Stress is strain for O'Leary

Leeds chief finds "so many things detract... I'm totally fed up"

By Sue Mott

Daily Telegraph

David O'Leary had his nose broken this week. Had he been out for the night at Leeds hotspot? Had one of his infamously unruly players slugged him on the training pitch?

The culture of melodrama is now so deeply inculcated in the fabric at Elland Road the Leeds manager cannot go to have a nose job without us all imagining the worst.

It was not vanity. It was necessity. Sinus trouble. And the surgeon told him he might as well straighten his often broke nose while he was at it. They also removed his tonsils. I'm not sure if this was the advice of the medics or the English FA. He is opinionated and controversy has not so much dogged his footsteps as sunk its teeth into his ankles and hung on.

"I am nice," he said, "I survived at Arsenal for 10 years. You've got to be ruthless and single-minded, but it doesn't sop you from being nice."

Nice? How nice can you be to preside over a team featuring repeated on-pitch indiscipline and off-the-pitch criminal charges for GBH?

Himself, his wife and two children now under police and private protection from the author of threatening letters. Is this a nice existence?

Here is a manager under more stress than any of you can name in the Premiership: the Bowyer/Woodgate fallout, controversial book, personal threats, Viduka's elbow, Smith's ill-discipline... and he is here, upright, and smiling.

The latest intrigue is whether Bowyer and Woodgate should play for England. But O'Leary thinks he knows what Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson is thinking. "Gut feeling? I think the England manager wants to pick them. I think he's looked at them on the pitch and thought, 'There's two good players that could benefit me'." What proof has he got? "No proof at all," he said, wide-eyed and innocent. 

"I think they should be picked for England." Even though one has a recent criminal conviction and the other was running about the streets of Leeds drunk and described in court as a "liar"?

"I tell you what, Sue. A lot of people have gone to prison in this country and been picked for England. Tony Adams. He went to prison."

Bur for drunk driving, not criminal assault  that O'Leary described as "utterly disgraceful" the Leeds United name.

"If a court of law found Bowyer 'not guilty, why shouldn't he be picked? And when Woodgate has served his community service, I don't see why he shouldn't be picked either."

Some of us think it would be scandalous if these two footballers were picked for England. He shrugged. "Do I care if they're picked? Not really. It suits me for them not to be picked. My self-interest is served by them not being picked." 

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