All lovely and everything but lets get the points on the board. Earn it
rather than think we can ride in on some nostalgia magic carpet.
PS Hernandez has been the best player in the league this season
PPS Becchio..!! FFS!
On 16 April 2019 at 09:16 "[1]nat...@sky.com" <[2]nat...@sky.com>
wrote:
Why Premier League needs Leeds United
henry winter, chief football writer
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The Premier League needs Leeds United. It needs the mystique of
Marcelo Bielsa, a manager so beloved by Leeds fans that two of them
are in a recording studio working on Bucket Man as a musical tribute
to his match-day seat of choice. It needs Bielsa’s intense,
imaginative football. It particularly needs the passion of the Leeds
faithful.
There are some great travelling supports in the Premier League, such
as Manchester United and Newcastle United, among others, and Leeds
would be a welcome addition on the road as well as with the
atmosphere that they generate at Elland Road. After Leeds played
away to Preston North End on April 9, the police officer in charge
of the away section at Deepdale praised the 5,516 visiting fans for
being “as loud as ever and no issues, no arrests”.
Leeds fans would represent an antidote to some of the ills besetting
the Premier League. They are the opposite of the glory-hunters
swooning because of a club’s prominence. Leeds fans might consider a
half-and-half scarf if stitching together Leeds United and the
Kaizer Chiefs, Lucas Radebe’s old team. They are the antithesis of
what Roy Keane famously termed the “prawn-sandwich brigade”. If
somebody mentioned opening a tunnel club at Elland Road, the ready
wits on their terraces would suggest that it was probably an escape
route after 15 years’ incarceration in the EFL.
Supporting Leeds is a passion passed on from generation to
generation. When they played Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday, there
were children too young to remember the Premiership years leaning
excitedly over the yellow and blue railings almost two hours before
kick-off at Elland Road, high-fiving Bielsa and his players as they
marched from the bus.
Three hours later, a fan called Matt Richardson celebrated Jack
Harrison’s winner so enthusiastically that he broke his ankle. A
friend of his took a picture of Richardson in his seat afterwards,
smiling, his left foot at a painful angle, continuing to watching
Leeds before the medics arrived. As he was helped into a wheelchair,
Richardson kept an eye on the game while doing a thumbs up to his
mates, who took great delight when he was strapped in by shouting:
“Seatbelt on”.
Richardson later tweeted from hospital that “this is what supporting
Leeds United does to me” . . . “but idc [I don’t care] because Leeds
won”. Victory took Leeds to 82 points, four behind the leaders
Norwich City and three ahead of Sheffield United with four games to
play in the compelling race for the two automatic promotion
positions.
Leeds know they still have major work to complete. They also know
how much they want it. If Leeds do go up, the city will acquire even
more of a buzz, there will be more students switching there, and
there will be smiles among broadcasters, knowing that noise is
guaranteed at Elland Road.
After Leeds were relegated from the Premiership after a 4-1 thumping
by Bolton Wanderers on May 2, 2004, their then caretaker-manager
Eddie Gray remarked defiantly: “It will not be the end of the club.”
No chance. Not with thousands of Leeds fans singing louder and
louder in trying to lift vanquished players, including one of their
own, Alan Smith, who was in tears. And this is why Leeds United
survived. The fans. And that is why 13 days later, as they bade
farewell to the Premiership with defeat at Stamford Bridge, the
Leeds fans sang We’ll Meet Again.
Pablo Hernández, the 34-year-old winger, has been among the success
stories under BielsaIAN HODGSON/PA
Barring some day-trips in the cup to elite venues, Leeds have been
in exile for a decade and a half, away from all the riches and
international exposure of the Premier League, and yet if anything
support has grown. Millions were stunned when the actor Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones, went
on Jimmy Kimmel Live to promote Series 8 and talked excitedly “about
a guy who magically transforms the north into this beautiful
paradise . . . and his name is Bielsa”.
Coster-Waldau instructed the studio audience to shout: “In Bielsa we
trust.” So a Dane is a Leeds fan. Why not? Leeds have a global
appeal. Adversity has not alienated many. For many, there is
enhanced pride at sticking by a distressed asset. All Leeds, Aren’t
We? Coster-Waldau is. Hundreds of thousands are.
