Sunday Times 29/10/06
Leeds 2 Southend 0: Leeds show their teeth
Duncan Castles at Elland Road
Leeds came into this match in relegation form, having shipped 18 goals while losing their last five matches. Logically they should possibly have lost Dennis Wise’s first match in charge too, since it was against the same side who had beaten Leeds here during the week. But Wise relishes challenges and he rose to this one.
The win came from late goals in each half, from Ian Moore and Robbie Blake, large draughts of perspiration, and a fair degree of fortune in resisting Southend’s second-half dominance. Wise, though, had been flown in to end a miserable run, and that he did. Never shy about making an impact, his first move at Elland Road had been to appoint Kevin Nicholls captain, principally because the midfielder was brave enough to give him a kicking last time they played each other.
“I want nastiness and togetherness,” said Wise, who also wanted to send a message out to an ageing and lately truculent squad.
Having lost the captaincy to a man recovering from knee surgery, Paul Butler is one of a number of players on the cusp of losing their jobs. A new club has been sought for Sean Gregan, borrowed goalkeeper Tony Warner may return to his old one, while Steve Stone is to be paid off. The signals were there long before Wise agreed to leave League Two Swindon, chairman Ken Bates unfavourably comparing his playing staff to excrement after one recent reverse.
Wise has been too canny to comment publicly on that analysis, but there were changes to the Leeds team that had granted Southend progress to the fourth round of the League Cup for the first time in the club’s history five days previously.
Graham Stack came in at goalkeeper, Eddie Lewis dropped to left-back to accommodate Adam Johnson, while Richard Cresswell was added as a second striker.
Soon Leeds were turning the screw with Johnson stretching his marker to send in crosses and a long-range drive that just failed to produce goals. On the other wing, Luke Moore was a persistent threat, one long, cross-field dribble almost teeing up David Healy. Southend’s central defenders were working double shifts to keep the Northern Irishman and Cresswell at bay.
Less clever for Leeds was the right side of defence, where Gary Kelly insisted on tucking in so tight to the beefy Butler that Southend were left freedom to roam.
Freddy Eastwood gratefully accepted it and was a deft Matthew Kilgallon interception away from laying on a Luke Gutteridge opener. Instead the first goal came from Moore, courtesy of a 40-yard Lewis pass that set him free down the centre of the park. The converted forward strode on, drew Darryl Flahavan from his line, and calmly clipped over the goalkeeper.
The Lion Sleeps Tonight was Bates’ curious choice of interval music, but his predators appeared to be rousing nicely as Cresswell nearly doubled Leeds’ advantage after the restart.
Southend, though, were also awakening, with Peter Clarke placing one header over the bar and seeing another touched away by Stack.
With home fitness visibly fading, Eastwood almost caught the keeper out with a low drive, but it was Leeds who were to score again, Blake’s spiralling free kick granting them a flattering margin of victory.
Star Man: Eddie Lewis (Leeds)
Player Ratings: Leeds: Stack 7, Kelly 6, Butler 6, Kilgallon 7, Lewis 7, Moore 7 (Richardson 61min, 71), Douglas 5, Derry 6, Johnson 6 (Westlake 87min, 6), Healy 6 (Blake 80min, 7), Cresswell 6.
Southend: Flahavan 6, Hunt 6, Sodje 7, Barrett 7, Hammell 7, Gutteridge 6 (Campbell-Rice 78min, 6), Clarke 6, Maher 6, Gower 6, Hooper 5 (Harrold 72min, 6), Eastwood 7
Blues strike £5m Leeds deal
Duncan Castles
Chelsea reach out-of-court settlement to avoid action over poaching
CHELSEA have avoided being found guilty of illegally approaching three Leeds United youth players by reportedly offering £5m in compensation for the two who ultimately moved to Stamford Bridge. Leeds had obtained mobile phone records of Chelsea communications with Daniel Rose, Tom Taiwo and Michael Woods last season while they were attached to the Leeds academy. Taiwo and Woods moved to Chelsea without transfer fees being agreed.
A joint Premier League and FA investigation into the affair ended on Friday when the bodies let Leeds withdraw their complaint. Last night, Chelsea denied that the compensation, which is understood to involved staged payments, was as much as £5m, and were keen to emphasise strongly that there had been no admission of liability.
