No surprise - we are fated to lose, after all - 25/5/08
Rick Broadbent in Beijing
It was surely fate that Kaiser Chiefs played their homecoming gig at Elland Road the night before Leeds played Wembley. In the past, Leeds has not done bands. The musical benchmark was always the Wedding Present, an angsty group of moderately ugly men in black. They sang songs about girlfriend trouble because they were from Leeds and so they could not get girlfriends. But this was to be a musical and football bonanza, the rebirth of the culturally deprived.
It was fate that the amps on Saturday night were emblazoned with LUFC and the first song was Everything Is Average Nowadays. The second was Every Day I Love You Less And Less. This was sporting history set to jangly guitar music.
You’ll have noticed that everyone’s been harping on about fate this week, blurring the boundaries between genius, serendipity and John Terry’s inability to stand up. And, let’s face it, if fate really had much to do with football, I would not have been in Beijing yesterday and I would also have found a decent site to deliver live pictures to my laptop. My mum texted me from holiday in Cyprus and offered to keep me up to date, albeit the Turkish waiter was having trouble with his aerial. That’s football, it’s a global game when it wants to be.
Eventually, I did find a site, possibly illegal and definitely expensive, and started to read the messages fans were posting next to the tiny screen. Someone said he was looking for porn and, although Garry Birtles mentioned something about flicking things through your legs in dangerous areas, I feel the poster had missed the point of the play-offs.
I lost the screen at half-time and, when it reappeared, Doncaster had scored in cyberspace. The commentators succumbed to emotion and said it was fully deserved, but it was their first shot on target. How bad did that make us?
I expect nothing less. It is fate, after all. Manchester United are fated to win and we are fated to lose. We get kicked in the teeth by pious pundits. We are dirty Leeds. It was interesting that, during the Champions League knees-up, Jamie Redknapp said that Paul Scholes was a dirty player. Roy Keane had told him. Those who thought Scholes was merely a bad tackler underestimated his nasty streak, Redknapp said. But Scholes is fêted and we are fated.
So Doncaster can sit alongside the other sides we have lost to on our big days – Watford, Aston Villa, Sunderland. When we lost to Watford, Neil Sullivan, our goalkeeper, scored an own goal. Yesterday he did not put a foot wrong but was, alas, playing for Doncaster. Now that’s fate.
We are Leeds and we were born under a bad sign. We won’t pretend that any of it reveals anything about mankind or that future generations will learn invaluable lessons from this. No fuss. No glory. No 15 points. As the Kaiser Chiefs so pithily put it, na na na na naa.
Yorkshire Evening Post
Leeds United suffer Wembley heartache
Leeds United 0 Doncaster Rovers 1
There is a train of footballing wisdom which says winning a play-off final is more fulfilling than finishing second and gaining automatic promotion. Doncaster Rovers would not argue with that.
Demoted to third place in League One on the last day of this season the South Yorkshire club were compensated yesterday by a fixture at Wembley which for them will be eternally memorable.
Doncaster chanced their arm this month but few among Rovers support will look back at their defeat to Cheltenham Town on May 3 – a defeat which conspired to send Nottingham Forest into the Championship ahead of them – with any form of regret. If the scenario which befell Rovers this season was made in the heaven, however, the reality for Leeds United was made in hell.
There are few more excruciating positions than being a losing play-off finalist, and especially when a club's heart, mind and plain statistical record tells them that by rights they should in fact have finished second.
That warped situation was home to Leeds today, the epitome of a wilderness where positive fate has deserted the League One club who needed and earned it most. Meant to be this season it so nearly was, yet once again so near was so far. We have, sadly, been here before.The ghosts of Cardiff and 2006 have never been truly exorcised from Elland Road, and the cuts created by United's loss to Watford at the Millennium Stadium ran deep.
Relegation and insolvency were the ultimate price of that rain-sodden day in Wales but it is reasonable to assume that the fall-out from Doncaster's win in League One's play-off final will be far less severe at Elland Road.
Freed of what were crippling debts and apparently blessed with reliable foundations, United's failure to master a talented and deserving Doncaster team ought not be catastrophic, as horrendous as the result feels today.
With the luxury of a fair playing field next season, and with the hindrance of a brutal points deduction, Gary McAllister will return to pre-season training on July 4 with a spring in his step and steel in his eyes. It will, though, be many years before Leeds are happy to stake an entire season on one game at a national stadium, in Wales, England or anywhere else.
Yesterday's defeat requires a post-mortem and McAllister will spend weeks digesting its implications, but the narrow loss also demands perspective.
The nine months behind Leeds have been a story of resilience, passion and bloody-minded desire, and their players have rekindled many of the valued traits – pride, bravery and ambition – which were sorely missing from Elland Road for several seasons.
Their attitude has been worthy of the respect of their supporters, which is never given easily in the city of Leeds. All the story lacked was a fitting ending. A goal from James Hayter early in the second half – as soft a strike as Leeds will concede under McAllister – finally laid low a team who have forced to accept defeat at last.
