The Elland Road gantry, in line with the goal at the Kop end, is where Norman Hunter liked to sit. There are no mod cons on that vantage point — only plastic seats which gather dust — but Hunter was happy there and would sweep in a few minutes before kick-off, dancing up the steps in his long, dark overcoat.
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For those of us in earshot, his voice was part of the soundtrack to games. Hunter would tear strips off players who deserved to be flayed and berate officials for their mistakes. He bounced to his feet as goals went in and had kittens whenever Leeds United played out of dangerously tight positions at the back. The club’s last match, at home to Huddersfield Town last month, found him in his usual form. “Looks like we’re getting there boys,” he said with a grin as he walked out after a 2-0 win.
There were two distinct sides to Hunter, both of which came to mind after his death on Friday at the age of 76. He was a sweet-natured gentleman with the broadest of smiles, a twinkle in his eye and a distinctive laugh. He would breeze through the press box at Elland Road and say hello with handshakes, shoulder squeezes and little jokes. But put a ball in front of him and Hunter was ready to play; to play hard and play to win. “His left foot was just like him,” says Alan Mullery, the former Tottenham Hotspur midfielder. “You couldn’t help but love it. You just didn’t want to be on the end of it.”
Football brackets Hunter in the same field as Tommy Smith and Ron Harris, the hard men of the 1960s and ’70s who were made for an era when football let almost anything go. But the “Bites Yer Legs” nickname that Hunter inherited after the 1972 FA Cup final was a simplistic moniker for one of the most accomplished English centre-backs of his generation, a player whose brutal tackles were a foil for his skill in possession. Hunter accepted that his right foot was mainly for standing on — “most fans will tell you I’m just a hard, one-footed workhorse,” he once said — but it was not by chance that he received the inaugural PFA Player of the Year award in 1974. Footballers appreciate a good footballer.
“The ‘Bites Yer Legs’ thing never bothered him,” says Eddie Gray, Hunter’s team-mate at Leeds for more than a decade. “He couldn’t have cared less about what people thought of him — people outside of Leeds, that is — but no one should remember Norman as a hard man and nothing else. He was talented, great on the ball, and he’s one of the best players to walk through the gates of Elland Road. In all my years in football I couldn’t think of anybody who made more of their ability than he did. He worked his socks off because in his head, he was lucky to have the life he was given.”
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Don Revie, the doyen of management at Leeds, cultivated that gratitude in young players like Hunter, boys who were taken out of day-to-day jobs and invited to ride the wave of professional sport. Hunter, whose father had died a few months before he was born in 1943, was 15 and beginning an apprenticeship as an electrical fitter in the North East when Revie signed him. Many of the players who served Revie at the peak of his reign could relate to that. Peter Lorimer envisaged a career in printing before Leeds found him. Mick Jones worked in a cycle factory in Worksop until Sheffield United gave him a chance. Revie had a knack for spotting elite talent in kids who were barely out of school.
Hunter had a kid’s frame when he came south from Gateshead, tall and gangly in the way that most teenagers were. The story went that Revie’s assistant, Les Cocker, fed him a concoction of raw eggs and sherry each morning to help him bulk up and fill out. Cocker and Hunter both had club houses on Kirkdale Gardens in Lower Wortley, where Hunter lived with his mother Betty. Terry Yorath and Tommy Henderson were lodgers with the Hunters for a while and Cocker kept a close eye on them, monitoring their movements and their nights out. The Cocker family still remember the delivery of Hunter’s first car: a salmon pink Vauxhall Viva that stood out from a mile away.
As Mullery recalls, Hunter was expertly guided in the arts of defending by Jack Charlton alongside him. Charlton had a few years on Hunter and was rapidly developing into a world class centre-back. They were Revie’s trusted pairing and might have been England’s, too, had Bobby Moore not stood in Hunter’s way at international level. “When you played against Leeds, Jack would be talking to Norman all the time,” Mullery says. “There was this constant conversation going on in the background. You’d hear Jack say things like ‘don’t worry about him, just send him my direction and I’ll sort him out’. Which he did.
“Norman learned from the best and if you were up against those two, you could count your bruises after the game. Any time you went near them with the ball, they’d try to clatter you.” Did Mullery enjoy playing against Hunter? “No,” he laughs. “Absolutely not. It was a challenge and you always tried to rise to challenges but goodness, he let you know you were in a game. It wasn’t fun.”
Mullery and Hunter became good friends at the end of their careers and worked together on cruise ships for a while, running coaching sessions for the children on board. “We stopped in Monaco once and set up this game between the crew and some of the passengers,” Mullery says. “Obviously Norman wanted to play. That went without saying. This 50-50 ball appeared and Norman hit one of the passengers, sending him somersaulting backwards. It was a Hunter tackle. He absolutely smashed him.
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“I was referee so I stopped the game and said to Norman, ‘Look, you can’t do that. These guys are paying hundreds of pounds to be on this trip. We need to look after them.’ Norman looked at me and said, ‘If they don’t want to fight for it, what can I do? It’s football, the ball was there and if the ball’s there then I’m going for it.’ That was him. A real gentleman off the pitch but competitive on it in a way which was pretty unique.”