When the club tweeted a picture of Elland Road before kick-off on
Saturday, Radebe quickly replied in an emotional salute to this
“field of dreams” he graced for 11 years. It is great men and
players such as Radebe and Gray, loyal Leeds servants, that stir
even more love for this club, and an even deeper longing for them to
return to on high.
Leeds also asked where people were watching the game against
Wednesday, and were inundated with locations around the world,
reflecting holidaying families on half-term but also the extensive
Leeds diaspora: Dublin, Vienna, North Carolina and Coney Island, and
Vancouver, Oslo, Cologne and Pietermaritzburg as well as Trondheim,
Inverness, Bordeaux and Georgia.
Leeds have suffered much in their 100 years, so many well-known
tales: cup-final shocks, managerial defections, inexplicable
refereeing decisions, administrations, points deductions, supporters
slain, players on trial, overspending, goldfish worth their weight
in gold, the sale of Elland Road, strange owners, knocked out of the
cup by a postman, play-off heartache, a season without a shirt
sponsor, embarrassing tours and a redesigned badge that so angered
fans they organised an online petition of protest.
Over the past 15 years in particular, the Leeds story has been part
circus, total chaos with only the supporters staying firm. Theirs is
an everlasting love, through thick and thin, almost gruel-like thin.
Supporters kept turning up to be counted.
When they then dropped into League One, they were the best-attended
club in the EFL and would have been 13th in the Premier League.
Whatever their status, Leeds’s support has always been full-on
Premier League. On reaching, against all odds, the 2008 League One
play-off final against Doncaster Rovers, many Leeds fans flocked to
the Doncaster ticket office when their 36,000 allocation was snapped
up in hours. After 23 minutes at Wembley, the multitude in the Leeds
section launched into Marching on Together, soon joined by hundreds
of their number in the Doncaster section.
These are fans who kept the faith, even when they kept selling
talent such as Luciano Becchio, Robert Snodgrass, Bradley Johnson
and Jonny Howson and that was just to Norwich City. Sam Byram, Ross
McCormack and Lewis Cook also went.
Players went, the support remained. More locations poured into
Leeds’s official timeline on Saturday: La Manga, Florida, Toronto
and Tenerife, and Ko Samui, Kathmandu, Orlando and Sydney, and
Madrid, Gibraltar, Alabama and LA. Leeds was certainly on Georgia’s
mind. Matthew Fitzpatrick’s Keighley-born caddy Billy Foster wore
his Leeds shirt under his overalls in Augusta, a Masters-stroke.
In Bielsa he trusts. After 25 managers, including caretakers, in 85
years, Leeds have raced through 18 managers in their mad, maddening
past 15 years (with Neil Redfearn in charge four times) but have now
found a saviour in Bielsa.
That is why they were watching in Bilbao and Buenos Aires, places
where Bielsa is particularly revered. The meticulous Argentinian has
made Leeds believe again, brought the atmosphere back, spent little,
given youngsters a chance, got them playing from the back, made
light of injuries, and always adhered to his style, even when
results dipped. Even when 2-1 up against Nottingham Forest with ten
men and 20 minutes left, Bielsa kept his team attacking. They lost
4-2 but didn’t sacrifice their principles. It is a purist ethos that
has endeared Bielsa to such stellar managers as Pep Guardiola and
Mauricio Pochettino.
On it went, more missives from Leeds fans tuning in from Dallas,
Seattle, Shanghai and Singapore, and Tipperary, Budapest, Sao Paulo
and Oklahoma, and Kuwait, Mar del Plata, Brooklyn and Tennessee.
Those travelling to Elland Road from Plymouth and Pudsey and all
stops inbetween swelled their average attendance to the 11th highest
in England (33,868). Others informed Leeds that they were watching
“on my phone whilst out for a family meal”, “between my fingers”,
“from behind the sofa” and “in A&E with access to a defibrillator”.
What promotion would mean, if they hold on, is loyalty rewarded for
those who keep turning up at Elland Road, and for those who moved
away but tune in from afar, never, ever losing their love of Leeds
United.
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