Leedsunited.com 25/1/10
MAX IS MAD FOR A FUTURE AT LEEDS
New signing Max Gradel says his permanent switch to Leeds is a dream come to true.
The former Leicester City winger signed a two-and-a-half year contract with Leeds on Monday and will go straight into the squad for Tuesday's trip to Swindon Town.
Max had already made 16 appearances as a loan man, but was delighted to secure a full-time switch to the club.
"It's a dream come to true," said Max. "I''m really excited to join a big club like this. I really can't believe I'm a Leeds player now.
"I just want to pull on the shirt again and help Leeds get where the club should be.
"It's a very big club with the fans and I just wanted be here and be one of the manager's players so I am very happy.
"I'm thankful to the club and the manager for believing in me and for wanting me to come. The manager has done everything he can to get me here.
"The fans have been brilliant as well. I like to play and I'm glad they like that."
The club announced moments before the kick-off of Saturday's FA Cup tie at Tottenham that a fee had been agreed with Leicester subject to the player passing a medical.
Max was a spectator on Saturday and because he wasn't available for the original game he won't be eligible to play in the Elland Road replay on Wednesday week.
"I watched the game on TV and before they announced a fee was agreed," said Max.
"I felt like a Leeds player even though I wasn't there and I thought they put in a lot of effort to get what was a great result.
"I found out today I won't be able to play in the replay, but I hope we can get as far as we can because I'd like to be involved in the next round."
While Max has featured prominently so far this season for Leeds, the majority of his appearances have come as a substitute.
The winger is now targeting a starting place in Simon Grayson's line-up as he looks to help his new club win promotion.
"I haven't started a lot of games this season and I wasn't fit when I first came here," he explained.
"When you're on loan the manager wants to play his players, but I'm one of his now and I'm a lot fitter so hopefully I will start more games.
"Every game is very important now because it feels like Charlton and Norwich are catching us up so we have to win games.
"I want to do everything I can to help us get promoted. We want to finish as champions because of the work we have put in."
BBC 24/1/10
Leeds United sign Max Gradel from Leicester City
Leeds United have completed the signing of Max Gradel from Leicester City.
The Ivorian winger has signed a two-and-a-half-year deal at Elland Road after a three-month loan spell at the club that saw him score three goals.
The 22-year-old had made just one substitute appearance for the Foxes this season and handed in a transfer request last week.
Leeds boss Simon Grayson told BBC Radio Leeds:"He is a joy to work with, enthusiastic and always with a smile."
Gradel became an instant hit with Leeds fans with some explosive performances as substitute after moving to Elland Road on an original one-month deal in October.
"He's a good player and has brought a lot to this club," added Grayson.
"When he's started games he's scored goals and set them up, and when he comes off the bench he is always lively.
"The crowd have taken to him from day one and he is probably the only player I've signed that after seeing him for just 10 minutes everyone wants me to sign him up full time."
Observer 24/1/10
Jermaine Beckford marks the end of Leeds United's goldfish years
With their striker the star of this year's FA Cup, the Elland Road club have finally shed their traumatic history
Leeds are a club much copied. They built a debt mountain long before Portsmouth, Newcastle or
West Ham, pioneering the suicidal wage bill and lunatic transfer budget for others to emulate. After the reckoning has come the rise, as if they exist these days to provide hope for clubs who endure near-death experiences.
But there is more to them than that, as they demonstrated by confronting Tottenham's aristocratic pretensions face on and earning a replay through Jermaine Beckford's penalty in added time, his second contribution in a thrilling tie. Their fans are as truculent as ever and the old fighting spirit of the 1970s has returned to erase the gauchness of the Peter Ridsdale years. The League One promotion race is their real battleground, but the FA Cup has quickened the pace of self-recovery. Beckford, who has scored against Manchester United and Spurs in successive rounds, has used the competition as a personal finishing school.
The third-round victory over United at Old Trafford was the real attention-grabber, but this is close behind. Those who occasionally look farther down the list of 92 professional clubs than the Premier League's top four already knew Leeds were calling the shots in League One. But the victory over England's champions altered the dynamic in a partly unhelpful way. Until Beckford outran Wes Brown to hustle United out, Leeds could play the Phoenix role, plotting a way back up through the divisions. By the time they reached north London, though, Norwich were on their tails at the top of the table and the nation was tuning in expecting another prime-time upset.
