Billy Bremner, who died at Doncaster Royal Infirmary yesterday after a heart attack, two days short of his 55th birthday, was a footballer consumed not merely by a passion for playing games but by the desire to win them. Bremner combined the technician's craft with the fervour - and at times the ruthlessness - of a resistance fighter.

Between 1959 and 1976 he made 585 appearances for Leeds United in the league alone. He also played in four FA Cup finals, a League Cup final and four European finals. In 1970 he was voted Footballer of the Year by the Football Writers' Association.

Bremner's honours, two championship medals, an FA Cup-winner's medal, two Fairs Cup medals and a League Cup tankard, reflected neither his qualities as a footballer nor the strength of Don Revie's Leeds team in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Bremner's autobiography was published in 1969 it had an apt title: You Get Nowt for Being Second. Between 1964 and 1972 Leeds finished runners-up in the league on five occasions.

It was a similar story at international level. Capped 54 times by Scotland, he gave one of his finest performances in the goalless draw with Brazil in Frankfurt early in the 1974 World Cup. Through Bremner, Scotland dominated the midfield but were unable to turn chances into goals and eventually went out of the tournament without losing a match.

Bremner might not have possessed the profound footballing skills of Johnny Giles, with whom he formed a midfield partnership at Elland Road, but his passing was as important as his tackling. In fact the most abiding memory of him is running at opponents with the ball at his feet and then passing to right or left without breaking stride. Bremner was the master of the disguised pass, with the foot dragged over the ball at the last second.

Arthur Rowe, architect of the push-and-run style which won Tottenham the championship in 1951, was among Bremner's admirers. "When he makes an early pass," Rowe observed, "he has his hands flung wide with a theatrical intensity. The crowd think he is posturing and call him a big head. In fact, by his balance and concentration he is ensuring absolute accuracy when so many others are too casual over the undemanding."

A story went around that Revie taught Bremner to say his prayers. Certainly the quick-tempered Scot, brought up in the tough Raploch district of Stirling, acquired a degree of inner discipline under Revie's influence once the Leeds manager had made him captain.

Bremner's playing career at Elland Road began shortly before Revie took over as manager. Leeds were heading for the Third Division, but by 1964 they had won promotion to the First and soon Bremner, Giles, Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Paul Reaney were making the sort of impact English football had never really experienced before.

Some felt the Leeds style took gamesmanship beyond the acceptable limits of fair play. Bremner's philosophy, set out in his autobiography, encapsulated the growing sourness of the English game in the 1960s and 1970s: "Gamesmanship is something which is practised and accepted as part of the stock in trade by most teams these days," he wrote.

The modern game simply would not tolerate the cold-eyed cynicism masquerading as gamesmanship with which Revie's Leeds teams were associated. And yet when Leeds United won the championship in 1974 their passing and movement reached levels which few sides have attained since.

The best-known picture of Bremner shows him in all wide-eyed innocence as Tottenham's Dave Mackay grabs him by the front of his Leeds shirt. Bremner, in fact, had just kicked Mackay up the backside, which was never a wise thing to do, but provocation was inherent in his style.

He left Leeds in 1976, played for Hull, became player-manager of Doncaster and then returned to Elland Road as manager in 1985. In 1987 Bremner took his old club to the FA Cup semi-finals, where they lost to Coventry City, and the following year he was sacked. A second spell at Doncaster lasted until 1992, whereupon Bremner, who was always a good talker, went on the after-dinner circuit with Norman Hunter.

"Maybe I'll grow old myself one day," Bremner wrote at the start of his autobiography. "Maybe I'll look back on football as I knew it and say that the game isn't like it used to be in my day." Indeed it isn't, and the sad thing is that Billy did not live longer to enjoy the difference.

(Billy Bremner, footballer, born December 9th, 1942; died December 7, 1997).