A joint FA and League statement read: “Leeds has withdrawn their complaint and the Premier League has been advised by both clubs that any claims and litigation arising out of any alleged improper approach have been settled.
“Chelsea have undertaken to conduct an internal review of policies and procedures in relation to the recruitment of players, take steps to rectify any shortcomings . . . and develop their own code of conduct.”
Leeds’s phone evidence came from Chelsea scout Gary Worthington, who spent five years at Leeds before moving to his new job in July 2005. He is understood to have signed a severance agreement with Leeds in which he promised not to recruit any of his former charges for 18 months.
But it is believed he continued to use his Leeds mobile number, contacting Taiwo and Woods before they signed with Chelsea, who denied making an illegal approach and initially offered Leeds £200,000 each for the players. Leeds will use the compensation to fund an overhaul of their first-team squad in January.
Wise words not enough
Rob Hughes
Wise must do more than promise grit if he is to win the hearts and minds of Leeds fans
Whoever is writing the script for Dennis Wise and Ken Bates at Leeds United has a lot to learn about the club, the city, and the real meaning of what it would take to earn the respect, never mind the affection, of a one-club, one-eyed Yorkshire football community.
On Thursday, the official unveiling of the 15th manager appointed in the 32 years since Don Revie left the club, they walked Wise past the bronze statue of Billy Bremner. They presented him in the Bremner Suite, where black and white photographs of the former captain hang like old and faded memories.
And when Wise, the street-smart Londoner, was asked to set out his stall for the new Leeds United era, he took a direct line to the past. “I told the players I want them to be a bit like the Leeds of before who were . . .” He searched the walls for a word. One came. “Well, ’orrible. I want a bit of nastiness, like they used to have here.”
Bates, the chairman who had employed Wise as the grit in his Chelsea teams, barely suppressed a smile. For Bates, now investing some of his Chelsea payoff in trying to exhume Leeds, the analogy Wise was trying to pull off is doubtless a real memory.
You have to be older than Wise’s 39 years actually to recall wee Billy Bremner. You need to read Michael Parkinson’s cutting phrase in this newspaper more than 40 years ago to picture Bremner, the fiery captain of the old Leeds, as “10st of barbed wire”.
Ten stone was a bit on the generous side for Bremner, just as it would be for Wise. They were diminutive warriors of the field, the “poison dwarves” of combative football. Yet getting to know Bremner after his 16 years of sheer perseverance in Leeds’s white was to discover a mellow man of almost secretive, charitable deeds.
He once went Awol from a Revie training session, took his punishment, and never explained to the boss that he had answered a knock on his door that morning and instinctively gone with a mother to visit her daughter, who was in a coma.
“It makes you seem so soft,” he later confided, “and you didn’t want to show that side to anybody in the game, did you?” The hope of the mother was that the voice of Bremner, already then synonymous with the coarse side of Leeds’s football, would bring her daughter to life. It didn’t, but he tried.
And the point is that, all these years on and long after Billy himself had passed away following a heart attack, identifying the new manager with the old skipper simply by alluding to “nastiness” will not begin to restore what Leeds have long lost.
Better men have perished in the process of trying. Brian Clough followed Revie in 1974, and lasted 44 days before a player rebellion got him the sack. Jock Stein came, saw, and retreated sharply back to Scotland. And like skittles, a succession of some of the British Isles’s most capable managers walked the ghostly corridors of Elland Road. Not all of them failed. Howard Wilkinson, with his chairman Leslie Silver and his captain Gordon Strachan, revived the past and won the title back in 1992, with a team containing the likes of Gary McAllister, David Batty, Gary Speed, Lee Chapman and Eric Cantona. George Graham built up a tough platform from which David O’Leary briefly prospered until he and his gullible chairman Peter Ridsdale overdid the spending and took Leeds as close as any major club in modern times has come to liquidation.
It has floundered rudderless since, and it took a man as cantankerous and as dogged as Bates to dare to step in and try, for his own sake as much as for Leeds, to mend the broken club.
Irascible as ever as he closes in on 75 years of age, “Batesy”, as Wise publicly called him on Thursday, chipped in with the line that if people don’t like the new management “they can follow somebody else”.
There’s the rub. There is no other club the Leeds supporters can follow, and no other option but to get behind the new team and, as the signature song of Leeds United goes, “march on together”.
