The best explanation for any football fan’s club allegiance is that, to quote Adrian Chiles of the parish of West Bromwich Albion, football fans are fused to the clubs they follow. Fusion to me represents the mapping onto the club in question key moments of the follower’s developmental history: key moments in childhood/adolescence/early adulthood, the patterning of their psychological traits and behaviours, relationship to authority figures and peer group, sublimation of the religio-nationalist culture they are born into and the representation of an individual’s ego ideal.
This is not an exhaustive list, and each football fan has their own story to tell. Two things I can state with a degree of certainty; football, especially the association or in American slang the “socca” variety, is an intensively tribal and exclusivist milieu. In terms of emotional and sacral experience, it is the closest experience in a secular world to religious and/or nationalist fervour. The ecstatic feelings that soccer engenders are the closest to those produced by popular music. It is the non-addictive opium of the masses. It is no coincidence that because both football and music generate euphoria and altered states of consciousness (without the artificial “highs” and damage to physical and mental health caused by chemical substances), that state and religious authorities have sought to curtail or at least neuter them throughout history; from medieval kings of England who banned football as it was preventing their subjects from practising archery to make them war ready right down to the Taliban in Afghanistan who banned music as “UnIslamic”.
More often though, states and corporate behemoths use football and sport generally to launder their reputations. But football terraces and supporters associations still remain sites of resistance to corporate greed be it the successful opposition of fans of English Premier League clubs to the European Super League proposals in February 2021; the reclamation of AFC Wimbledon “against the interests of football” as the English FA notoriously put it when sanctioning their forced removal in 2002 to Milton Keynes where the usurper club MK Dons play and the resistance to autocracy on the terraces of Albania in the dying days of its Stalinist regime in 1991 and in Tehran against the hideous clerical totalitarianism of the mullahs of Iran.
Anyway, how does this thumbnail treatise on the uniquely mesmeric properties of football and football allegiance explain my long attachment to Leeds United Football Club. It was an attraction born in the glorious failure of our attempt in 1970 to win a then unprecedented treble of League Championship, FA Cup and European Champions Cup. It was a dream which crashed and burned in the environs of Hampden Park where Celtic (deservedly) beat us 2-1 in the second leg of the European Cup in front of a British record crowd of 135,000 after winning the first leg at Elland Road 1-0; Old Trafford where Chelsea (most undeservedly) beat us 2-1 in the first FA Cup Final replay since 1912 in a violent contest which had it been refereed by the former Premier League official, David Elleray, would have seen six red cards on either side and in which the taking out of Eddie Gray, our maestro at No 10 who had absolutely ran Chelsea defenders ragged in the 2-2 contest at Wembley, by a trademark Ron Chopper Harris foul, was a major factor in our defeat and at grounds like Derby, West Ham and Sheffield Wednesday as we struggled to fulfil an inhuman fixture schedule imposed on us by the early end to the season on April 11th in order to prepare England for their World Cup defence in Mexico in June 1970. Imagine Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola putting up with such arrangements! A twice replayed FA Cup semi-final with Manchester United (settled at the third attempt by a “King” Billy Bremner goal definitely did not help (maybe there is a case for abolishing Cup replays, he says tongue in cheek).
My allegiance was rekindled by another episode of glorious heartbreak in 1987, the year I left Northern Ireland. In that season we came within 24 minutes of getting to the FA Cup Final before losing 3-2 in that semi-final after extra time to the eventual winners, Coventry City. We have never had so much as a sniff of a Cup Final since! We also came within 20 minutes of promotion back to the old First Division through a trademark John (“Shez”) Sheridan free kick goal in the inaugural Football League play-off final replay at St Andrews, Birmingham in extra time before two goals by Peter Shirtliff ensured that Charton, our opponents that Friday evening, would stay in Division One courtesy (you have done the arithmetic!) of a 2-1 scoreline in their favour.
