As this week sees the 25th anniversary of our last appearance in an FA Cup Semi-Final, a toellandback mini-series has just stumbled into action to bring back some memories of our cup run of 1987. This is part one – Telford United.

As the 1986/7 season began Leeds United were in a fairly similar position to where we are now, stuck around the middle of the table of the second division of English football and having been out of the limelight for far too long. But a great FA Cup run was about to lift the gloom, as well as providing a boost in confidence that was to carry us to fourth place in the league and the dreaded play-offs.

The backdrop to all this was the fear of the hooligan s who followed Leeds in that decade, and the cup run was dogged by controversy at every stage, as the police and football authorities tried to keep the thugs at bay. After a number of high-profile disturbances during the 1984/5 season the first version of the membership scheme was introduced, and only supporters’ club members, season tickets and shareholders could get tickets for away games.

For the whole of the next season the new system worked well, as the only trouble at a Leeds away game was down to the delightful followers of Millwall, during an incident that we weren’t involved in. But the other clubs in our division started to complain that our ticket restrictions were costing them money, with fewer Leeds fans travelling to away games. So the scheme was stopped a few weeks into the 1986/7 season, but as luck would have it, the next away game was at Bradford.

As a result the hooligans came flooding back, and the trouble at Odsal stadium that day culminated in a chip van being set on fire, in a sickening mockery of the Bradford Fire disaster, which had only happened 15 months before. Inevitably the away ticket restrictions were re-introduced by the FA after the inquiry into the Bradford trouble, just a few weeks before we the draw for the third round of the FA Cup gave us an away tie at Telford United.

Telford’s immediate reaction was to ask the FA if they could ban all Leeds fans from the game (ALL of us, not just the hooligans) saying “we’ve got a lovely little ground, and we don’t want it wrecked”. We could have just pointed out that the ticket restrictions had prevented trouble while they had been in force, but we’d just had the away game at WBA, where someone from the Leeds section set a groundsman’s hut on fire. The timing couldn’t have been worse, and although we now know it was down to one person who didn’t get his ticket from Leeds (he got in with a home end ticket before being moved to the away pen) this fact wasn’t known at the time the Telford controversy broke.

Thankfully the local police decided that they couldn’t stage the tie and insisted it was moved to another venue, which meant that genuine Leeds fans would be able to see the game after all. The FA ordered West Brom to stage the game at the Hawthorns, and they must have been really pleased after the incident at their ground only a month before.

This was the cue for an hysterical reaction in the press about how the’ hooligans had won’ as Telford were denied home advantage, with some papers even suggesting that Leeds should be thrown out of the competition just because we’d been drawn against them. In those days Emlyn Hughes was one of the presenters on Football Focus on Saturday lunchtimes and every week between the draw and the game he droned on about Telford being hard done by, and by the time the game came round we were all thoroughly sick of it.

In fact, when Telford played a 5th round tie away to Everton two years earlier, the arrangement was that any replay would have been played at Molineux, not in Telford. Conclusive proof that the old Bucks Head ground was incapable of staging games against any of the bigger clubs, and that our hooligan following was nothing to do with the decision to move the game. So the Hawthorns it was, yet for some reason the West Midlands flew into a panic about the prospect of trouble at the game, even though we were against a non-league club we’d never met before.

The kick-off time was moved to noon on the Sunday, and there was a massive police presence to segregate fans onto separate routes from the M5 to the ground, not just inside. It turned out to be one of the coldest days that Leeds have ever played on, and we couldn’t help thinking that the game would have been called off if it hadn’t been for the effort involved in getting such a police presence in place. I remember the Leeds fans on the big away terrace had to start jogging on the spot to try to keep warm, a sea of heads bobbing up and down that looked like the start of the London marathon.

An early goal from Ian Baird seemed to settle the nerves, but Telford soon equalised and started to have a fair share of the possession, as the frozen pitch was proving to be a great leveller. They were creating too many chances for our liking, and deep anxiety spread through the Leeds following about the possibility of our first FA Cup defeat by non-league opposition. But in the last ten minutes Baird did well to control an awkward bouncing long ball into the Telford half, before scoring with a powerful shot from outside the area.

To our great relief we’d come through a tricky tie against a club with a great cup-fighting tradition, and it was no surprise (to us anyway) that there was only one arrest on the day. In the years since 1987 Telford have completely rebuilt their ground, and the new Bucks Head consists of four new stands almost on the same site. With the present day away section being a good modern terrace taking up a whole end, I’ve no doubt that if we ever get drawn away to Telford again they will have no difficulty in staging the tie at their own place.

But back in 1987 the fourth round draw sent us to Swindon, and that’s the next chapter in our story.

Photo: Action Images

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