That was seldom on the cards here, but how Spurs will dread the rematch at Elland Road. Two of the top six defences in the English game have now failed to cope with Beckford, a former Chelsea trainee who dropped all the way to Wealdstone to restart a stalled career. In modern football no one expects a young striker to be able to fall so far off the chart and still make a name for himself as Beckford has. This is a big torch to carry. It lights the way for hundreds of other youngsters discarded by Premier League academies. If he carries on this way, he can look higher than Newcastle United, his most likely destination in this transfer window before he elected to stick with Leeds for the rest of this campaign.
Beckford is the individual billboard star of this year's FA Cup and Leeds are the big romantic tale in a competition that squeals for our attention in a schedule crammed with Premier League and Champions League drama.
The Yorkshire revival is back on course. A draw and two defeats since the Old Trafford ram-raid had broken a sequence of 17 games unbeaten. Coincidence? A fair extrapolation is that the third-round win interfered with the team's ascent. Cup runs often work as a distraction for clubs bent on promotion. Mischievously, some of us wondered whether Simon Grayson's men motored to White Hart Lane thinking the best result would be a hiding.
If so they hid it well, as an early Tottenham onslaught subsided, and the 4,500 travelling fans proclaimed a first-half counter-surge after a torrid opening chapter. "We're not famous any more," sang the Leeds throng, subverting a chant many opposing crowds have tried to tickle them with since they plunged from a Champions League semi-final in 2001 to a league housing Yeovil and Leyton Orient.
Unlike United, Spurs saw the upstarts coming. Forewarned, by the Manchester miracle, Tottenham were in threat-elimination mode. Leeds assumed the Alamo pose. Grace under pressure was impossible. Patrick Kisnorbo's head, bandaged from the start, was emblematic of their defiance.
After 25 minutes of north London bullying, though, Leeds decided it was time to explore the other half of the pitch, and Beckford twice forced gymnastic reactions from Heurelho Gomes. No longer in command, Tottenham's millionaires knew they would have to grapple. Premier League players are meant to be softer nowadays, but they all carry memories of when football was always feisty (in their pre-professional years) and Harry Redknapp's team welcomed the chance to play old-school Cup football. Jermaine Jenas might as well have been reading a book when Leeds first equalised, but otherwise Spurs applied themselves valiantly. Even Roman Pavlyuchenko, he of the languid air, recognised the urgency of Tottenham's position, restoring his team's lead. But still to come was Beckford's meatily executed penalty.
In an interview with the Yorkshire Post last week, Ken Bates recalled being wheeled out as the new chairman five years ago by Gerald Krasner, who asked: "Do you want to shake hands for the photographers?" Bates replied: "Not now I've seen the books."
Leeds were losing £120,000 a week and were practically wearing the taxman like a rash. "The finances were completely out of control," Bates recalled on Friday. Now, the average gate is 25,000 and the club filed a £4.5million profit last season.
The assumption that Leeds will glide straight through the Championship next season is flawed, because they have achieved the current rebirth without risking a repeat of the luxury goldfish years. Run prudently, they will encounter one of football's deepest mysteries: how do teams escape a division where a kind of communism applies? Most teams are equal, and most can beat any other on any Saturday.
But that's another mission. First Leeds needed to regain their self-respect, their identity. The twinkly team of the David O'Leary years has retreated into a kind of infamy. This one is an older diagram of machismo, with touches of prettiness. You look at Leeds now and no longer see a history of trauma. You see a replay and Beckford writing his name across the sky.
Telegraph 23/1/10
Leeds United on the march with the wily Simon Grayson
The fairytale of the FA Cup run continues, the story of Leeds United’s stirring revival under Simon Grayson gains another remarkable chapter.
By Henry Winter
Saturday was a famous draw, a result rooted in Leeds players’ never-say-die attitude under
Grayson, whose deployment of the outstanding Robert Snodgrass in the hole proved a tactical masterstroke.