There is no logical reason as to why Leeds United had so much of my headspace throughout my life. Team games and especially changing room culture were anathema to my studious, dyspraxic (although this word would not enter my lexicon and that of the medical and educational worlds along with cognate, “neurodiverse” conditions like autism, dyslexia, and ADHD until well into my adulthood) and overweight young self. The hyper-masculine milieu of the Leeds United (or any football club at any level) dressing room imagined by David Peace in his football classic The Damned United (later made into arguably the iconic football film of the noughties) about Brian Clough’s infamous 44 day tenure as our manager is as far as it is possible to get from that of a sheltered grammar school boy who would go onto critique the evils of patriarchy and toxic masculinity in my Master’s and PhD theses. (Health warning: Peace is a fan of our bitter West Yorkshire rivals Huddersfield Town who in their relegation season just passed still dine out on their 1-1 victory over us - yes you have spotted the logical error but it was the highlight of the Dog Botherers season at their ground which prevented us achieving a club record in winning consecutive League games).
There is no family connection to Leeds apart from an aunt who taught in the Batley area in the 1930s (I do not know if one James Savile was one of her pupils). Our legendary midfield general, John Giles, was the only Irish player from North or South on our team. My elder brother was a follower and I do remember the whole family watching and cheering us on in the Wembley Cup Final with Chelsea. But it was to be the last communal Leeds United experience for me until I went to Leeds matches. Until then, I could only consummate my commitment through the media of the latest scores which would flash up on the screen during Grandstand on BBC TV, the teleprinter and classified results service on that show or Sports Report on BBC Radio 2 (and later Five Live). The reassuring voices of Peter Jones, Bryon Butler and Maurice Edelston as radio commentators and regional reporters such as Bill Bothwell, Larry Canning and the lugubrious and later disgraced national treasure Stuart Hall were all soundtracks to my childhood Saturdays (and Wednesday nights).
Complementing this live audio experience of top class English football were the flagship football shows of the only two major broadcasting networks of the time: the BBC’s Match of the Day broadcast on Saturday nights and ITV’s Big Match on Sunday afternoons. It was on those shows that the words of the radio commentator were made flesh as a soccer starved Northern Irish public (or those of us living west of the Bann who had been deprived of our natural focal point, Derry City, who had been forced out of the Irish League due to the Troubles) feasted on the superstars of the era – Best, Charlton, Bremner, Giles, Osgood, Keegan, Lee ….. as well as football from lower down the food chain in the old Second, Third and Fourth Divisions. Today no terrestrial viewer can watch any action outside the oligopoly of Sovereign Wealth Funds, the East India Companies of our times, and bottomless cash machines of US benefactors (or malefactors as Manchester United fans with their experience of the Glazier would see them) that is the Premier League. Scarce wonder that fans of this unity of football imperialist powers rarely spare a thought for the fallen giants of the past who languish in the Football League pyramid with little hope of regaining past glories or the demise of clubs like Bury who are the lifeblood of their communities.
It was on the basis of this rationed diet of selective football coverage that many of my contemporaries selected or developed their football club allegiance. The world of football allegiance was a fairly pluralist one amongst my generation with clubs like Everton, Arsenal, Tottenham, Derby, Manchester City and Chelsea as well as Leeds plus, what was even then, the Big Two of Liverpool and Manchester United and, of course, Celtic and Rangers. The extensive support that Leeds United enjoy in Scandinavia, Malta, Ireland, or any country which was able to see broadcast English football is a legacy of those days.
However, as I embarked upon my lonely odyssey as a long distance Leeds United supporter, I soon became aware of two things: the relative paucity of Leeds fans among my peers and its cause – the widespread and deeply rooted unpopularity of Leeds United Football Club. We were accused of being over-physical, of infuriating gamesmanship such as the tactic of deploying our centre half Jack Charlton to stand in front of the opposition goalkeeper at corner kicks; of keeping possession of the ball near the corner flag to see winning positions out, of sledging the opposition and, most seriously of all, of attempted bribery of the opposition to “take it easy” at crucial title deciding league games. Don Revie’s tactics of drawing up dossiers on the opposition, the strength, and weaknesses of their players, aroused some ridicule especially when he tried it during his ill-fated spell as England manager. Now they are, in the form of Data Analysts, de rigeur at all major clubs.
