Tag Archives: Twitter

If Leeds United Don’t Go Up, Let’s Hope Norwich City Go Down – by Rob Atkinson

Posted on 03/11/2013 | 64 comments

Hughton – that sinking feeling

Over the last few seasons of Leeds United frustration and mediocrity, one thing at least has become clear. The quality of the scavengers circling to take advantage of our misery has declined since the start of our fall in 2003. A decade ago, it was the likes of Tottenham queuing up to take stars and starlets off our hands at a price cut to reflect the desperation of our position. Latterly though, it’s been little Norwich, a club that shared a common lift-off platform with us as we ascended out of the League One murk.

Norwich started that season with a sobering 7-1 home defeat to Colchester United. They promptly sacked the clueless Bryan Gunn, nicked Colchester’s managerial prodigy Paul Lambert and never looked back. In the reverse fixture, Norwich won at a canter, went on to win the league and, accompanied by second-placed Leeds, prepared for Championship football.

There, the paths of Leeds and Norwich diverged. Leeds went the austerity route under not-so-cuddly chairman Ken Bates, failing to invest in the squad and selling off their crown jewels to confirm their status as perennial under-achievers since 2010. Norwich, on the other hand, seized the second tier by its short and curlies and breezed their way to a second successive promotion, gaining the promised land and munificent riches of the Premier League, unknown to them since the time of Delia’s tired and emotional exhortation to their fans for some sort of atmosphere. And soon, the plundering of LS11 would start.

After a reasonably comfortable passage in their first season back at top level, Norwich set about planning a consolidation of their elevated status. Strangely, to some eyes, they appeared eager to accomplish this by recruiting – over time – the League One midfield of the club that finished runners-up to them at that level in 2010, Leeds United. The first import was Bradley Johnson in July of 2011. This created few ripples at Elland Road, but the next two similar transfers out were bombshells of seismic effect. First home-grown hero Johnny Howson made the trip to East Anglia, in January 2012. Howson’s local boy credentials, his untiring efforts in midfield and his knack of popping up with a vital goal – notably at Carlisle in a play-off semi-final and at home to Bristol Rovers when his equaliser restarted the promotion express – were warmly appreciated by the Elland Road crowd. Howson was Leeds through and through, and his loss was keenly felt.

Then, in July it got worse still. Robert Snodgrass was no local boy – but he was the latest in a traditional line of Scottish talent to make a name at Elland Road, following in the illustrious footsteps of Bremner, the Grays, Lorimer, Jordan, Strachan and, erm, George McCluskey. Snoddy was a real talent – he even left us with fond memories of a League Cup defeat to Liverpool when his treatment of a hapless Reds defender was so disrespectfully contemptuous that the lad had to be taken off with twisted blood. His goals were regular and spectacular – Snoddy was a 24-carat Leeds hero.

Norwich City fans were catching on by this time to the regular humiliations their club were visiting upon once-mighty Leeds – and they were revelling in it, weren’t they just? Now, any given transfer window brought a barrage of tweets from Canaries fans, with the hashtag LUFC and a mickey-taking 140 characters wondering who the next import from Elland Road would be. They were making hay while the sun shone and loving it. Little Norwich in a position to humble former European giants! It was unprecedented, the stuff of bumpkin wet dreams. Norwich had hit on a rich seam of transfer success as they picked over the twitching corpse of each successive failed Leeds campaign. They had become carrion Canaries, feeders off a bigger but seemingly moribund football club.

By last season, things appeared to have reached the stage where Norwich would take a player from Leeds, not because they needed him, but just because they could. They swooped again in the January window for the disaffected Luciano Becchio, our top scorer, fobbing us off with the ineffectual Steve Morison and an insultingly small cash adjustment. Becchio went on to sink almost without trace at Carrow Road, Morison was a disappointment at Leeds and the whole deal was a failure, of benefit to neither party. But the Norwich fans crowed anew.

Now we have the crazy and repellent situation where, every time a promising lad emerges at Elland Road, the gallows humorists dive out of the woodwork with increasingly weak jokes about him being destined for Norwich City, or more likely Norwich City reserves. These jokes are feeble and unwelcome – but they have the additional barb of that worrying potential to become “bad taste jokes” – by turning out to be true. How Leeds fans have wished for a turning of the tables, to get rid of this monkey on our backs. How we would love, even more, the chance to meet Norwich on equal terms again, our own problems sorted out, and to be able to bring these irritating yokel upstarts to account.

