As Relevant as Ever?
Despite their early positivity, Kevin and Dennis just couldn't work it out.
Though far removed from the recent Premier League mania, buy-outs, resignations and transfer lunacy of the entertaining but damaging extravaganza known as “the closing of the transfer window”, it got me to thinking about how this relates to Leeds United; to where we are now in the depths of the Football League, and to where we could be in a couple of years if we achieve the success currently predicted.
This is not an article exclusively about Leeds but is the view of the current premier league talking points, including the joke that it Newcastle United, from the perspective of a
So my initial reaction to the Abu-Dhabi multi-multi-multi billionaires is not one of mourning the death of football but actually that, if Manchester City can get this kind of money injected, why can’t we?
City and
Both also, I think, feel a curse of sorts hangs over them. Though we have failed to achieve success in any form for as great a sustained period as City, you cannot help but feel that things are going to go wrong, that any bright promise can only bring untold misery.
In 2000-2002 Leeds spent big money. This was nothing, however, compared to some of the salaries and wages being paid today, and I’m not talking about Chelsea, Man United, or now of course Man City, rather the type of salaries and transfer fees that can be paid by newcomers from the Championship or teams perpetually struggling for top-flight survival.
Our gluttony however sent us crashing off the Premier League radar just in time to miss out on the more recent wave of cash thrown at clubs in the top-flight. This also meant, gallingly, that we missed out on the guaranteed 50 minutes of quality highlights every week, without fail, offered by Sky’s “Football First” service. That was a particularly bitter pill to swallow (recently sweetened in part by LUTV!).
But history suggests that we have missed out on so much not necessarily because of the amounts we spent but rather the point in time at which we spent it. Had events occurred to Leeds two years after they actually did (a Back to the Future-style alternate timeline if you like) it is possible that none of our recent misery would have been an issue because the flooding of so much new money into the highest level of the game coincided with the boy with the marker pen writing on his chest crying us out of the Premiership at the Reebok. I am not, and certainly would not deny that the misery which followed was a direct consequence of the way the club was run between 2000 and 2003, or that the results were the proper consequences of it. But it is interesting that the “crash” in the transfer market hit us at precisely the wrong time. We became a shining example of how not to run a football club at the same time as clubs traditionally with limited resources outspent the Ridsdale “dream-living” era by some distance using borrowed money with the support of vastly more lucrative T.V. deals. It is this which leaves me feeling a slight sense of misfortune though this accompanies, rather than replaces, the contempt I feel towards Ridsdale and the way he conducted himself.
“The Glory Years”. A classic Leeds United video. I have watched it about 4,000 times. For those of you Leeds fans who shamefully have never seen it, you would probably think the clue is in the title. Yet watching it you come away feeling not glory, but injustice, misfortune and frustration. I think it is precisely this feeling which makes me feel sympathy, perhaps camaraderie, with City over the last twenty years.
As supporters we are betrayed and brow beaten by the club we love but always come back for more. We never get what our loyalty deserves. Taking the two other examples, it would be difficult to argue that the Man United supporters deserve the success their team produce even if, begrudgingly, their players do. The Geordies on the other hand seem to be very much like the exposed bingo wings of their Saturday night women – impervious to pain – coupled with a blind optimism and a belief, presumably inspired by some form of hallucinogenic drug, that the only people that can make Newcastle United successful are people with strong links to the club. I hear Gazza desperately needs something occupy his time at the moment. Maybe they can persuade Vic Reeves to get out of the Churchill dog’s bottom and say “Oh Yes” to Mike Ashley or whoever is next in line at a club with such unrealistic expectations that their supporters will never be satisfied.
The distinction is realism. Scum expect success because they know no different. The Geordies surprisingly expect success having been nowhere near it for over half a century. We expect success but we are realistic enough to know that the gulf between us now and where we ultimately want to be couldn’t be much wider. Our push for promotion this year is a realistic one. Not because we are Leeds but because we have a capable squad and management team, for League One. We are just glad that we’re not fending off creditors, have a settled team and actually play some nice football for a change. City’s lot in the Premier League has been one of mediocrity sprinkled with the odd relegation flirtation. The Shinawatra takeover promised glory but in keeping with the curse delivered a qualified result, tainted by rumours of the owner’s criminal corruption and breaches of human rights in Thailand. Oh, and of course Sven. But they expect success because now they have the money to buy the players to provide it.
Underlying the hilarity of the Newcastle comedy roadshow (coming to a Championship stadium near you soon), and the bitterness at the perpetual Man United success story, is an interesting dichotomy in methods of pursuing success at the highest level. If Leeds did the wrong thing at the wrong time, the scum story since about 1995 is the complete opposite. Bringing a generation of youth through at just the right time, increasing the size of the stadium at just the right time, obtaining significant global investment at just the right time. All of this is of course is a matter of fortune rather than design (a common feature in their dominance since 1993). For the Geordies however, none of this would be possible with the exception of stadium improvements. The youth set-up is non-existent. Apparently Keegan was pleading for the board to buy Beckham, Henry and Ronaldinho in the summer – what one commentator recently described as “the showcase from the Rothmans Football Yearbook 2003” – but the sentiment is clear and it matches that of the Geordie masses. Buy big quick. reap quick, short-term success.
Sam Allardyce completely remodelled his squad in the summer and was given about three months to make them demonstrate European Champions class based on total attacking football. Ridiculous. His system at Bolton took three or four years to reap rewards and would probably have done the same at St James’ Park. But this was not good enough for the Geordies who in football supporting terms are simply greedy. The owner sacked Allardyce on the back of pressure from the masses and then, having brought in Keegan to appease them, put in place a structure which could only hamper Keegan and looked like the type of long-term system which would have clearly suited Allardyce. Odd.