While owning some of the things we did wrong such as collective pestering of referees; the notorious punch up between Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan in the Charity Shield at Wembley in 1974 occasioned by a nasty foul by Giles and which led to dismissals and lengthy bans for both and that between Norman Hunter and Francis Lee at Derby in November 1975 occasioned by Lee’s notorious acts of simulation and which led again to dismissals and the ugly foul by Terry Yorath in the early minutes of the 1975 European Cup Final on Bayern Munich’s Jonny Hansen which ended his game (which Terry attributes to the influence of the fearsome Scot Bobby Collins on his early days at Elland Road,) I would argue, as John Giles, did that, in the Revie era, we were more sinned against than sinning.
But, in a way, that is not the point. The tag of Dirty Leeds stuck, and the widespread merriment occasioned whenever we came a cropper such as our FA Cup loss at Colchester United in 1971 and the loss to Sunderland in the 1973 Cup Final made for extremely uncomfortable ribbing from my classmates. This “bantz” took a darker form when used as a weapon from my bully or “tormentor.” I truly dreaded going into school after we had lost important games such as Cup Semi-Finals to Manchester United (the tormentor’s team) and, above all, the horrendous disappointment of the 1975 European Cup Final defeat.
Long after Don Revie left, parts of the football commentariat, informed or ill-informed just could not let go, like the proverbial dog with the bone. The occasion of our relegation to the old Second Division in May 1982 was greeted on the back page of the Daily Mail with the headline “It’s Not All Bad News for Yorkshire. LEEDS DOWN!” Particularly wounding for me was the comment by Patrick Barclay the then football correspondent of my daily read, the Guardian, that Leeds “were cynical” and had “corrupted British football.” On the day after we had won the last Football League Championship in 1992, the Daily Mirror still could not resist its obsession with alleged Leeds United bribery by claiming that we had survived relegation in 1962 courtesy of “a flabbergasting own goal” at Newcastle, a game which Leeds had won comfortably 3-0.
The echoes of Leeds United’s capacity for sharp practice came down to the Bielsa era with the “Spygate” affair in which the revered Argentinian had allegedly sent a club official to monitor a training session at Derby County who we were due to play the following day through use of a telescope from a nearby public car park in January 2019 and when the tv pundit and former English international women footballer, Karen Carney, appeared to suggest that we owed our promotion to the Premier League in 2020 to advantageous timing of the Covid-19 outbreak.
In future articles I will itemise, without any sense of bearing any chips on shoulders (LOL!), the incidences where we have received adverse treatment and those where actions of people within the club have brought serious harm to us. For now, it is enough to say that the injustices we suffered, and the hostility directed towards us led me to believe that we could do no wrong, on or off the pitch. Just as partisans and their supporters in the conflicts such as Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine tend to deny that their “side” do not commit atrocities and double down on any criticism, as if their identity or place in the cosmos is at stake (psychologically it is) so I reacted and still, to an extent, react to particular attacks on Leeds United as attacks on my family.
My love and attraction towards Leeds United may well be a form of sublimated nationalism. The Leeds United family (as Don Revie saw us as) and global community of our fans is my tribal/communal identity not the national community or constitutional tradition that I was born into in Northern Ireland. My citizenship is that of the European Union. But having eschewed the trinity of God, United/New Ireland, and Socialist Utopia that I have believed in wholly or separately throughout my life, what better club or imagined community to project my unconscious nationalism or religiosity on to than Leeds United. We have the glorious history, an equally inglorious history of failure, our icons our foundational stories and villains, be they football authority figures or toxic figures within the club. Sadly, we also have our dead – Kevin Speight and Christopher Loftus stabbed to death in Taksim Square, Istanbul before our 2000 UEFA Cup Semi Final first leg with Galatasaray and two victims of domestic hooliganism at Tottenham in 1981 and at Birmingham City in 1985 on the same day as the Bradford City fire tragedy.
