Leeds United fans still marching on together – but the jury remains out over the arrival of Massimo Cellino - Telegraph 15/4/14

Leeds supporters have seen it all over the years and are now buckling up for the latest ride under a new, unpredictable owner
By Rob Bagchi
In the late Sixties when George Graham had a more mischievous, happy-go-lucky side, his irritation at his team-mates’ protracted post-match tactical dissections was routinely encapsulated by his exasperated plea to “put the ball away”.
As a former Leeds United manager, he will recognise that the club have effectively heeded his injunction for the past 11 years.
From the moment that Jonathan Woodgate was sold to Newcastle United in January 2003 and the full extent of Peter Ridsdale’s ruinous profligacy became too pressing to gloss over with mollifying corporate flannel, to the overturning of the Football League’s block on Massimo Cellino’s takeover 10 days ago, football has been the least of Leeds’s concerns.
Don Revie once said that “Leeds United is a lump of ground – it’s the team that matters”, but for the past decade they have amounted to little more than two tenancy agreements, the loyalty of a large and defiant fan base and a strategy defined by such short-termism that 33 players were brought in on loan during Simon Grayson’s 37 months as manager.
Look at the boardroom cast list over the period – Ridsdale, Professor John McKenzie, Gerald Krasner, Simon Morris, Ken Bates, David Haigh and Salem Patel – and it is not difficult to see that, in a contrasting way to Barcelona, Leeds became more than a club: not so much a saga as a Hammer Films production of Howard’s Way replete with blood on the carpet, rented goldfish, pastel-shirted PR consultants, unusual dentistry, an octogenarian who mistook bluntness and invective for candour and the latest allegation, surveillance equipment in executive lavatories.
As fans we used to talk about history and tradition, goals, formations, the potential for fun or wallow ruefully in misery. Now we practise eternal vigilance, attempting to divine the meaning of official statements that bear the hallmarks of spin.
We have had to teach ourselves the rudiments of accountancy to understand the books, boggle our minds trying to piece together offshore ownership arrangements, delve into Italian civil and criminal law and trawl Middle-Eastern financial newswires trying to get some information when formerly garrulous board members clam up at the first sign of strife.
Gone are the days of clubs run by successful hauliers, furniture tycoons and paint magnates and anyone who remembers some of the high-handedness of the belligerent butcher Bob Lord, “the Khrushchev of Burnley” in Arthur Hopcraft’s pithy phrase, will shed few tears for their passing.
Yet what we were supposed to get with professional management, openness and “customer focus” is an illusion that evaporates when the good times end.
Under GFH Capital, Leeds may have modernised their presence on Facebook and Twitter but simply being there and issuing glib maxims about pulling together is no substitute for proper engagement.
It is not only at Elland Road that communication has been positively North Korean; try getting a word out of the Glazers. Indeed Aston Villa’s Randy Lerner rarely speaks anymore, Newcastle’s Mike Ashley has been tight-lipped for years while “Silent” Stan Kroenke at Arsenal is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Chief Bromden – he can talk but chooses not to.
Little wonder then that Leeds fans have largely embraced Cellino, at least since the night he sacked Brian McDermott and was blockaded in the car park by scores of supporters.
His actions subsequently have been commendable and rare at Elland Road for a number of years, using his own money to bail the club out of imminent danger.
Ridsdale once had Max Clifford on the payroll to manage the club’s and his image and anyone who had dealings with the GFH Capital regime knows about the people engaged to work on the principals’ profiles.
The daft thing is that none of them could have come up with such a successful PR ruse as Cellino’s encounter with a supporter turned phonejacker who broadcast his amusing diatribe of complaints and captured the apparent sincerity of his ardour for the club.
That passion and his resources seem for many to have pardoned all his previous transgressions as facts such as convictions, contempt for supporters at his Serie A club Cagliari and his serial sacking of managers become debating points and technicalities.
One phrase keeps being repeated on fans’ forums – “buckle up for the ride”.
But some of us have been rescued too often to be anything other than cautious, finding in the past that frying pan has led to fire, purgatory to the Inferno.
Optimism and scepticism make strange bedfellows but until we can be saved from the need for saviours, until we can get the ball out again, they will just have to rub along in a restless alliance.

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