As a mission statement, this matches or even betters Millwall’s famous cry of defiance “Nobody likes us, but we don’t care.” We are, it seems, the ultimate marmite club: revered and despised in equal measures. Phil Hay states that we do not have the goal of being a second favourite team for football followers; simple binary choice; love us or hate us, like it or lump it.
I wish to state at the outset that I actually would like us to be just another football club with its history, its ups and downs but without the emotional baggage which weighs so heavily on Leeds United. But that seems to be impossible with us for the reasons that Phil goes onto sketch out.
He writes” [They] don’t do simple, they don’t take the clearly marked path when there’s a minefield to explore but they do not throw in the towel either.” (2) He recalls capacity home attendances in League One and full away ends at Hereford, Yeovil, and Hartlepool; indeed, I would confidently state that we would have sold out away allocations at all the third tier grounds.
He describes the anti-hero ethos at Leeds thus:
Authority is a funny thing at Leeds, in the sense that it is not welcome. They hate the EFL. They hate the Premier League. They hate VAR. They hate Sky TV, they hate referees, all – categorically, undeniably- indicative of institutional anti-Leeds bias.(3)
From this seemingly ingrained hostility to authority, comes "a marvellous talent for bearing grudges." These include referees responsible for notorious decisions in the 1970s which cost us League titles and European glory: Ray Tinkler’s allowing of a clearly offside goal by West Bromwich Albion in April 1971 which contributed to us being overtaken in the title race by Arsenal in their first Double season; the Greek referee Christos Michos whose blatant officiating in favour of AC Milan in the 1973 European Cup Winners Cup Final led to a life long ban due to never denied bribery by the Italians (justice caught up with Milan with their demotion from Serie A for match fixing offences) and the French official Michel Kitabjian whose refusal to award us a penalty for Franz Beckenbauer's trip of Alan Clarke as he was about to pull the trigger in the 1975 European Cup Final in Paris and his disallowing of Peter Lorimer’s perfectly good goal as a result of persuasion by Herr Beckenbauer led to Bayern Munich’s undeserved win and rioting by Leeds fans (Franz Roth scorer of the first Bayern goal accepts that Lorimer’s goal was good).
In more recent years, these grudges have extended to those who stewarded the club in the boom and bust years at the turn of the millennium, most prominently life long fan and Chairman Peter Ridsdale and the succession of chancers and asset strippers who descended on the club like carrion after relegation to League One and administration in 2007, chief among them Ken “Master” Bates and the convicted Sardinian fraudster Massimo Cellino who as Chairs seemed to delight in creative destruction with frequent managerial changes, dismissal of expertise and starving hapless coaches of transfer resources. Bates’ conduct was particularly egregious. He put the club into administration, came up with a restructuring package which would repay creditors with one penny for every pound, denied potential buyers access to the club’s creditors and eventually bought the club from off shore trusts that he had set up but which he denied links to in order to satisfy the Football League. An exercise in opaqueness which matches Gerry Adams’ claims never to have been in the IRA. But an exercise which landed us with a fifteen point deduction in our inaugural League One season due to our failure to exit administration without a proper insolvency deal. But like any populist rogue, Bates steered the fans’ hostility towards the pantomime villain of the EFL and its chair the late Brian Mawhinney, Northern Ireland born former Conservative MP and cabinet minister and away from himself.
This episode connected with me in a particularly disconcerting way. For it was on 9th August 2007, that the fifteen point deduction was confirmed after an unsuccessful appeal. 9th August 1971 was the date of the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland by the then Unionist Prime Minister Brian Faulkner. Watching Brian Mawhinney with his Ulster Unionist background appearing to smirk on the television as he sealed the points deduction, triggered a response in the primitive region of my brain, the part that holds the resentments of a collective Northern Irish Catholic/Nationalist unconscious, and which ever so briefly fused the grievance culture of Leeds United with that of my tribe of origin. However, my superego soon asserted itself in directing my rage towards its proper target – Master Bates. It must always be emphasised that blame for that fiasco lies with him and him alone and his then sidekick Shaun Harvey who was later rewarded for his incompetence by being made Chair of the English Football League. Leeds fans could shout “Fuck Off to the Football League” to their full lung capacity all they liked that season but the truth we could have been relegated to League Two because of the club’s failure to comply with the Football League’s insolvency regulations.