No wonder Leeds fans never stopped chanting. Grayson has got the whole club marching on together, his reputation as one of the game’s most promising managers again enhanced by the Cup.
Having masterminded the shock of the third round, the knockout blow landed on the distinguished chin of Manchester United, Grayson had once again set another Premier League side an unexpected challenge.
“Are you watching Manchester?’’ chanted the 5,000 Leeds supporters, many of them stripped to the waist.
Once again, Leeds’ mood had been excellent, brimming with defiance and belief. Despite recent travails in League One, Grayson is proving a master at motivation, a trait seen in his successful time reviving Blackpool’s fortunes.
Leeds may be short of technique in certain areas, but they lack nothing in effort. The bandage around Patrick Kisnorbo’s head is an emblem of their commitment to the cause. Their refusal to give up was another magical moment in this Cup season.
From first minute to the last second of added time, Leeds gave everything. During the opening storm whipped up by Jermain Defoe, Kisnorbo and the rest of Grayson’s players stood firm.
The team spirit, the bond of togetherness that Grayson has in his dressing room, was clear in the way Kisnorbo threw himself in the way of a thunderous Defoe shot and then Snodgrass blocked a Niko Kranjcar strike.
The hunger was unmistakable in the way Bradley Johnson snapped away at the cultured heels of Kranjcar, muscling the ball off the Croatian midfielder just after the half-hour mark.
The determination of Grayson’s players was exhibited in the reflexes of Casper Ankergren, who summoned up the ghost of Hull City’s Boaz Myhill, haunting Spurs with a series of saves from Defoe’s penalty and two Gareth Bale free-kicks.
Talk about Casper the Unfriendly Ghost. Leeds’ fans loved it, taunting Spurs with a chant of “you’re just a small town in Arsenal’’.
Once again, Grayson’s tactics had been intelligent. Having relied on a 4-4-2 system to win at Old Trafford, Leeds manager used a 4-4-1-1 system here that confused Spurs.
“There’s only one Simon Grayson,’’ chorused the visiting hordes. Without taking his eyes off the game, Grayson gave them an appreciative wave. Leeds fans love the way that Grayson, a schoolboy fan, has given the club its respect back. Wembley may be a distant dream but the Championship isn’t.
Grayson is certainly not afraid of making big decisions, dropping Luciano Becchio and moving Snodgrass from the right flank and into the hole.
Snodgrass, scheming in the no-man’s land between midfield and attack, caused Spurs problems. After forcing Gomes into an athletic save, Snodgrass lifted the ball through to Beckford, who struck a powerful right-footed shot that Gomes parried.
Spurs urgently needed somebody to cut the strings being so expertly pulled by Snodgrass. Redknapp’s centre-halves, Michael Dawson and Sébastien Bassong, did not know whether to stick or twist, to stay close to Beckford or step out to stifle Snodgrass.
Jermaine Jenas, the one slightly defensive player in Spurs midfield, did drop back but Snodgrass was influential all evening. Seven minutes in to the second period, the Scot was surrounded by three Spurs players but still won a vital corner, flicking the ball off Danny Rose.
Snodgrass’ curling corner, and painful hesitation in Spurs defence, allowed Beckford to equalise Peter Crouch’s earlier effort.
Redknapp had to solve the Snodgrass conundrum. Paying Grayson and Leeds a real compliment, the Spurs manager sent on that pedigree dog of war, Wilson Palacios, with instructions to deprive Snodgrass of room.
After 62 minutes, Palacios was fortunate that Alan Wiley, the referee, ignored the midfielder’s foul on Snodgrass. Clear penalty. Not given.
Grayson, standing in the technical area, spotted the infringement, grimaced when Wiley waved play on but refused to moan, quickly rallying his players.
Watching Grayson on the touchline, hearing him drive Leeds on, it is easy to understand why players loved playing for him, why Beckford has withdrawn his transfer request.
Greater riches are on offer elsewhere, like at Everton, but Leeds are worth sticking with.
They are clearly going places under Grayson which is why they could have sold out Saturday’s allocation three times over, why local radio now streams commentaries on the web because of the global interest in Grayson’s team.