More despatches from the lone trail of the Long Distance Leeds United supporter to follow.
Anyway, how does this thumbnail treatise on the uniquely mesmeric properties of football and football allegiance explain my long attachment to Leeds United Football Club. It was an attraction born in the glorious failure of our attempt in 1970 to win a then unprecedented treble of League Championship, FA Cup and European Champions Cup. It was a dream which crashed and burned in the environs of Hampden Park where Celtic (deservedly) beat us 2-1 in the second leg of the European Cup in front of a British record crowd of 135,000 after winning the first leg at Elland Road 1-0; Old Trafford where Chelsea (most undeservedly) beat us 2-1 in the first FA Cup Final replay since 1912 in a violent contest which had it been refereed by the former Premier League official, David Elleray, would have seen six red cards on either side and in which the taking out of Eddie Gray, our maestro at No 10 who had absolutely ran Chelsea defenders ragged in the 2-2 contest at Wembley, by a trademark Ron Chopper Harris foul, was a major factor in our defeat and at grounds like Derby, West Ham and Sheffield Wednesday as we struggled to fulfil an inhuman fixture schedule imposed on us by the early end to the season on April 11th in order to prepare England for their World Cup defence in Mexico in June 1970. Imagine Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola putting up with such arrangements! A twice replayed FA Cup semi-final with Manchester United (settled at the third attempt by a “King” Billy Bremner goal definitely did not help (maybe there is a case for abolishing Cup replays, he says tongue in cheek).
My allegiance was rekindled by another episode of glorious heartbreak in 1987, the year I left Northern Ireland. In that season we came within 24 minutes of getting to the FA Cup Final before losing 3-2 in that semi-final after extra time to the eventual winners, Coventry City. We have never had so much as a sniff of a Cup Final since! We also came within 20 minutes of promotion back to the old First Division through a trademark John (“Shez”) Sheridan free kick goal in the inaugural Football League play-off final replay at St Andrews, Birmingham in extra time before two goals by Peter Shirtliff ensured that Charton, our opponents that Friday evening, would stay in Division One courtesy (you have done the arithmetic!) of a 2-1 scoreline in their favour.
There is no logical reason as to why Leeds United had so much of my headspace throughout my life. Team games and especially changing room culture were anathema to my studious, dyspraxic (although this word would not enter my lexicon and that of the medical and educational worlds along with cognate, “neurodiverse” conditions like autism, dyslexia, and ADHD until well into my adulthood) and overweight young self. The hyper-masculine milieu of the Leeds United (or any football club at any level) dressing room imagined by David Peace in his football classic The Damned United (later made into arguably the iconic football film of the noughties) about Brian Clough’s infamous 44 day tenure as our manager is as far as it is possible to get from that of a sheltered grammar school boy who would go onto critique the evils of patriarchy and toxic masculinity in my Master’s and PhD theses. (Health warning: Peace is a fan of our bitter West Yorkshire rivals Huddersfield Town who in their relegation season just passed still dine out on their 1-1 victory over us - yes you have spotted the logical error but it was the highlight of the Dog Botherers season at their ground which prevented us achieving a club record in winning consecutive League games).
There is no family connection to Leeds apart from an aunt who taught in the Batley area in the 1930s (I do not know if one James Savile was one of her pupils). Our legendary midfield general, John Giles, was the only Irish player from North or South on our team. My elder brother was a follower and I do remember the whole family watching and cheering us on in the Wembley Cup Final with Chelsea. But it was to be the last communal Leeds United experience for me until I went to Leeds matches. Until then, I could only consummate my commitment through the media of the latest scores which would flash up on the screen during Grandstand on BBC TV, the teleprinter and classified results service on that show or Sports Report on BBC Radio 2 (and later Five Live). The reassuring voices of Peter Jones, Bryon Butler and Maurice Edelston as radio commentators and regional reporters such as Bill Bothwell, Larry Canning and the lugubrious and later disgraced national treasure Stuart Hall were all soundtracks to my childhood Saturdays (and Wednesday nights).