When the superlatives were done on Thursday, Wise told the press that his first ruthless act had already taken place on the training ground at Thorpe Arch. He had relieved Paul Butler, the ageing centre back, of the captaincy, and given the armband to the former Luton and Wigan midfielder Kevin Nicholls, a man who, because of injuries, has yet to make any telling impression at Leeds following his arrival from Kenilworth Road in July. “Nicko’s the type that I like,” Wise enthused. “He’s got a bit of bite about him. He’s very aggressive, a leader. I played against him a couple of times and he booted me — and it hurt. He’s a nice fella, he’s what I want.”
You mean, a journalist suggested, he’s like you, a combative spirit? “Thank you,” said Wise, flashing that cheeky-chappie Cockney smile. “The players will find I’m very honest, to the point. I’m not a ranter and raver.
“I suppose I’ve been a bit selfish (leaving Swindon Town after less than four months in charge there), and let down the players there, but I’ve told every one of them that this is a massive, wonderful challenge with a big club and I’d be stupid to turn it down.”
He was asked if he will move the wife and family up to Yorkshire, and said he had discussed that with his family. The plan is that they stay in the south and he gives it as long as is required in Leeds — on a contract that neither Bates nor Wise will specify the length.
Some players, he said, will have to go, some new ones will come in, no different to every new manager at every club. Yet it was different, partly because of the legacy that was all around us in those sepia-toned pictures, partly because of Wise’s own men sharing his inaugural platform. Bates, of course, was central to it. Gus Poyet, the former team-mate of Wise who was at home in Uruguay when he got a call “out of the blue” from Dennis last July asking if he fancied joining him as assistant manager and coach at Swindon. “And now, in just three months, we’re here at this big club,” said Poyet. “It’s unbelievable.”
Completing the platform quartet, and again a former Chelsea blue, was Gwyn Williams. After 27 years at the Bridge, working every job from scout to assistant to such first-time managers as Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli, and such imported managers as Claudio Ranieri, Williams had seen the entire Bates era from the reputed £1 purchase of the indebted Chelsea to the £17m Bates personally received when Roman Abramovich took over.
Bates took the money, but couldn’t live a tax exile’s tranquillity in Monaco without the angst of football. And it was Williams, the observer of all things at Chelsea, who in the summer left Stamford Bridge and shortly afterwards accepted the task of rebuilding the playing side, from apprentices to Bosman-type transfers, at Leeds.
“It is,” he said on Thursday, “very much like Chelsea all over again.” He had started there as youth development officer under Geoff Hurst in 1979, and one of his first tasks at Leeds is to try to help Bates recover compensation for youth players lured from Leeds to Chelski. Williams has observed every one of 11 managers’ first days at Chelsea, from Hurst to Jose Mourinho, and helped foreigners from every part of the globe to settle into English football. So when he says that there was something impressively direct about Wise’s first training session at Leeds, something he describes in a single word, “management”, there speaks a man who knows what it takes to survive tough times in football, and harsh times under Bates.
After the chairman called time on the mass media conference, it was Williams who drove Wise to the hotel that will be his home from home. And it had been Williams, often the silent witness of all that has gone on at Chelsea’s transformation, who mostly watched and listened as the hot air was dispensed from the top table on Thursday.
“He’s a Rottweiler, that one,” Williams said more than once afterwards, using the term to suggest that this club, with its antipathy to all things Chelsea and with its mistrust of outsiders, will need the most tenacious of wills to conquer.
Meanwhile, for the media, Bates was giving out the descriptive words he thinks sums up his newest team manager. “He’s tough, a leader, a motivator, a winner,” said Bates. “Need any more?” There is, though both men seek to play it down, an affinity between Wise and Bates — a closeness that might compare to the old Leeds days when Manny Cousins was chairman, Don Revie a first-time manager, and Billy Bremner the heart of a team that possessed far greater talents than are remotely available today.
“I don’t think personal (friendship) comes into it,” insisted Wise when asked if the fact that Bates was godfather to one of his children would spare him the sack. “I know that one day it will happen, but Batesy will still be godfather to my son. There’s a working relationship, and I trust him. If I do the job right, I won’t get the sack, if I don’t, I will, simple as that.”
Bates said nothing, but Poyet had an observation. “You ask if Dennis would have come for any other chairman,” he said. “Do you think anyone else would offer him a job like this?”