To seize the initiative back from Grayson, Redknapp sent on Roman Pavlyuchenko, who promptly scored, but there was late drama when Beckford swept in the equaliser from the spot.
“We’re Leeds, and we’re proud of you,’’ sang the visitors. No wonder. Grayson has got Leeds on the march.
MAX IS MAD FOR A FUTURE AT LEEDS
New signing Max Gradel says his permanent switch to Leeds is a dream come to true.
The former Leicester City winger signed a two-and-a-half year contract with Leeds on Monday and will go straight into the squad for Tuesday's trip to Swindon Town.
Max had already made 16 appearances as a loan man, but was delighted to secure a full-time switch to the club.
"It's a dream come to true," said Max. "I''m really excited to join a big club like this. I really can't believe I'm a Leeds player now.
"I just want to pull on the shirt again and help Leeds get where the club should be.
"It's a very big club with the fans and I just wanted be here and be one of the manager's players so I am very happy.
"I'm thankful to the club and the manager for believing in me and for wanting me to come. The manager has done everything he can to get me here.
"The fans have been brilliant as well. I like to play and I'm glad they like that."
The club announced moments before the kick-off of Saturday's FA Cup tie at Tottenham that a fee had been agreed with Leicester subject to the player passing a medical.
Max was a spectator on Saturday and because he wasn't available for the original game he won't be eligible to play in the Elland Road replay on Wednesday week.
"I watched the game on TV and before they announced a fee was agreed," said Max.
"I felt like a Leeds player even though I wasn't there and I thought they put in a lot of effort to get what was a great result.
"I found out today I won't be able to play in the replay, but I hope we can get as far as we can because I'd like to be involved in the next round."
While Max has featured prominently so far this season for Leeds, the majority of his appearances have come as a substitute.
The winger is now targeting a starting place in Simon Grayson's line-up as he looks to help his new club win promotion.
"I haven't started a lot of games this season and I wasn't fit when I first came here," he explained.
"When you're on loan the manager wants to play his players, but I'm one of his now and I'm a lot fitter so hopefully I will start more games.
"Every game is very important now because it feels like Charlton and Norwich are catching us up so we have to win games.
"I want to do everything I can to help us get promoted. We want to finish as champions because of the work we have put in."
BBC 24/1/10
Leeds United sign Max Gradel from Leicester City
Leeds United have completed the signing of Max Gradel from Leicester City.
The Ivorian winger has signed a two-and-a-half-year deal at Elland Road after a three-month loan spell at the club that saw him score three goals.
The 22-year-old had made just one substitute appearance for the Foxes this season and handed in a transfer request last week.
Leeds boss Simon Grayson told BBC Radio Leeds:"He is a joy to work with, enthusiastic and always with a smile."
Gradel became an instant hit with Leeds fans with some explosive performances as substitute after moving to Elland Road on an original one-month deal in October.
"He's a good player and has brought a lot to this club," added Grayson.
"When he's started games he's scored goals and set them up, and when he comes off the bench he is always lively.
"The crowd have taken to him from day one and he is probably the only player I've signed that after seeing him for just 10 minutes everyone wants me to sign him up full time."
Observer 24/1/10
Jermaine Beckford marks the end of Leeds United's goldfish years
With their striker the star of this year's FA Cup, the Elland Road club have finally shed their traumatic history
Leeds are a club much copied. They built a debt mountain long before Portsmouth, Newcastle or
West Ham, pioneering the suicidal wage bill and lunatic transfer budget for others to emulate. After the reckoning has come the rise, as if they exist these days to provide hope for clubs who endure near-death experiences.But there is more to them than that, as they demonstrated by confronting Tottenham's aristocratic pretensions face on and earning a replay through Jermaine Beckford's penalty in added time, his second contribution in a thrilling tie. Their fans are as truculent as ever and the old fighting spirit of the 1970s has returned to erase the gauchness of the Peter Ridsdale years. The League One promotion race is their real battleground, but the FA Cup has quickened the pace of self-recovery. Beckford, who has scored against Manchester United and Spurs in successive rounds, has used the competition as a personal finishing school.