That ambition ran through Revie’s squad and was a reason why Hunter left Leeds with almost every club honour on his record: two league titles, an FA Cup, a League Cup and two Inter-Cities Fairs Cups. Defeat in the 1975 European Cup final deprived him of what Hunter called “the complete package”, but he engendered the ethos of the Revie team: not only good enough to win, but utterly intent on it.
Allan Clarke came to Elland Road from Leicester City in 1969, a British record transfer and in many ways the final piece in Revie’s jigsaw. Clarke had tunnel vision when it came to chasing trophies and Revie’s dressing room suited him. “The press used to call me a loner,” Clarke says, “and at my previous clubs I probably was. I kept myself to myself but it wasn’t because I wanted to be like that. I just didn’t feel that some of the players around me had the same ambition or drive as I did.
“Then I got to Leeds and got in with lads like Norman. Norman was a world-class defender and like all of the players there, he hated losing. He’d give everything to win games. We didn’t lose many but whenever we did you could hear a pin drop in our dressing room. I liked that. At other clubs I’d found it hard to understand why players were laughing and joking after we’d been beaten.” Revie used both the home and away changing rooms at Elland Road for training sessions but Hunter had a preference. “It’s odd what you remember,” Clarke says. “Before he left for the day he’d always comb his hair in the home dressing room. Always the home one.”
After 17 years at Leeds, he joined Bristol City, where he made more than 100 appearances, before winding up his playing career at Barnsley, where he took over as manager from Clarke, who left to manage Leeds in 1980. He also managed Rotherham United and Bradford City, but as he told the “Daily Mail” a few years ago, a story as rich as his is largely remembered for three things: the “Bites Yer Legs” banner in the crowd at Wembley, the mistake against Poland that cost England a place at the 1974 World Cup (below) and the tear-up with Franny Lee which encapsulated the wild-west nature of football back in the day.
The footage of Hunter and Lee, from the Baseball Ground during a game between Leeds and Derby County in 1975, is legendary: Hunter landing a right hand on Lee, Lee wiping blood from his split lip and then coming at Hunter with a hail of punches as the referee tries to speak with Leeds’ captain, Billy Bremner. The pair were dragged off the pitch and it took most of Derby’s coaching staff to stop a furious Lee from confronting Hunter again in the players’ lounge.
“Norman told me afterwards that he could feel him and Franny Lee eyeing each other up,” Clarke says. “He decided to get the first punch in before Franny did, because someone was about to throw one. Franny could see that his lip was bleeding and all hell broke loose. Norman would stand up to anyone, but he was disappointed about getting sent off that day. He wouldn’t deny that. Ultimately he felt like he’d let the other lads down.”
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Lee can laugh off the incident now. “I wouldn’t shine a light on it at all,” he told The Athletic. “A lot was made of it over the years but it was one of those things that happens in football. I don’t give it any thought.
“Norman was a top-notcher, a smashing fella who I met many times and had a good time with. We bumped into each other at the airport on the way home from holiday a few years ago and had a long chat. You always got a smile and a laugh out of Norman. It’s such a sad loss.”
The recurring theme in the tributes paid to Hunter, aside from his warm personality, was the quality of his play. “Aggression was part of his game,” Mullery says, “and it gave him his reputation but it’s easy to look at that and forget how talented he actually was.
“I mean this honestly: his left foot was as good as any I ever saw, one of the best in the game. We had a left-back at Spurs, Ron Henry, who was so cultured that we used to say he could pick winkles with his left foot. Norman’s was equally good in my eyes. I’m sure he won’t mind me saying that his right foot was there to stand on — and to kick you from time to time. But his left was exceptional.”
It was that class that brought Hunter into the England fold and into the squad for the 1966 World Cup. He didn’t play in the tournament or receive a winners’ medal at the time, but after a 43-year wait he was awarded one in 2009 after FIFA changed its rules to allow non-playing reserves to receive them. Hunter received it at Downing Street (below), beaming brightly and pleased as punch.
There was little that got away from him and few things were capable of beating him. His death came after he contracted the coronavirus. He leaves behind his wife Sue and his children, Michael and Claire.
They will miss him sorely at Leeds. They will miss his grin, his firm handshake and the glow that lit up the club’s hospitality lounges for season after season. They will miss the dry wit which stuck with Jones after the FA Cup final in 1972. Jones dislocated an elbow towards the end of that final and was helped up the Wembley steps by Hunter, his arm in a sling. Nauseous and in horrible pain, Jones was met by the Duke of Edinburgh. “The Duke asked me if I was okay,” Jones says. “Norman leaned over and whispered in my ear: ‘Is he fucking joking?’”
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On Friday, shortly after his death was announced, Twitter served up a photo of Hunter from last October, standing alone inside Elland Road with the crisp, blue sky above him. It’s his stamping ground, his world and his life, and he’s in awe of the vast empty stadium. But Elland Road is in awe of him, too. His seat in the gantry will stay where it is: empty in body but not in spirit.
(Photo: PA Images via Getty Images)
