I recently watched a recording of the 1970 FA Cup final replay with my 12-year-old son. You can find the match by searching for “football’s most brutal game”. I was attempting to show him how football has “evolved” and it made me smile that the first thing you see in the BBC coverage is an upfront trigger warning that “some viewers might find the video disturbing”.
That in itself tells us how much society has changed over the past 50 years, before you see the Leeds manager, Don Revie, smoking a cigar in the dugout while Leeds and Chelsea play out a game that today looks like a combination of football and mixed martial arts. Some of the best players of that generation, including Jack Charlton, Billy Bremner and Ron “Chopper” Harris, spend more time kicking each other than they do the ball. The game was viewed on TV by nearly 29 million people and featured only one yellow card and no sendings-off.
