If you closed your eyes just for a moment and forgot all about the reality of
the league table, the financial meltdown, the off-field bickering, life at
Elland Road did not look as crummy as all that. An angelic looking blonde girl
with pig tails played tag with her Leeds-shirted brother around Billy Bremner's
statue. The queue to get into the club shop that has a sale on was healthy. A
couple merrily scoffed their pre-match chips underneath the bronze plaque
commemorating Bremner, Don Revie, and the FA Cup won by the old team of legend.
There was, believe it or not, a buzz around the place.
Everybody knew this match had the feel of do or die. To the immense elation
of the locals, Leeds found it in them to do enough. This win did not come
without its moment of high anxiety, as Luton were awarded a penalty with four
minutes to go.
The noise that cascaded around the place when Casper Ankergren plunged to
parry Dean Morgan's spot kick was raw and wild. It ensured that Richard
Cresswell's 50th-minute goal, scored through sheer will as much as skill, gives
them glimmer of light. But only a glimmer. They remain bottom. Now there are
nine games to go. Nine games to somehow avoid the drop and prevent the worst
nightmare in the history of Leeds United. They have never before sunk as low as
English football's third tier. It starts for them at Leicester on Tuesday,
followed by a trip on Saturday to Southend, who are one place and one point
above them. How dearly they needed this boost. The last few weeks have been a
tale of Leeds disunited as the captain Kevin Nicholls has asked to leave - he
was absent here, but not forgotten in understandably rude terrace chants; an
unnamed player was accused of leaking details of the team to the opposition and
the chairman Ken Bates through a splurge of fighting talk
has exacerbated behind-the-scenes problems. At last weekend's match Bates,
in a not untypical show of belligerence, used his programme notes to publish
the address of a former club director Melvyn Levi. The two men are entangled in
a legal dispute and Bates saw fit to describe Levi as 'the enemy within'.
Levi duly served an injunction on this weekend's programme that was lifted only
on the morning of the match. But Bates's latest missive was so abrasive
somebody at the club thought it prudent to cross out a paragraph with marker
pen in all 8,500 programmes. Not that it was not a doddle to read another of
the many jibes about Levi through the hastily applied ink anyway. Many
supporters have a different view about quite who is the enemy within. A
worrying number are staying away, unable to bring themselves to come to the
games while Bates is running the club. These range from individuals, such as
Mark, a former home-and-away season-ticket holder, who won't return to
Elland Road under the current regime, to groups, such as the East Anglia
supporters club that, not so long ago, would bring three coaches to matches and
now struggle to fill a minibus. The club seldom bother to open the upper tier
of the East stand any more. Marching on together? For some it is more akin to
trudging off alone and wallowing in disillusionment. Bates has alienated the
official supporters club, preferring to set up a new members' club that costs
£47 to join and includes such privileges as the right to buy tickets and gain
entry to a smart members' bar on matchday. There is also a 10 per cent discount
on purchases in the shop, some free magazines and a Christmas card. Forgive me
if my sense of economics is not hugely refined, but that does not seem an awful
lot for £47. The attendance was a respectable 27,138, helped by the reduction
in ticket prices to £15. Generally, though, figures suggest that around 10,000
have drifted away since the club dropped
out of the Premiership in 2004. The crowds held up quite well at first,
averaging 30,000 in their first year of exile. That has fallen to an average of
20,000 in this season of radical decline. Rank performances on the pitch, a
lack of players for supporters to identify with and hiked-up ticket prices have
contributed to the number of punters who have drifted away. Considering this
season has been the story of 42 players, three managers, one volatile chairman,
thousands of lost supporters and endless tales of woe, is it any wonder the
club sit bottom of the table? Think about it for a moment. Some 42 players
have pulled on the shirt for Leeds this season. That is almost enough for four
separate teams. There has been a constant stream of loaned journeymen, the
latest being yesterday's debutant, Lubomir Michalik, the Slovak who joined from
Bolton. It is hardly the blueprint for success. Leeds haven't won successive
league games all season. The financial problems are,
according to Bates, coming to an end. He has stated that by the end of this
season, the club will be debt-free and no longer paying off ex-employees. It
beggars belief that they are still funding salaries for players such as Robbie
Fowler and Danny Mills. Up until last year they were still paying three
ex-managers in David O'Leary, Terry Venables and Peter Reid. How far back do
we need to go to trace the moment the club's descent became inexorable? Is it
when Peter Ridsdale got so out of his depth following the dream? Is it when the
debts were reformed into bonds that required the fire sale of a promising team?
Is it when Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer were implicated in a protracted
court case? Is it when Gerald Krasner's consortium did their bit for the debts
by selling the stadium and the Thorp Arch training ground? Or is it when Bates
took over and started doing things in his own inimitable style? Surveying the
wreckage of this ailing club, it pays to look at the
bigger picture and remind yourself not just that it is six years since they
were in the semi-finals of the Champions League with a team of internationals.
But also, Leeds have won the English title more recently than Liverpool. Leeds
were the team to last conquer the game in this country with an English manager
in Howard Wilkinson. In the cutting words of the travelling Luton fans
squeezed into one corner: 'You're not famous any more.' Actually that's not
strictly true. The club are still famous. But the team are barely recognisable
from the heights of yesteryear.
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it's a God awful small affair
