Well, apart from a rumoured offer from Kuwait, they were the only club that came in for him. Even then, Stein wasn’t the first choice to replace Jimmy Armfield at Elland Road. He wasn’t even second choice. Cussins initially offered the job to Lawrie McMenemy and his suggestion of John Giles was over-ruled by the Leeds board."

Episode Seventy Eight of the Blizzard Podcast looks back on "44 Days, Later" by Lawrence Donegan, first published in Issue One back in June 2011. In it, he compares the short-lived tenures of two of football's greatest managers at Leeds United. Don Revie lasted no longer than Brian Clough in the Leeds dugout, and from his inauspicious start it's not hard to see why.

"The optimism that greeted the Stein era at Elland Road didn’t disappear — his reputation as a manager and a man saw to that — but it was tempered by a couple of losses in the league, against Manchester City and Tottenham, and two indifferent draws against West Brom in the League Cup. There was very little transfer activity, evidence perhaps that the appeal of playing for Leeds, and for
one of the greatest managers of the post-war era, was not what it once was."

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