As Phil Hay explains, the grudges we hold may seem petty:
but the closer you get to Leeds, the more you appreciate the way in which their supporters have been asked to stomach incompetence, ineptitude and promises written on cheques which had zero chance of being cashed.[4]
A classic Leeds grudge concerns the decision by the Football League under its tyrannical Chairman, Alan Hardaker, to force us to play our last and decisive fixture of the 1971-72 season at Wolverhampton Wanderers 48 hours after winning the FA Cup at Wembley to enable the England players in our squad who were due to play West Germany in the second leg of a European Championship qualifier in West Berlin the following Sunday. We just needed a point at Molineux to secure the League and Cup double but as our misfortune would have it we lost 2-1 with three stonewall penalties being denied us. To really pick at the scabs of this long running wound, this match was to be at the centre of match fixing allegations five years later in the Daily Mirror newspaper in September 1977 against Don Revie. I won’t deny that Don was practised in the dark arts, but these allegations were entirely circumstantial and have never been proved. Billy Bremner did sue Danny Hegan, one of the Wolves accusers, and won £90,000 in damages.
The backdrop to these allegations were Don Revie’s departure from his post as England manager that summer, a post he looked to be a racing certainty to be relieved of, to manage the United Arab Emirates national side. Don didn’t help himself by announcing his intentions in the Daily Mail before informing the Football Association. For many in football, this was supreme vindication of the moniker “Don Readies,” and he was subsequently banned from football for ten years (the ban was overturned in the courts). I do not defend Don’s conduct in its entirety but the dire poverty which he had experienced growing up in Middlesbrough in the 1930s (his joiner father was often out of work in an era of the notorious means test for the unemployed imposed by the National Government and memories of the local workhouse which only closed in 1930 would have been very raw) led to a life long concern for financial security and an associated neurotic insecurity which must have transmitted itself to players on crucial occasions and maybe even to the wider Leeds United “family”.
Hardaker’s notorious inflexibility in enforcement of fixture obligations had earlier been demonstrated at its most cruel when he insisted that Manchester United play their scheduled League fixture on the Saturday after the Munich air crash on 6th February 1958 which killed seven of their players including the legendary Duncan Edwards. He never made any secret of his dislike for Don Revie and Leeds United nor did other officials of the time including the top referee Clive Thomas. Oh, and England failed to overturn their 3-1 deficit to West Germany. So, WTF bother?
Grievances, real or imagined, constitute so much of the memory bank of Leeds United supporters. And with this burden of history, this psychological armoury of disappointment, blame, enmity and defiance comes a fractious fan base (at least on X, formerly Twitter) ever ready to take offence and even to turn on our own as exemplified by the words and actions (contemptible) of those who doorstepped striker Patrick Bamford for his missed penalty against Newcastle and his fluffed opportunity against Leicester at the tail end of the 2022-23 season which contributed (but by no means singularly) to our relegation. Criticism of one’s players is legitimate but not when it crosses such boundaries. All of us as football fand should heed the Native American proverb “Never criticise a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.”
[1] Phil Hay, What I’ve Learned Covering Leeds for 18 years: Grudges, Greatness, and Toilet Selfies The Athletic 12 June 2024
"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
ReplyDeleteCorinthians 13:11
There's a spot on the journey Barry when a man ought walk out from the tribe.
# 2000 Leeds were fantastic . Is this the worst England team ever ? Definitely maybe . Thiago has retired , very generous of Liverpool to top up his pension plan by £ 40 + million ; 51 starts over 4 seasons .
ReplyDelete