Leeds 2 Southend 0: Leeds show their teeth
Duncan Castles at Elland Road
Leeds came into this match in relegation form, having shipped 18 goals while losing their last five matches. Logically they should possibly have lost Dennis Wise’s first match in charge too, since it was against the same side who had beaten Leeds here during the week. But Wise relishes challenges and he rose to this one.
The win came from late goals in each half, from Ian Moore and Robbie Blake, large draughts of perspiration, and a fair degree of fortune in resisting Southend’s second-half dominance. Wise, though, had been flown in to end a miserable run, and that he did. Never shy about making an impact, his first move at Elland Road had been to appoint Kevin Nicholls captain, principally because the midfielder was brave enough to give him a kicking last time they played each other.
“I want nastiness and togetherness,” said Wise, who also wanted to send a message out to an ageing and lately truculent squad.
Having lost the captaincy to a man recovering from knee surgery, Paul Butler is one of a number of players on the cusp of losing their jobs. A new club has been sought for Sean Gregan, borrowed goalkeeper Tony Warner may return to his old one, while Steve Stone is to be paid off. The signals were there long before Wise agreed to leave League Two Swindon, chairman Ken Bates unfavourably comparing his playing staff to excrement after one recent reverse.
Wise has been too canny to comment publicly on that analysis, but there were changes to the Leeds team that had granted Southend progress to the fourth round of the League Cup for the first time in the club’s history five days previously.
Graham Stack came in at goalkeeper, Eddie Lewis dropped to left-back to accommodate Adam Johnson, while Richard Cresswell was added as a second striker.
Soon Leeds were turning the screw with Johnson stretching his marker to send in crosses and a long-range drive that just failed to produce goals. On the other wing, Luke Moore was a persistent threat, one long, cross-field dribble almost teeing up David Healy. Southend’s central defenders were working double shifts to keep the Northern Irishman and Cresswell at bay.
Less clever for Leeds was the right side of defence, where Gary Kelly insisted on tucking in so tight to the beefy Butler that Southend were left freedom to roam.
Freddy Eastwood gratefully accepted it and was a deft Matthew Kilgallon interception away from laying on a Luke Gutteridge opener. Instead the first goal came from Moore, courtesy of a 40-yard Lewis pass that set him free down the centre of the park. The converted forward strode on, drew Darryl Flahavan from his line, and calmly clipped over the goalkeeper.
The Lion Sleeps Tonight was Bates’ curious choice of interval music, but his predators appeared to be rousing nicely as Cresswell nearly doubled Leeds’ advantage after the restart.
Southend, though, were also awakening, with Peter Clarke placing one header over the bar and seeing another touched away by Stack.
With home fitness visibly fading, Eastwood almost caught the keeper out with a low drive, but it was Leeds who were to score again, Blake’s spiralling free kick granting them a flattering margin of victory.
Star Man: Eddie Lewis (Leeds)
Player Ratings: Leeds: Stack 7, Kelly 6, Butler 6, Kilgallon 7, Lewis 7, Moore 7 (Richardson 61min, 71), Douglas 5, Derry 6, Johnson 6 (Westlake 87min, 6), Healy 6 (Blake 80min, 7), Cresswell 6.
Southend: Flahavan 6, Hunt 6, Sodje 7, Barrett 7, Hammell 7, Gutteridge 6 (Campbell-Rice 78min, 6), Clarke 6, Maher 6, Gower 6, Hooper 5 (Harrold 72min, 6), Eastwood 7
Blues strike £5m Leeds deal
Duncan Castles
Chelsea reach out-of-court settlement to avoid action over poaching
CHELSEA have avoided being found guilty of illegally approaching three Leeds United youth players by reportedly offering £5m in compensation for the two who ultimately moved to Stamford Bridge. Leeds had obtained mobile phone records of Chelsea communications with Daniel Rose, Tom Taiwo and Michael Woods last season while they were attached to the Leeds academy. Taiwo and Woods moved to Chelsea without transfer fees being agreed.
A joint Premier League and FA investigation into the affair ended on Friday when the bodies let Leeds withdraw their complaint. Last night, Chelsea denied that the compensation, which is understood to involved staged payments, was as much as £5m, and were keen to emphasise strongly that there had been no admission of liability.
