Armfield was the man charged with redressing the disorderly regime of Brian Clough at Leeds United in the 1970s, and for that alone he deserved a medal.

But recognition of his 54 years within the sport was not something he especially craved.

"Throughout my life I've been paid to do something I enjoy," he said. "That makes me privileged."
Armfield, as history shows, did not receive a medal at Leeds. A contentious defeat in the 1975 European Cup final saw to that.

In so nearly becoming the first English manager to win the continental trophy, however, he displayed the traits of a man who liked to see what life could offer him.

While a member of the squad at Blackpool, the only league club he would play for, Armfield would regularly undertake shifts at his local newspaper, the Evening Gazette, to train him for a future career in journalism.

When Leeds United dispensed with him in 1978 after four years as their manager, he did not look for another managerial position but instead accepted a job with the Daily Express.

It was a sabbatical from which he never returned and next year will begin his third decade in radio, an industry which currently employs the 72-year-old as one of BBC Five Live's matchday summarisers.

"I'm what you'd call a busy person," Armfield said. "There was always
something on the go.

"Back in the 1960s, while I was still playing, I took my FA coaching
badges at a time when they weren't really in vogue. I would also spend three evenings a week at the Evening Gazette because in my mind I imagined that once I finished playing I'd become a journalist. That was
the plan.

"But Bolton Wanderers asked me to be their manager in 1971, and a short
while later I took the job at Leeds. I'd turned down a different offer to manage Everton. It's a long time ago now, and a different part of my life, but I look back on it fondly.

"I've got a soft spot for Leeds as a club and I liked the city; the people were very good to me. And in the main I thought I did well."
Armfield was United's antidote to the poison spread through Leeds by the most ill-conceived managerial appointment ever seen at Elland Road.
Clough presided over the club for 44 torrid days, working in the shadow of the renowned Don Revie for as long as he could stand it.

For all his precocious talent, the idiosyncrasies of Clough were not compatible with Elland Road and Armfield was appointed in October 1974 with Leeds submerged near the bottom of the first division.

To his eternal credit, United finished the 1974-75 season eight points behind the league winners, Derby County, and navigated their way to the European Cup final by disposing of Anderlecht and Barcelona in earlier rounds.

Armfield has discussed United's 2-0 defeat to Bayern Munich in the final too many times to re-live it again but the city of Leeds, and more besides, believed the club had been critically hindered by the ineptitude of the match referee.

Supporters at the Parc des Princes in Paris ripped out seats from the terraces, and United were subsequently banned from European competitions for two years.

Armfield would have been the first Englishman to manage a European Cup-winning team, an honour which fell instead to Clough with Nottingham Forest four years later. By then, the mess Clough had left behind at Elland Road was a more faded memory.

"The first job for me was to get the Leeds team back on its feet," said Armfield. "That didn't actually take a great deal of doing.
"The players were very experienced, and they knew their way around England and Europe.

"I'd won a number of England caps and I had more international experience than some of them, but when it came to European experience, they all had more than me. I was working with a squad that should have been doing much better than they were under Brian.

"We got to the European Cup final, and I've always felt we were robbed on the night. What should have been a great day wasn't such a great day in the end.

"I then had the difficult job of breaking up the great team that Don Revie had built. I brought in guys like Tony Currie from Sheffield United and Brian Flynn from Burnley, and I also signed John Hawley from Hull City.

"John's a player who sticks out in my mind because I never actually saw him play for Leeds. He came to us in 1978, and the board decided to let my contract run out later that summer.

"Personally I felt that we were going along nicely, but the club thought differently. I remember after one defeat, when we'd dropped to around seventh in the division, the chairman called a board meeting for the Monday morning.

"The gist of the discussion was him asking me what on earth was going on and whether the team had had it. I was slightly amazed, to say the least, and I said 'you do lose in football, you know'. After four years there, my contract wasn't extended."

Remarkably, United's selection for Armfield's successor was to prove as great a misjudgement as that which brought Clough to Leeds in 1974.
Jock Stein, like Clough, seduced the board at Leeds with his impeccable history and his successful association with Celtic in Glasgow, and a deal was brokered in August of 1978. Two months later, and after a reign which ran for just a day longer than Clough's, Stein uprooted abruptly and accepted an offer to become Scotland's manager.
"The Leeds job wasn't for Jock," said Armfield. "I thought that when he took it, but at that point he didn't have a job.

"He phoned me to ask me about Leeds and I basically told him that the club was ready for him to walk into. There was nothing to do except pick the team up and carry on.

"I suppose the biggest task for me had been to get rid of the sour feeling that existed at Leeds when Brian (Clough) left. For two Christmases running, I got the players to take part in a pantomime at the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds, and we filled out all our nights there.

"People warned me that there'd be jokes about a pantomime off the pitch and a pantomime on it, but it was that type of thing that removed the sour taste. It needed to be done."

Leeds have been involved in a similar battle for hearts and minds this season, forced to salvage public opinion after administration and relegation from the Championship last summer.

Armfield, who has made a steady recovery after being diagnosed with throat cancer last year, is philosophical about United's league position, as unlikely and unfitting as it seems for a club who were one rung and a competent referee away from the top of Europe's ladder 33 years ago.

"You can argue that Leeds are too big for their division," Armfield said. "But Nottingham Forest would say the same.
"You are where you are, and the sooner a club realises that and accepts the platform they're building from, the sooner the tide will turn. Bad situations are there to be improved."
There speaks a man who knows.