http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=A1YourView&xml=/sport/2007/05/05/sfnjim05.xml
Leeds big on egos, small on accountability By Jim White Now it is certain. Thanks to the 10-point deduction for going into administration, Leeds United have been relegated to the third tier of English football. The frail mathematical lifeline that kept them still theoretically connected to the Championship has been cut from beneath them by their own board. Not even a mathematical turnaround that would make Stephen Hawking scratch his head with bemusement can save them now. So extraordinary has been the club's decline that all week the newspapers, radio and television have been attempting to analyse precisely how is it that an outfit recently supping from the top table have plunged so deeply that in August their fans will be required to don an aqualung to navigate their way round the new fixture list. But reading of, and listening to those involved in the Leeds story speak about their part in the fall, it is hard to understand quite how it ever happened. No one, apparently, did anything wrong. Despite being at the helm of a club in financial meltdown, for instance, the current chairman, Ken Bates, declares himself entirely blameless. It is nothing to do with him, he insists. As far as he is concerned, the fault lies with everyone from the city council, through the previous administration to those journalists with the audacity to try to pick their way through the fisherman's nest of holding companies within which he prefers to locate his business interests. Equally, the manager in charge of a team who have gone from the play-offs to relegation in 12 months sees only positives in the experience. "We can draw strength from this and improve as a group," says Dennis Wise, as if the plunge into League One were some pre-season team-bonding exercise involving the fording of a stream using only a ball of string, two paper clips and a milk carton. advertisement Meanwhile Peter Ridsdale, the chairman who presided over the accumulation of debt so mountainous you would need the skills of Chris Bonington to assess its true scale, is telling anyone who will listen that the only mistake he made at Elland Road was to defer to his manager, David O'Leary. Talking to John Humphrys on Radio 4's On The Ropes this week, Ridsdale appeared to be the living embodiment of Brian Clough's assertion that there is no creature on earth with a more inflated ego than a football club director. According to the Ridsdale version, everything good that happened at Leeds was due to his wise stewardship. Everything bad was the fault of the manager or the other directors. "Privately I had my own view on that, but I was obliged to go with the majority of the board," he told Humphrys of their cack-handed decisions, from buying stock for the office aquarium to having four managers on the payroll at once. Indeed, anyone who caught Ridsdale in full post-rationalising flow would have hesitated to join in the outbreak of gleeful sniggering that has greeted the once-great Yorkshire club's humiliation. As if watching the football their team have played has not been punishment enough, the Elland Road faithful have been condemned to spending the past five years listening to the self-serving approaches of Messrs Ridsdale, O'Leary, Venables, Bates and Wise. Instead of mocking surely, right now, there can be no one in the game more deserving of sympathy than Leeds' hard-pressed fans. _______________________________________________ the Leeds List is an unmoderated mailing list and the list administrators accept no liability for the personal views and opinions of contributors. Leedslist mailing list [email protected] http://list.zetnet.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/leedslist The Leeds List - "where never is heard a discouraging word..."