A joint FA and League statement read: “Leeds has withdrawn their complaint and the Premier League has been advised by both clubs that any claims and litigation arising out of any alleged improper approach have been settled.
“Chelsea have undertaken to conduct an internal review of policies and procedures in relation to the recruitment of players, take steps to rectify any shortcomings . . . and develop their own code of conduct.”
Leeds’s phone evidence came from Chelsea scout Gary Worthington, who spent five years at Leeds before moving to his new job in July 2005. He is understood to have signed a severance agreement with Leeds in which he promised not to recruit any of his former charges for 18 months.
But it is believed he continued to use his Leeds mobile number, contacting Taiwo and Woods before they signed with Chelsea, who denied making an illegal approach and initially offered Leeds £200,000 each for the players. Leeds will use the compensation to fund an overhaul of their first-team squad in January.
Wise words not enough
Rob Hughes
Wise must do more than promise grit if he is to win the hearts and minds of Leeds fans
Whoever is writing the script for Dennis Wise and Ken Bates at Leeds United has a lot to learn about the club, the city, and the real meaning of what it would take to earn the respect, never mind the affection, of a one-club, one-eyed Yorkshire football community.
On Thursday, the official unveiling of the 15th manager appointed in the 32 years since Don Revie left the club, they walked Wise past the bronze statue of Billy Bremner. They presented him in the Bremner Suite, where black and white photographs of the former captain hang like old and faded memories.
And when Wise, the street-smart Londoner, was asked to set out his stall for the new Leeds United era, he took a direct line to the past. “I told the players I want them to be a bit like the Leeds of before who were . . .” He searched the walls for a word. One came. “Well, ’orrible. I want a bit of nastiness, like they used to have here.”
Bates, the chairman who had employed Wise as the grit in his Chelsea teams, barely suppressed a smile. For Bates, now investing some of his Chelsea payoff in trying to exhume Leeds, the analogy Wise was trying to pull off is doubtless a real memory.
You have to be older than Wise’s 39 years actually to recall wee Billy Bremner. You need to read Michael Parkinson’s cutting phrase in this newspaper more than 40 years ago to picture Bremner, the fiery captain of the old Leeds, as “10st of barbed wire”.
Ten stone was a bit on the generous side for Bremner, just as it would be for Wise. They were diminutive warriors of the field, the “poison dwarves” of combative football. Yet getting to know Bremner after his 16 years of sheer perseverance in Leeds’s white was to discover a mellow man of almost secretive, charitable deeds.
He once went Awol from a Revie training session, took his punishment, and never explained to the boss that he had answered a knock on his door that morning and instinctively gone with a mother to visit her daughter, who was in a coma.
“It makes you seem so soft,” he later confided, “and you didn’t want to show that side to anybody in the game, did you?” The hope of the mother was that the voice of Bremner, already then synonymous with the coarse side of Leeds’s football, would bring her daughter to life. It didn’t, but he tried.
And the point is that, all these years on and long after Billy himself had passed away following a heart attack, identifying the new manager with the old skipper simply by alluding to “nastiness” will not begin to restore what Leeds have long lost.
Better men have perished in the process of trying. Brian Clough followed Revie in 1974, and lasted 44 days before a player rebellion got him the sack. Jock Stein came, saw, and retreated sharply back to Scotland. And like skittles, a succession of some of the British Isles’s most capable managers walked the ghostly corridors of Elland Road. Not all of them failed. Howard Wilkinson, with his chairman Leslie Silver and his captain Gordon Strachan, revived the past and won the title back in 1992, with a team containing the likes of Gary McAllister, David Batty, Gary Speed, Lee Chapman and Eric Cantona. George Graham built up a tough platform from which David O’Leary briefly prospered until he and his gullible chairman Peter Ridsdale overdid the spending and took Leeds as close as any major club in modern times has come to liquidation.
It has floundered rudderless since, and it took a man as cantankerous and as dogged as Bates to dare to step in and try, for his own sake as much as for Leeds, to mend the broken club.
Irascible as ever as he closes in on 75 years of age, “Batesy”, as Wise publicly called him on Thursday, chipped in with the line that if people don’t like the new management “they can follow somebody else”.
There’s the rub. There is no other club the Leeds supporters can follow, and no other option but to get behind the new team and, as the signature song of Leeds United goes, “march on together”.
