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February 2, 2003
(Sunday)
Mark Lawson: I'm a
Leeds idiot
For at least the past
two years, it has been necessary to apologise
in polite society for supporting Leeds United. The whole thing began
to feel like being a Labour voter in 1983, or a Tory one in 1997.
"You're not still supporting them?"
"Well, yes, but only because I always have."
Now the solution to this liberal dilemma is at hand. The court-room
stars Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate have both left the club, so
the team should be easier to support. But at the exact moment that
continuing to support Leeds is removed of the taint of bigotry and
thuggery by association, it now brings the accusation of being an
idiot.
We - I think I can say we after 34 years of support - have become a
joke club. Earlier in the season, I was irritated by the transfer
window, which prevented Terry Venables from going shopping to replace
his many injured centre-backs, but now the recruitment curfew
operates as a kind of restraining order on an apparently insane
Elland Road board, making it blessedly impossible for them to sell
any more players after it fell again at midnight.
The only consolation is that Leeds have always been an up-and-down
club. As recently as the 80s almost an entire decade was spent in the
second tier, despite LUFC winning the top division on either side of
that trough. Leeds have always been the kind of team that can beat
Manchester United in the league and then, as earlier this season,
lose to Sheffield United in the Worthington. Or, as now seems
horribly likely on Tuesday, to Gillingham in the FA Cup.
Since the turn of the millennium, two difficulties have lain in wait
for Leeds. The first was the Bowyer-Woodgate trial; the second the
massive transfers funded on the pledge to banks that playing
greatness would swell gate receipts and, in turn, justify the buys.
Ironically, the solution to the first problem - selling Bowyer and
Woodgate - has only partially solved the second, because the bad boys
went for a fraction of their 2000 prices. In that sense, Leeds are
football's Enron. In the Elland Road case, there's no suggestion of
criminal behaviour but the value of assets was catastrophically
overstated.
The chairman Peter Ridsdale apparently became known to the players as
Father Christmas because he handed out such handsome contracts, but
the nickname is now also appropriate in the sense that everyone has
stopped believing in him.
With Ridsdale sidelined, the shots are now apparently being called by
Allan Leighton from the Post Office, a business whose recent history
suggests that Leeds are now in the grip of an undertaker who suffers
from the delusion that he's a surgeon. Leighton has been responsible
for the removal of one high-class manager in David O'Leary and the
humiliation of another, Venables.
Yet the one relative winner is Venables. Few people would ever have
bet that Tel would leave a business - as he surely must soon leave
Leeds - looking like the only fair and decent geezer in the place.
His jumble-sale buys of Paul Okon and Teddy Lucic have performed
creditably and he's coaxed effort and elegance again from Harry
Kewell, while being dignified and open with the press.
And just a final word for Woodgate. In Newcastle United, he's joining
another up-and-down club and one that has also spent massively in the
hope of buying success. In fact, the Newcastle chairman shows signs
of having studied at Ridsdale Academy.
So Woody may yet be offered in another fire sale. The drowning fan
clutches at the straw that it might be Leeds buying him back. The
more likely scenario is a return to the 80s, when players you'd never
heard of peopled a team nobody wanted to watch.
Unlike my son's generation, which switches between clubs depending on
results, it's my belief that you support the team of the place where
you grew up and stick with them until you die, or they sign Robbie
Savage.
Otherwise, I'd have become a Geordie as quickly as Woodgate did.
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