Complementing this live audio experience of top class English football were the flagship football shows of the only two major broadcasting networks of the time: the BBC’s Match of the Day broadcast on Saturday nights and ITV’s Big Match on Sunday afternoons. It was on those shows that the words of the radio commentator were made flesh as a soccer starved Northern Irish public (or those of us living west of the Bann who had been deprived of our natural focal point, Derry City, who had been forced out of the Irish League due to the Troubles) feasted on the superstars of the era – Best, Charlton, Bremner, Giles, Osgood, Keegan, Lee ….. as well as football from lower down the food chain in the old Second, Third and Fourth Divisions. Today no terrestrial viewer can watch any action outside the oligopoly of Sovereign Wealth Funds, the East India Companies of our times, and bottomless cash machines of US benefactors (or malefactors as Manchester United fans with their experience of the Glazier would see them) that is the Premier League. Scarce wonder that fans of this unity of football imperialist powers rarely spare a thought for the fallen giants of the past who languish in the Football League pyramid with little hope of regaining past glories or the demise of clubs like Bury who are the lifeblood of their communities.
It was on the basis of this rationed diet of selective football coverage that many of my contemporaries selected or developed their football club allegiance. The world of football allegiance was a fairly pluralist one amongst my generation with clubs like Everton, Arsenal, Tottenham, Derby, Manchester City and Chelsea as well as Leeds plus, what was even then, the Big Two of Liverpool and Manchester United and, of course, Celtic and Rangers. The extensive support that Leeds United enjoy in Scandinavia, Malta, Ireland, or any country which was able to see broadcast English football is a legacy of those days.
However, as I embarked upon my lonely odyssey as a long distance Leeds United supporter, I soon became aware of two things: the relative paucity of Leeds fans among my peers and its cause – the widespread and deeply rooted unpopularity of Leeds United Football Club. We were accused of being over-physical, of infuriating gamesmanship such as the tactic of deploying our centre half Jack Charlton to stand in front of the opposition goalkeeper at corner kicks; of keeping possession of the ball near the corner flag to see winning positions out, of sledging the opposition and, most seriously of all, of attempted bribery of the opposition to “take it easy” at crucial title deciding league games. Don Revie’s tactics of drawing up dossiers on the opposition, the strength, and weaknesses of their players, aroused some ridicule especially when he tried it during his ill-fated spell as England manager. Now they are, in the form of Data Analysts, de rigeur at all major clubs.
While owning some of the things we did wrong such as collective pestering of referees; the notorious punch up between Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan in the Charity Shield at Wembley in 1974 occasioned by a nasty foul by Giles and which led to dismissals and lengthy bans for both and that between Norman Hunter and Francis Lee at Derby in November 1975 occasioned by Lee’s notorious acts of simulation and which led again to dismissals and the ugly foul by Terry Yorath in the early minutes of the 1975 European Cup Final on Bayern Munich’s Jonny Hansen which ended his game (which Terry attributes to the influence of the fearsome Scot Bobby Collins on his early days at Elland Road,) I would argue, as John Giles, did that, in the Revie era, we were more sinned against than sinning.
But, in a way, that is not the point. The tag of Dirty Leeds stuck, and the widespread merriment occasioned whenever we came a cropper such as our FA Cup loss at Colchester United in 1971 and the loss to Sunderland in the 1973 Cup Final made for extremely uncomfortable ribbing from my classmates. This “bantz” took a darker form when used as a weapon from my bully or “tormentor.” I truly dreaded going into school after we had lost important games such as Cup Semi-Finals to Manchester United (the tormentor’s team) and, above all, the horrendous disappointment of the 1975 European Cup Final defeat.
