Tag Archives: Premier League

Leeds United’s Roller-Coaster Ride to Mediocrity Must End Soon

Posted on 24/04/2013 | Leave a comment

The Lifeblood of LUFC

At a time when, once again, there’s a bit of cautious optimism drifting around Elland Road it’s worth reflecting that we’ve been here before, several times in fact since the club returned to what should be its absolute minimum status as a second tier club. In those three seasons, we’ve ridden the traditional roller-coaster; great Cup performances against nominally superior foes at one end of the scale, awful, abysmal defeats against teams we should be easily out-matching at the other. The roller-coaster is a suitable analogy – you go up and down and there are thrills along the way, but ultimately you get nowhere, ending up back where you were and feeling slightly sick.

Is there any real difference this time? Well, maybe. The man we now have in charge is young(ish), undeniably hungry after what seemed an unfortunate dismissal at Reading, and able to point to a Championship record at his former club which is little short of remarkable. Brian McDermott operated on a tight budget at the Madejski Stadium, being forced to sell several of his better players (for a fat profit to the club), and bring through adequate replacements for a fraction of the sum coming in. Yet he oversaw a surge in the league last season from 18 points back to actually pip Southampton for the title, and that doesn’t happen by chance.

So there is possibly cause for optimism for our prospects next season – IF the owners get it right. McDermott has pointed out that he doesn’t want to hear talk of the club backing him – the club should be backing themselves, investing in their own future. He is simply right. His is a message of realism and genuine hope, something we should all appreciate after the confusing messages sent out by Neil Warnock over the past year or so. McDermott has been there and done it, as had Warnock before him. But Warnock’s appointment smacked of desperation and papering over the cracks that were widening as last summer’s takeover saga stretched out to a ridiculous length. McDermott has come in looking a better fit for the club, a round peg in a round hole. It looks very much, just now, as if Leeds United and Brian McDermott need each other almost equally.

Let’s face it, though. Leeds United isn’t going to feel quite right again until we’re back where most of us still feel we rightfully belong: in the top flight, and what is more – pushing towards the top end. Over the past 50 years, that has been the general profile of the club and even after going on for a decade at a lower status, it still looks wrong for that name – Leeds United – to figure outside of the elite. The last real high time we had was promotion from the third level, an escape from a truly shameful period in our history. Thanks, Simon Grayson, you did the job for us. The next peak should be elevation to the Premier League, and we will hope we can thank McDermott for that in the not-too-distant future. But what lies ahead afterwards?

The Premier League is now a big-money cartel, as it really goes without saying. Should we be in a position where promotion to that level appears likely, it will be time – well in advance of the actual confirmation of higher status – to think about exactly what direction Leeds United should be aspiring to. We simply cannot go into this with our eyes shut or blinkers on. Some clubs may be able to go up and budget for immediate relegation, rubbing their hands at the prospect of parachute money. Not Leeds, I would suggest. The weight of history hangs too heavy about our shoulders, the expectations of the fans and their collective pride – a throatily raw and raucous thing – should not encourage or even permit such a negative and unambitious mindset. We have to get there first, but once we do – we have to GO for it, because We Are Leeds. It’s as simple as that. We Are Leeds.

If the people at the top of the club really don’t recognise the import of those three words, then they are certainly not the right people. Mediocrity served Leeds United well for decades, and nothing more was expected of them, not even by died-in-the-wool supporters. Don Revie changed all that, changed it for good; so 24 years after his death, the legacy of the Don still dictates the expectations surrounding the club. However hard it may be to compete these days, in the vastly different game we have now compared to the one that we knew then, that will remain the case because of the worldwide name of Leeds United, and the pride of their followers around the globe, motivated not by glory or trophies, but by the fact that We Are Leeds.

With support like that, with pressure like that, mediocrity is never an option. Once we’re there, we have to go in to win.

Another Hollow Triumph for Money, Murdoch and Man United

Posted on 22/04/2013 | Leave a comment

We deserve the Title! We DO!!! Waaaahh!!!

More than likely they’ll be tenaciously cavorting away in dutiful triumph tonight at The Theatre of Hollow Myths, as Man United celebrate another processional title triumph, brushing aside what I expect to be feeble resistance from Aston Villa..

Since Murdoch bought the game, the Trafford-based club have been on easy street. Better-placed than the rest – given their global fan-base – to capitalise on a league based on glitz and merchandise, their fortunes have been linked inextricably with the fortunes of Murdoch’s Sky TV empire as it has tightened its grip on what used to be our national game.

In 1967, Manchester United won the Football League Championship. Brief flickering highlights were shown in grainy black and white as the champions paraded the famous old trophy. England were World Cup holders, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister and a pint of bitter cost about 8p. It would be two years before Man set foot on the moon and Jimmy Greaves had hair. It was that long ago. Matt Busby and his team celebrated another trophy, but their era of success was coming to an end. Man U would never win the Football League Championship again.