Yesterday, Norwich City – shorn of the injured Snoddy of blessed memory – went to Manchester City, and the Canaries got well and truly stuffed without so much as a tweet of resistance. 7-0 they lost. It was the kind of score the vidi-printer used to choke on and then confirm in capital letters rather than numbers, for fear its accuracy might otherwise be doubted. SEVEN NIL. Some wantonly malicious blogs might even emphasise it in bold. SEVEN NIL. The Norwich defending would have shamed a primary school eleven, they were hopeless in midfield and utterly punchless up front. Could there have been a Leeds fan anywhere who saw that result and didn’t experience a frisson of delighted satisfaction? Not this Leeds fan, that’s for certain. This Leeds fan and this blog were cock a hoop with mean-spirited glee.

The Germans have a word for it – and as usual it’s a long and clunky one. Schadenfreude. It means delighting in the suffering of others and it’s not something, gentle reader, to which I’m usually prone – you’ll be relieved to hear. But football is the modern take on the gladiatorial arena, in which you are able to see those you despise suffer, and can relish the fact of it without losing your essential humanity. Or so I tell myself. The unvarnished truth is that I want to see Norwich City have a shocking season, culminating in relegation. I’d love to see us displace them in the top flight, but at a push, meeting them again in the Championship would do – ideally with Snods and maybe Johnny Howson back in white shirts as is only right and decent. If what goes around really does come around, maybe that might happen. On yesterday’s evidence of their slaughter at the Etihad, it’s not impossible.

How sweet, how very sweet, that would be.

64 Comments

Posted in Football, Leeds United, Life

Tagged Bradley Johnson, canaries, Johnny Howson, Leeds United, Luciano Becchio, norwich city, relegation, Rob Snodgrass, Schadenfreude, transfers, tweets, Twitter

Could the Leeds United Chairman be Trying to Pass the Buck? – by Rob Atkinson

Posted on 28/09/2013 | 28 comments

“The buck stops here” is a phrase that was popularised by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who kept a sign with that phrase on his desk in the Oval Office. But where does the buck stop in football, and more specifically – where does it stop at Leeds United? We don’t have a President – the last candidate for that position was bundled into a car and dispatched into exile in Monaco; he hasn’t been heard from since. The next most likely candidate for stopper of the buck is the current Leeds United Chairman, Salah Abdulla Nooruddin Nooruddin. Mr Nooruddin’s views on just where responsibility lies for the present state of the club appear somewhat ambiguous, as witness the tweets that accompany this article, specifically the one issued in the wake of the Millwall defeat.

Leeds United is a football club quite unlike any other, as we all know – but it nevertheless shares some characteristics in common with more run-of-the-mill outfits. One of these foibles is that any praise or appreciation of the fans as a body of support; any suggestion from the suits at the top that the turnstile fodder at the bottom are not merely that, but are in fact salt of the earth heroes of whom the players, staff, directors and tea-ladies are in respectful awe – any such sentiment expressed at times of tension particularly, can be relied upon to go down well. A well-timed word or two to this effect might even buy a stressed Chairman some useful time and room to manoeuvre. It’s been done before.

That explains the honeyed words in the earlier tweets. But Salah appears to have emitted the most recent tweet under some duress, in response to some angry hectoring from irate fans who can see this season falling apart. And, looking beneath the surface of that tweet, it begs the question: just how wise or otherwise was this tweet? What is Salah actually saying?

To say in so many words that the club are trying to bring in a striker AND a winger – a necessity I’m on record as specifying a few days ago – is encouraging. We can but hope that, thus committed, Mr Nooruddin and Co will make good on this statement of intent. The rest of the tweet though is a little more problematic, with – once you start to dig – a few more layers to it. “BUT with current squad we should have won today!!!” says Salah, plaintively. Based on what, exactly? The lack of width and creativity is nothing short of legendary this far into the campaign. Squillions of pixels and fonts have been expended on setting out the extent and effect of that problem. Leeds United are well known among those who love them as an impotent force, firing blanks; one that, to quote the hackneyed cliché, couldn’t score in a brothel. This is why we need the early Christmas present Salah was coyly referring to. It’s perplexing that the Chairman should so bluntly be stating that we should have won. Who’s he blaming exactly? The players themselves? The manager himself?? These are shark-infested waters, and Mr Nooruddin should be well enough aware of the esteem in which Brian McDermott is held by the supporters, to keep his toes safely out of them. Such sentiments, expressed by a layman, could easily be misconstrued.

The view of the massive majority of the support is quite plain, and it sits very well with the characteristics of the modern game, dominated by big money and overseas owners, whether rich or not so rich. The supporters, by overwhelmingly common consent, do not blame Brian for the current situation. They do not even blame most of the players; they know there is some residual deadwood left over from the old regime, and they know that reinforcements are urgently needed. Given all this, many – perhaps most – of the supporters will view the Chairman’s blithe assertion that the current squad, with all its deficiencies, “should have won” a highly competitive Championship away game, as somewhat naive, a little bizarre, slightly bonkers. This is not really Salah’s area. Salah’s area is to listen to that nice Mr McDermott, to take on board his wisdom concerning the personnel we need and then to set about obtaining those personnel with as little fuss and bother as possible and without undue delay.

