1970 FA Cup final: The most brutal game in English football history

A version of this article was first published in April 2020

Eddie Gray collects the ball in the centre circle and immediately sets his sights on Chelsea’s goal. But David Webb has other ideas. Fuelled by fresh memories of his roasting at the hands of the Leeds winger a couple of weeks prior, the defender hits him, both feet off the ground, no prisoners. Bang.

It takes all of two minutes for the 1970 FA Cup final replay to live up to its billing as a game best avoided by the faint of heart.

It is a match that has gone down in football folklore as a meeting of pure malice between a defeated Leeds United side renowned for having the muscle to match their magnificence and a victorious Chelsea team with flashiness and ferocity in equal measure.

Football was a very different game half a century ago, when much greater leniency was shown to crunching, full-blooded tackles and their aftermath. But even by the standards of the time it made for brutal viewing.

Such is its enduring reputation, it has been re-refereed twice since by leading officials according to modern interpretations of the rules. In 1997, David Elleray concluded he would have shown six red cards, while in 2020 Michael Oliver opted for 11., external

On the night, referee Eric Jennings cautioned just one player.

As the two clubs gear up to face each other in the FA Cup for the first time since that game 54 years ago, BBC Sport looks back at one of the most notorious encounters in English football history.

“Previous”. This is the polite phrase many of the 1970 final’s participants use to explain the history and lasting grievances being carried into the game at Old Trafford.

On a grander scale, Leeds-Chelsea was the north-south divide personified. The Blues were seen as the fashionable southern fancy-dans, who hung out drinking champagne with celebrities on the King's Road, while the Whites were perceived as the dour, gritty northerners, smoking cigarettes and playing carpet bowls in their working men's club.

In truth, the two sides were more alike than they would have been willing to it - both a blend of brute force and brilliance, each driven and on the way up. This perhaps partly s for their bitter rivalry.

"The rivalry was there because Leeds had a name, a reputation as being dirty,” said Bonetti, in an interview with the Chelsea website in 2018., external “I'd call them physical because dirty doesn't sound a very nice word. We matched them in the physical side of things because we had our own players who were physical and that was probably why we were such big rivals. We weren't unalike in the way we played."

In his autobiography, Leeds midfielder Johnny Giles attests to “a special sort of animosity” between the teams.

“I had that bit of ‘previous’ with Eddie McCreadie,” added Giles. “John Hollins, who would usually mark me, could do a bit. And Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris had made a name for himself.”

Chelsea striker Ian Hutchinson put it more simply: “We hated them and they hated us.”

Leeds still carried lasting scars from their 1967 FA Cup semi-final defeat by the Blues, in which they felt they had a perfectly good Peter Lorimer free-kick ruled out.

In the 1969-70 season alone they faced each other six times, with Leeds winning both league games, including a 5-2 win at Stamford Bridge, and the Blues coming out on top over two games in a League Cup third-round tie.

There were also individual scores to be settled, with one of the freshest that between Webb and Gray. Leeds’ Scottish winger had given the Chelsea full-back an absolute chasing in the drawn final at Wembley that prompted the replay.

The Whites had largely dominated but somehow failed to win on a national stadium surface buried under a mountain of sand, in an attempt to make it playable following poor weather.

Webb was switched to centre-back for the replay to get him away from Gray and give Harris the task of keeping the winger quiet, but fate drew the two back together almost immediately and gave the Chelsea man a chance to make his mark.

This he did, about halfway up Gray’s left shin.

By 2020 standards, this would have earned Webb a first yellow, according to Oliver. His second would follow 12 minutes later for another late, two-footed lunge, this time on Alan Clarke deep in his own half, and a third in extra time. But back in 1970, Jennings kept his whistle from his lips.

Further seemingly clear offences came and went without punishment - Billy Bremner sent spinning from the field by Peter Houseman, Hunter and McCreadie coming to blows, a foot left in by Clarke.

As renowned Observer journalist Hugh McIlvanney wrote afterwards: “At times, it appeared that Mr Jennings would give a free-kick only on production of a death certificate.”

Webb recalled later to the Daily Mail:, external “Every time he went for his pocket and you thought he was going to book somebody he pulled out his hanky, blew his nose and said, ‘Get on with it, will you">