Fast forward 25 years, and Man U came as close as they had ever come to regaining the Holy Grail, only to see it snatched from their sight forever as Leeds United took the prize in 1992 by four clear points, becoming the last ever proper League Champions. But things were about to change, and not before time. It had been a clear quarter of a century since the media’s favourite team had won the league; that most marketable of clubs had failed, utterly, to rise to the top of the game where their profit potential could best be realised. The money men in their grey suits were frustrated. This could not be allowed to go on.

And so the Premier League was born, in a blitz of fireworks, tickertape and dancing girls, complete with cheesy music, the hirsute Richard Keys, a league title trophy modelled on the lines of Thunderbird One and all the bells and whistles an Australian entrepreneur could dream of. Behind the window-dressing, bigger changes were afoot. The money would be channelled upwards, in defiance of gravity and the previous trickle-down economics of the game which had afforded some protection to the relative paupers. The big and the rich would get progressively bigger and richer; the days of the League Title being won mainly on merit were done.

From now on, the destiny of the title would be decided largely on the basis of pre-season balance sheets. From a situation where he who dared, won – we would now see an era where he who spends biggest stands the best chance. One club above all others stood to benefit from this Brave New World – Man U, heralded as the Biggest Club In The World (to a background of incredulous giggles in Milan, Barcelona and Madrid) had built up a worldwide following with their relentless harking-back to the legacy of the Busby Babes and the Munich disaster. Their history had made them everyone’s second-favourite club; now Murdoch’s revolution put them in pole position to capitalise on that, and reap a harvest of trophies from the seeds they’d sown in flogging Man U tat to a globe-full of eager and undiscriminating consumers.

Resistance became sporadic; almost futile (were Man U the sporting equivalent of Star Trek’s Borg?) Man U won the first two “Premiership” titles before a cash-rich Blackburn out-spent and out-fought them in 1995. After that the procession continued, the titles piled up at the Theatre of Myths, only Arsenal, Chelsea and Man City have interrupted the monotonous toll of the bell signalling more success for the most effective franchise in football.

Tonight will see the 20th “Title” for the club that used to be loved by many outside of their immediate support, but are now regarded with a dull hatred by proper football fans. This is put down to jealousy of course; but every fan has a choice, and jealousy is an unnecessary emotion. Tonight’s latest success will see the appearance of more Man U acolytes everywhere, as the need to be identified with size and success sucks in those of questionable character and inadequate self-esteem. More Man U shirts in Torquay and Milton Keynes, more tacky memorabilia sold in Stoke and Londonderry.

The 20th title then – but there remains a clear demarcation. 7 titles in their history up to 1967. 13 in the 20 years since 1993. Is this just a coincidence? Of course it’s not; if anything it’s an indictment of Man U’s failure. Somehow, in seven of those years, they’ve failed to win the league, despite the financial and psychological disadvantages of their rivals, they’ve let it slip away.

The fact is that the titles won since 1993 are devalued by the steep slope in Man U’s favour of the playing field on which all have to compete. Liverpool were dominant in an even competition for the best part of two decades up to the 90’s; it is now 23 years since they were Champions, but their overall record remains formidable. Whatever Man U might want to make of it as they crow about 20 titles to 18, they know in their heart of hearts that the baubles won in the Murdoch era are of a lesser water than the diamonds Liverpool gathered to them. The exchange rate is against them; their achievements are relatively less. If they maintained their current rate of success for another twenty years (and who knows, they might – but it would kill the game), then maybe they could be compared to Liverpool, the acknowledged masters at the time Murdoch’s coup took place.

But for the moment, I say – as a devoted fan of Leeds United – Liverpool are still The Greatest.

There’s Only Two Brian McDermotts

Posted on 12/04/2013 | 2 comments

In 1996, Arsenal confirmed the appointment as their new manager of one Monsieur Arsène Wenger. I took a distant but distinct interest as I did with any news story concerning Arsenal, a club I have always thoroughly admired. And I must confess; at first I thought it was a wind-up, some weak attempt at a joke. An Arsenal manager called Arsène? Were our major clubs recruiting managers on the basis of weirdly appropriate names now? How ridiculous. You couldn’t make it up.

History shows of course that Arsenal FC was being deadly serious and decidedly astute. They were appointing a man who would become their longest-serving and most successful manager, a man widely credited with revolutionising the whole of English football, a cerebral man with a scientific approach to the art of beautiful football. But others reacted initially as I had. Former Arsenal captain Tony Adams has said

“At first, I thought: What does this Frenchman know about football? He wears glasses and looks more like a schoolteacher. He’s not going to be as good as George [Graham]. Does he even speak English properly?”