McAllister knew the extent of the fever sweeping through Leeds before yesterday's final, so much so that he and his squad slipped quietly out of Yorkshire on Wednesday to relocate to their base in Hertfordshire and purposely detach themselves from the intensity of an expectant city.
But the enormity of League One's showpiece was impossible to escape once the sweeping arch of Wembley became visible from the team's bus. Inside the overpowering stadium, the stands devoted to Leeds swam with an unbroken dusting of yellow and white, a striking contrast to the swathes of empty seats visible among Rovers' supporters.
Evidence of the fight for tickets that McAllister's players left behind them at Elland Road was provided vividly by three pockets of United's followers in the southern reaches of Wembley, the area which had in theory been reserved for those travelling from South Yorkshire.
The allocation of tickets given to Leeds by the Football League sold out on Wednesday afternoon, but United's fans are nothing if not resourceful. Turned away from Elland Road, hundreds simply re-routed to Doncaster's ticket office to ensure their attendance in London yesterday. When a club has endured the torment that Leeds United have, it does not do to miss the day when redemption is said to be at hand.
Over the past four years, Leeds have been kicked in the teeth with more regularity than a front-row forward. English football has not been their friend for a long time, and long before the Football League weighed in with a less-than-subtle kick of their own. The 15-point deduction imposed on United by the Football League – the albatross that Leeds have carried since August 3 – seems as nauseating today as ever it has, a sensation increased by the undeniable influence the penalty has exerted on United's standing.
Lord Brian Mawhinney, the Football League's chairman, was presented to both teams before kick-off, drawing fierce cat-calls from United's supporters but polite handshakes from the club's players. If by now they are tired of thinking about the involvement of his organisation in their campaign and their careers, that fatigue is understandable.
In seasons to come, it is to be hoped that United's time under the Football League's banner will cease completely via their reintroduction to the Premiership. That, unfortunately, is a thought for another day and another season.
Doncaster carried the play-off trophy out of Wembley last night, and it is only fair to acknowledge that the more impressive team on the final day of the season walked away with the winners' medals and the beaming smiles.
The 1-0 defeat was not a conclusive loss on the scale of United's capitulation to Watford two years ago, but Leeds fell below their peak at Wembley and failed to replicate the confident dominance which underpinned their brilliant victory over Carlisle United in the play-off semi-finals.
McAllister did not alter his line-up and was justified in giving the Brunton Park XI their chance at England's national stadium, but Doncaster had the game by the throat after 10 minutes, a period in which the platform of their victory was built.
Casper Ankergren dug United out of trouble on two occasions, timing dives perfectly twice in quick succession to claw the ball away from the feet of Hayter and James Coppinger, and Jason Price's shot which deflected over the crossbar in the seventh minute was a narrower miss than it looked.
United's strikeforce of Jermaine Beckford and Dougie Freedman found useful possession difficult to come by, and Beckford's only effort of the first half was gathered easily on the ground by ex-United goalkeeper Neil Sullivan.
Jonathan Howson went closer with a shot a minute before the break which curled over the crossbar by a matter of inches, but as useful as the interval may have been to McAllister, his words had had no time to register when Doncaster claimed the opening goal.
Brian Stock dropped a corner into the heart of Ankergren's box where hesitant marking from Howson allowed Hayter to charge towards goal and plant a header between United's goalkeeper and Neil Kilkenny, who were attempting in vain to guard the goalline.
The sections of Wembley filled by Doncaster's supporters were flushed with euphoria as silence gripped the other end of the stadium, quiet spreading among fans who feared a repeat of Cardiff was suddenly imminent.
United's players were alive to the seriousness of their position, and threw themselves at Doncaster with more energy than precision.
Sullivan saved a low shot from Beckford and then saw another effort from the striker fly straight into his arms, and Howson's deflected shot skipped over the crossbar. But it was not until the 87th minute that Sullivan was required to trust to luck.
A throw-in from Frazer Richardson deflected through Doncaster's box to Jonathan Douglas, who drove a fierce volley a foot to the right of Sullivan's left-hand post with Rovers' veteran keeper unable to intervene. It was the chance that Leeds had yearned for, but a chance which went begging.
No other team deals in late goals with the prolific style of Leeds United, but their pool appeared to have run dry during the drama of their semi-final against Carlisle. There was no injury-time equaliser, and no reprieve; only the sound of Andy D'Urso's whistle confirming that a campaign like no other had ended in a manner with which Leeds are horribly familiar.
At Brunton Park on May 15, promotion appeared to be fated; it seemed to be the prize that Leeds above all others deserved to receive.
That feeling did not subside yesterday, and it will not leave the players who have the summer to reflect on how cruel a sport football can be. But there is no shame in their defeat. At Wembley, McAllister's squad fell short; over nine months, they have been giants among footballing men.