Now Joe Kinnear has been appointed. Strange. Very, VERY strange. For this “massive club” his CV for this “massive job” included the following:-
He motivated Wimbledon into punching and kicking their way into a couple of semi-finals
He is not only able to survive heart attacks, but also one would presume the inevitable temptation of suicide at dealing with deluded Geordies on a daily basis
He is willing to touch something Terry Venables won’t
He is friends with Dennis Wise
He is happy to agree to a fifteen minute rolling contract (though this is probably governed more by the Newcastle United medical insurance policy than anything).
Please accept my apologies, this has inadvertently turned into a rant at the bar-coded jokers as they lunge from one self-made disaster after another which was not intended but has been enjoyable. So I must bring this into line with the article’s theme. Someone recently commented to me that the image of Newcastle is how we were viewed as we plummeted through the divisions. So how can I laugh so joyously and whole-heartedly at this tale of Geordie misery. Well that is because so much of this is down to them. Not the club or the manager or the board or the lenders or the transfer market, but the Geordies. We undoubtedly enjoyed the ride of the Champions League but we had no idea of the house of cards being constructed behind the scenes until it was too late. At the beginning of last season the Geordies were presented with a magnificent opportunity to create the foundations of a lasting success at the club, something they had never previously enjoyed. Allardyce the manager and Ashley the owner, instantly £200 million worse off on taking over, were the new “messiahs” on Tyneside. Oh how they love their messiahs! But their patience levels would just not tolerate this kind of idea. So they shouted about it, and they got exactly what they wanted. The Messiah!
Forgetting his last visit to save them, when millions were squandered, bottle was lost (on and off the pitch), not to mention his without-warning abandonment, he was back. Out of touch with football having not watched a game for three years he was there to turn back time and reignite the glory years. The great motivator was back to motivate the players. But these players, along with the vast majority of others in the modern game, are motivated only by one thing. And it isn’t Kevin Keegan. The great manager was back to buy all the best players the world by offering the pull of being managed by the great Kevin Keegan. But that isn’t what pulls the majority of players to clubs these days. Even if a genuine messiah was manager. He would of course have known this had he actually taken an interest in the sport since resigning, surprisingly, from his last job.
And so he has resigned. Again. Surprisingly. The irony in the tale and in the current discord at Newcastle - where the owner is scared off by the angry mob whilst he looks to sell the club for over £450 million (despite not being interested in profit apparently) – is that Keegan’s resignation allows the Geordies to conveniently forget that his appointment was a terrible knee-jerk one and would never in a million years have produced the success that he promised and they believed in. Perhaps underneath all of the “sack the board” rhetoric, the “vote with your feet” crusade, is a veiled relief that Keegan left when he did in the way he did so they could divert attention from their idiocy onto their owner, another idiot who fits in more and more with them –the XXXL “King Kev” shirt aside – with each disastrous gaffe. If they do get a buyer and the buyer brings back King Kev, that would be the crowning moment in the Newcastle self-created spiral to oblivion. Hope does spring eternal after all.
So turning back to Leeds and to my friend’s comment. As supporters we had no control, no say. We have been used and abused for as long as I can remember. Our club was all but wiped off the planet by a man and his business associates who continue in business without any recrimination. We were gutted but loyal bystanders as the turmoil unfolded before our eyes. We cried at Cardiff and we cried at Wembley. But we are always realistic. We got what our season deserved overall at Cardiff and what our performance overall deserved at Wembley (though certainly not our season). But we were not the cause of any of it. The board never listened to us, they never made a decision we asked them to. They still don’t. And though Bates may be hated there is a deference you must give as a supporter to those who run a football club, that ultimately if they did all you asked of them the club would be bound to fail. And so it proves perpetually at Newcastle. Bates, Krasner, McKenzie and now in hindsight Ridsdale didn’t listen to us. And maybe in some way that will be to our benefit in the future, subject to the curse of course! Same goes for City.
So can the blue half of Manchester really hit the big time? Fergie has been unable to resist the opportunity of having a dig in the press this week. “It takes more than money”, he says, “to win titles”. Chelsea managed it two years in a row. And at Man United the young nucleus of the mid-1990s home grown talent are on their last legs. Their team on Saturday, much the same as the one which won the Champions League (the inexpensive Berbatov being the only difference) contained only two home grown players.
Even at Arsenal, where Arsene Wenger has developed a fantastic set-up for bringing through young players, it must be remembered that many of these are still bought by the club rather than picked off the streets of North London. The success in Wenger’s model is yet to truly manifest itself but at board level you would imagine success might be measured equally between the number of trophies and the vast sums Arsenal will be able to command in the transfer market. From a personnel perspective this is perhaps the main flaw in Wenger’s plan but I really hope it succeeds.
Talk of curses aside, I think the future should look rosy for City and, for a short time, I would probably be happy for them. They have a good manager and more money than any football club in the world. As a Leeds fan, am I jealous? Yes of course it would be nice to see South American superstars (sorry Luciano) every week but perhaps it is a good time to be building nice momentum with a combination of bought, nurtured and local talent, so that by the time we reach the Premiership we will know whether football at the highest level really is on the verge of eating itself. In truth, the cursed Man City might be just the ones to spearhead the feast.
And so, with five wins on the bounce, goals aplenty, good football to watch and 25,000 for a home game in the third division with Hereford United, we could really start work our way onwards and upwards, out of the football league and back to the thick of the madness that is the Premier League. Who knows there may be a multi-multi-billionaire waiting for us when we get there!
We may be removed from it, but it is a good time to be onlookers with a vested interest.
Marching on Together.
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