This seemed to reflect most people’s level of incredulity at what appeared an odd decision. Who, indeed, was Wenger? What had he done? He was certainly no Johan Cruyff, a global “name” who had been touted by many for the Highbury hot-seat. Rarely though can such a seemingly strange appointment have turned out so well. Despite the more recent lack of actual silverware, look at Arsenal now. Look at the football they play. It’s enough to make a Leeds fan drool – I know I do.

Dioufy meets McDermotty

Fast forward to 2013 and there has been another “you couldn’t make it up” appointment – the strangeness being of a somewhat different nature, but nonetheless bizarre for that. Leeds United have recruited one Brian McDermott, recently sacked by Reading FC. This appointment has come with just five games to go of a season that was always supposed to be about promotion to the top league, but has latterly taken a nightmare downturn towards a struggle to avoid relegation back to the third tier. United of course share the city of Leeds with Rugby League superstars Leeds Rhinos – Coach: another Brian McDermott. Furthermore, the Rhinos have an outstanding winger called Ryan Hall, a world-class exponent of the game and prolific try-scorer; a major contributor to his club’s dominance of the Super League. And – lo and behold – we find that Leeds United also have a winger called Ryan Hall, a man of more modest accomplishments but much promise; one who produced a game-changing, match-winning performance at Huddersfield which gave Leeds United fans a lot of hope for his future.

Two clubs in two different sports sharing one city; both managed by a Brian McDermott, both with wingers named Ryan Hall. That’s stretching credibility quite a long way; has anything like it happened before? Could weirdness of that degree have a happy ending comparable to the way the weird Wenger story turned out?

Well, maybe it could. Once you get past the long-odds coincidence which certainly rivals the strangeness of Arsenal’s Arsène, you begin to look at the merits of the appointment. It’s an move being welcomed quite whole-heartedly by long-suffering Leeds fans, who had been certain for a while that former manager Neil Warnock’s approach was going to produce nothing but dire football, inexplicable substitution decisions and a heavy reliance on his old favourites from previous incarnations of his managerial career. He was going to build on his excellent record of promotions gained; he was going to top off that record by returning his biggest-ever club to the Premier League. But it all went horribly wrong, and Neil has clearly been yearning for his Cornwall home, hearth and tractor for months now. He’s seemed tired and dispirited, forced to defend the inadequate efforts of a palpably rudderless team, reduced to cliché after cliché as he attempted to deflect criticism of the performances of a squad he’d recently described as “Leeds’ best in years.”

McDermott though appears to be a horse of a different colour. A younger, hungry man, a still slightly angry man who you’d guess feels wronged by his dismissal from Premier League Reading, a club he’d served undeniably well and against whom he now seems destined to compete in the Championship next season. That’s if Leeds stay in that league – which is by no means certain as yet. With five games to go, McDermott quite possibly needs at least four more points to secure Championship football for next season and give him the chance to plan in the longer term. He has said already that he’s been given “assurances of support”, and we can but hope that these don’t turn out to be yet more of the same forked-tongue promises we’ve heard for a good many seasons now. McDermott though has the air of a man who is happy and confident as he picks up what many in the game see as a poisoned chalice. Leeds United has the reputation of a managers’ graveyard going back many years now and – surely – nobody entering via the revolving doors that have seen so many unceremonious exits can be at all optimistic they won’t share the same fate. Nevertheless, Brian McDermott has made all the right confident and determined noises, he has his right-hand man with him and he says he can’t wait to get stuck in. This is what we want to hear.

At some point, for heaven’s sake, Leeds United’s owners have to get it right. We’ve had a decade or more of stumbling, shambling descent into the pits of despair, followed by an almost equally stumbling and shambling partial recovery. As yet another era starts – and at Leeds we seem to have two or three new eras per season – the patience of the always potentially truculent masses cannot be relied upon for much longer. Leeds could so easily go the wrong way in just the next few weeks, and that would make for a terrifyingly long journey back at a time when – as in wider society – the rich are getting ever rich while the rest scrap for crumbs. Those who seek happy omens might look at how Arsenal’s strange appointment of Arsène turned out, or they may look across the city and look at the Brian McDermott who is in charge of the current Super League Champions. The omens are there, and in hard times they’re the straws we might reasonably clutch at.

We could go the wrong way – but we simply can’t afford to. It has to be safety first, followed as soon as possible by definite progress on and off the field. New investment is clearly sought, and appears to be a must-have without which the club will, at very best, continue to tread water.

This is not an option if the club is to have any real success in the foreseeable future, so the owners must deliver support to their new man. And Brian McDermott just has to be the right man; he has to get it very right very soon, establishing a pattern of success comparable with his fine work at Reading and leading us back to the top before the club is cut irretrievably adrift of the powers in the game.

That’s the scale of his task. That’s the urgency of the situation we now face. Good luck, Brian.