When the superlatives were done on Thursday, Wise told the press that his first ruthless act had already taken place on the training ground at Thorpe Arch. He had relieved Paul Butler, the ageing centre back, of the captaincy, and given the armband to the former Luton and Wigan midfielder Kevin Nicholls, a man who, because of injuries, has yet to make any telling impression at Leeds following his arrival from Kenilworth Road in July. “Nicko’s the type that I like,” Wise enthused. “He’s got a bit of bite about him. He’s very aggressive, a leader. I played against him a couple of times and he booted me — and it hurt. He’s a nice fella, he’s what I want.”
You mean, a journalist suggested, he’s like you, a combative spirit? “Thank you,” said Wise, flashing that cheeky-chappie Cockney smile. “The players will find I’m very honest, to the point. I’m not a ranter and raver.
“I suppose I’ve been a bit selfish (leaving Swindon Town after less than four months in charge there), and let down the players there, but I’ve told every one of them that this is a massive, wonderful challenge with a big club and I’d be stupid to turn it down.”
He was asked if he will move the wife and family up to Yorkshire, and said he had discussed that with his family. The plan is that they stay in the south and he gives it as long as is required in Leeds — on a contract that neither Bates nor Wise will specify the length.
Some players, he said, will have to go, some new ones will come in, no different to every new manager at every club. Yet it was different, partly because of the legacy that was all around us in those sepia-toned pictures, partly because of Wise’s own men sharing his inaugural platform. Bates, of course, was central to it. Gus Poyet, the former team-mate of Wise who was at home in Uruguay when he got a call “out of the blue” from Dennis last July asking if he fancied joining him as assistant manager and coach at Swindon. “And now, in just three months, we’re here at this big club,” said Poyet. “It’s unbelievable.”
Completing the platform quartet, and again a former Chelsea blue, was Gwyn Williams. After 27 years at the Bridge, working every job from scout to assistant to such first-time managers as Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli, and such imported managers as Claudio Ranieri, Williams had seen the entire Bates era from the reputed £1 purchase of the indebted Chelsea to the £17m Bates personally received when Roman Abramovich took over.
Bates took the money, but couldn’t live a tax exile’s tranquillity in Monaco without the angst of football. And it was Williams, the observer of all things at Chelsea, who in the summer left Stamford Bridge and shortly afterwards accepted the task of rebuilding the playing side, from apprentices to Bosman-type transfers, at Leeds.
“It is,” he said on Thursday, “very much like Chelsea all over again.” He had started there as youth development officer under Geoff Hurst in 1979, and one of his first tasks at Leeds is to try to help Bates recover compensation for youth players lured from Leeds to Chelski. Williams has observed every one of 11 managers’ first days at Chelsea, from Hurst to Jose Mourinho, and helped foreigners from every part of the globe to settle into English football. So when he says that there was something impressively direct about Wise’s first training session at Leeds, something he describes in a single word, “management”, there speaks a man who knows what it takes to survive tough times in football, and harsh times under Bates.
After the chairman called time on the mass media conference, it was Williams who drove Wise to the hotel that will be his home from home. And it had been Williams, often the silent witness of all that has gone on at Chelsea’s transformation, who mostly watched and listened as the hot air was dispensed from the top table on Thursday.
“He’s a Rottweiler, that one,” Williams said more than once afterwards, using the term to suggest that this club, with its antipathy to all things Chelsea and with its mistrust of outsiders, will need the most tenacious of wills to conquer.
Meanwhile, for the media, Bates was giving out the descriptive words he thinks sums up his newest team manager. “He’s tough, a leader, a motivator, a winner,” said Bates. “Need any more?” There is, though both men seek to play it down, an affinity between Wise and Bates — a closeness that might compare to the old Leeds days when Manny Cousins was chairman, Don Revie a first-time manager, and Billy Bremner the heart of a team that possessed far greater talents than are remotely available today.
“I don’t think personal (friendship) comes into it,” insisted Wise when asked if the fact that Bates was godfather to one of his children would spare him the sack. “I know that one day it will happen, but Batesy will still be godfather to my son. There’s a working relationship, and I trust him. If I do the job right, I won’t get the sack, if I don’t, I will, simple as that.”
Bates said nothing, but Poyet had an observation. “You ask if Dennis would have come for any other chairman,” he said. “Do you think anyone else would offer him a job like this?”