Long after Don Revie left, parts of the football commentariat, informed or ill-informed just could not let go, like the proverbial dog with the bone. The occasion of our relegation to the old Second Division in May 1982 was greeted on the back page of the Daily Mail with the headline “It’s Not All Bad News for Yorkshire. LEEDS DOWN!” Particularly wounding for me was the comment by Patrick Barclay the then football correspondent of my daily read, the Guardian, that Leeds “were cynical” and had “corrupted British football.” On the day after we had won the last Football League Championship in 1992, the Daily Mirror still could not resist its obsession with alleged Leeds United bribery by claiming that we had survived relegation in 1962 courtesy of “a flabbergasting own goal” at Newcastle, a game which Leeds had won comfortably 3-0.
The echoes of Leeds United’s capacity for sharp practice came down to the Bielsa era with the “Spygate” affair in which the revered Argentinian had allegedly sent a club official to monitor a training session at Derby County who we were due to play the following day through use of a telescope from a nearby public car park in January 2019 and when the tv pundit and former English international women footballer, Karen Carney, appeared to suggest that we owed our promotion to the Premier League in 2020 to advantageous timing of the Covid-19 outbreak.
In future articles I will itemise, without any sense of bearing any chips on shoulders (LOL!), the incidences where we have received adverse treatment and those where actions of people within the club have brought serious harm to us. For now, it is enough to say that the injustices we suffered, and the hostility directed towards us led me to believe that we could do no wrong, on or off the pitch. Just as partisans and their supporters in the conflicts such as Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine tend to deny that their “side” do not commit atrocities and double down on any criticism, as if their identity or place in the cosmos is at stake (psychologically it is) so I reacted and still, to an extent, react to particular attacks on Leeds United as attacks on my family.
My love and attraction towards Leeds United may well be a form of sublimated nationalism. The Leeds United family (as Don Revie saw us as) and global community of our fans is my tribal/communal identity not the national community or constitutional tradition that I was born into in Northern Ireland. My citizenship is that of the European Union. But having eschewed the trinity of God, United/New Ireland, and Socialist Utopia that I have believed in wholly or separately throughout my life, what better club or imagined community to project my unconscious nationalism or religiosity on to than Leeds United. We have the glorious history, an equally inglorious history of failure, our icons our foundational stories and villains, be they football authority figures or toxic figures within the club. Sadly, we also have our dead – Kevin Speight and Christopher Loftus stabbed to death in Taksim Square, Istanbul before our 2000 UEFA Cup Semi Final first leg with Galatasaray and two victims of domestic hooliganism at Tottenham in 1981 and at Birmingham City in 1985 on the same day as the Bradford City fire tragedy.
More despatches from the lone trail of the Long Distance Leeds United supporter to follow.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Barry - you have a real talent for this sort of writing. Was telling a friend in Galway yesterday to read the piece. He had read your first one on Leeds. He and I have a shared interest in the pull of the game and the bonding function it fulfils.
ReplyDeleteI find it cathartic and I am glad you are spreading the good news!
ReplyDeleteT'was HJ that the 'gaffer' is referring to in his comment. We met up by chance. He was visiting a mutual friend when I called by.
ReplyDeleteOur conversation covered election results and then as is our wont moved on to religion. Our positions on both are similar and our differences but nuanced. The 'gaffer' is comfortable identifying as an atheist, whereas I prefer the 'non-theist' handle. I was expounding on religion's social function, potentially positive psychological benefits, and even transcendent potential. In that context, I likened the experience to attendance at a concert or a football/hurling game. And that's when your name came up!
I enjoyed the looser writing style of both pieces Barry, as I did the self-revelatory aspects too. Hardly surprising that one who has had to deal with quite a bit of adversity in life chooses to continue following a team that mirrors struggle and frustration.