That’s the role of the executive as opposed to the expert professional, Salah. That’s division of responsibility, that’s delegation up the line. All you have to do is make what the manager wants possible – to somehow find the money without which it’s NOT possible. It’s a vital, pivotal role. And that, Mr Nooruddin, is why the buck stops with YOU – so please. Do not even think about passing it.

28 Comments

Posted in Football, Leeds United, Sport

Tagged Football, GFH Capital, Leeds United, loan window, money, Salah Nooruddin, Twitter

It’s a Twitter Bad Taste Jamboree for Millwall Fans as Leeds are in Town – by Rob Atkinson

Posted on 28/09/2013 | 78 comments

Millwall Beauty Queens Parade for Police Five

Twitter is a good place to avoid today for Leeds fans – or indeed for anyone whose idea of good taste precludes taunting rival supporters over two bloody murders thirteen years ago. Millwall fans are generally the exception to the rules of taste though, as they are to most rules – not excluding those governing grammar, basic hygiene and indeed evolution.

It’s not hard to find Millwall fans on Twitter today. Those of this dismal fraternity who are able to find their way around a computer are there in the ether, in force, to celebrate the first of Millwall’s two cup finals this season. Their team face Leeds United, the cause of all those chips on rival fans’ shoulders everywhere. The effect is accentuated with Millwall fans, for whom the chip on the shoulder invariably possesses a higher IQ than the diseased organ inside the skull.

It’s pointless to regale you here with the output of the South Bermondsey twitterati. It’s all there, for those who might want to source it. Hashtag #sickeningbile might be a useful route to go. Strong stomachs are required; this is no place for the queasy. Youngsters who weren’t even born when Chris Loftus and Kevin Speight met their awful fate in Taksim Square Istanbul, are gleefully evident, aping their elders, glorying in the blood spilled by two lads who went overseas to watch a football match – and never came home.

Most football clubs suffer from a minority of this sort, people who genuinely seek approval for dragging their very souls through the gutter as they seek to out-do each other in aiming jibes at the misfortunes of others. It’s been a blight on football for over 50 years, certainly since the time of the Munich Air Disaster. Man U fans are only too well aware of the fashion down the years for tasteless chants and songs on that sad subject. My own Leeds United have shameful form for it; Liverpool too and various other clubs. Man U fans will climb on their high horse a few times every year over this, but they are not without sin, reveling in their own sick celebration over Hillsborough and Istanbul, plumbing the depths over the Heysel tragedy. It’s hard to find a club that doesn’t attract a lunatic fringe of this kind of “support” – but it’s usually a minority and it’s been greatly reduced in recent years. Only Millwall buck this trend. There it’s most of them, most of the time. There, civilised behaviour and rules of taste and respect seemingly don’t apply.

Millwall fans, rather than condemning the examples of pond-life in their midst, tend to glory in them. “No-one likes us, we don’t care” they sing defiantly, happy with their grisly reputation, proud of a record that would sicken a psychopath. They’re more famous of course for their tendency towards violence, usually in gangs of herd-instinct cowards seeking small groups of rival fans to attack. When none such are available, they will be content to fight among themselves and disgrace the game in this country that way. They had a set-to at Wembley last April in the FA Cup semi-final. Bewildered Wigan fans looked on as their team cruised to victory and the Millwall animals tore into each other like sharks drunk on blood. Images of crying children caught up between bloodied “adults” lacing into their own kind shocked and revolted the nation. As usual, nothing effective was done.

It’s about time, though, that something was done. Millwall is the land that time forgot, a throwback to an uglier era that the rest of the game is doing reasonably well in leaving behind. Only at Millwall does this anti-culture still flourish, by word and by deed. In Leeds, the old men of the sixties and seventies Service Crew sit around swapping stories on internet forums these days, their boots hung up for good. Even West Ham fans are emerging from their own savage past. Man U fans are too busy travelling up and down between Devon and the Theatre of Hollow Myths to engage in fisticuffs – they’re an aging population too.

The modern football fan is a relatively peaceful person, obsessed with the media fishbowl of the Premier League, horrified by the price of everything, as likely as not to be a student, or a female; a far cry from the working man’s army of previous decades. Not so at Millwall. Millwall defies evolution, laughs at progress, dismisses a family atmosphere as “soft”, spouts poison on the internet, looks for easy targets down scary back-alleys. Millwall is the past in defiance of the present and the future. Millwall should be consigned to that past, to the dustbin of football history – and their shrinking legion of “fans” left to lob half-bricks at each other.

It’s high time to get rid of Millwall.

PS – see below for the evidence of one Millwall cretin glorying in his following the Twitter account of Turkish murderer Ali Umit Demir. Disgusting – but we shouldn’t apply normal human standards to some Millwall apes.