The third-round victory over United at Old Trafford was the real attention-grabber, but this is close behind. Those who occasionally look farther down the list of 92 professional clubs than the Premier League's top four already knew Leeds were calling the shots in League One. But the victory over England's champions altered the dynamic in a partly unhelpful way. Until Beckford outran Wes Brown to hustle United out, Leeds could play the Phoenix role, plotting a way back up through the divisions. By the time they reached north London, though, Norwich were on their tails at the top of the table and the nation was tuning in expecting another prime-time upset.
That was seldom on the cards here, but how Spurs will dread the rematch at Elland Road. Two of the top six defences in the English game have now failed to cope with Beckford, a former Chelsea trainee who dropped all the way to Wealdstone to restart a stalled career. In modern football no one expects a young striker to be able to fall so far off the chart and still make a name for himself as Beckford has. This is a big torch to carry. It lights the way for hundreds of other youngsters discarded by Premier League academies. If he carries on this way, he can look higher than Newcastle United, his most likely destination in this transfer window before he elected to stick with Leeds for the rest of this campaign.
Beckford is the individual billboard star of this year's FA Cup and Leeds are the big romantic tale in a competition that squeals for our attention in a schedule crammed with Premier League and Champions League drama.
The Yorkshire revival is back on course. A draw and two defeats since the Old Trafford ram-raid had broken a sequence of 17 games unbeaten. Coincidence? A fair extrapolation is that the third-round win interfered with the team's ascent. Cup runs often work as a distraction for clubs bent on promotion. Mischievously, some of us wondered whether Simon Grayson's men motored to White Hart Lane thinking the best result would be a hiding.
If so they hid it well, as an early Tottenham onslaught subsided, and the 4,500 travelling fans proclaimed a first-half counter-surge after a torrid opening chapter. "We're not famous any more," sang the Leeds throng, subverting a chant many opposing crowds have tried to tickle them with since they plunged from a Champions League semi-final in 2001 to a league housing Yeovil and Leyton Orient.
Unlike United, Spurs saw the upstarts coming. Forewarned, by the Manchester miracle, Tottenham were in threat-elimination mode. Leeds assumed the Alamo pose. Grace under pressure was impossible. Patrick Kisnorbo's head, bandaged from the start, was emblematic of their defiance.
After 25 minutes of north London bullying, though, Leeds decided it was time to explore the other half of the pitch, and Beckford twice forced gymnastic reactions from Heurelho Gomes. No longer in command, Tottenham's millionaires knew they would have to grapple. Premier League players are meant to be softer nowadays, but they all carry memories of when football was always feisty (in their pre-professional years) and Harry Redknapp's team welcomed the chance to play old-school Cup football. Jermaine Jenas might as well have been reading a book when Leeds first equalised, but otherwise Spurs applied themselves valiantly. Even Roman Pavlyuchenko, he of the languid air, recognised the urgency of Tottenham's position, restoring his team's lead. But still to come was Beckford's meatily executed penalty.
In an interview with the Yorkshire Post last week, Ken Bates recalled being wheeled out as the new chairman five years ago by Gerald Krasner, who asked: "Do you want to shake hands for the photographers?" Bates replied: "Not now I've seen the books."
Leeds were losing £120,000 a week and were practically wearing the taxman like a rash. "The finances were completely out of control," Bates recalled on Friday. Now, the average gate is 25,000 and the club filed a £4.5million profit last season.
The assumption that Leeds will glide straight through the Championship next season is flawed, because they have achieved the current rebirth without risking a repeat of the luxury goldfish years. Run prudently, they will encounter one of football's deepest mysteries: how do teams escape a division where a kind of communism applies? Most teams are equal, and most can beat any other on any Saturday.
But that's another mission. First Leeds needed to regain their self-respect, their identity. The twinkly team of the David O'Leary years has retreated into a kind of infamy. This one is an older diagram of machismo, with touches of prettiness. You look at Leeds now and no longer see a history of trauma. You see a replay and Beckford writing his name across the sky.
Telegraph 23/1/10
Leeds United on the march with the wily Simon Grayson
The fairytale of the FA Cup run continues, the story of Leeds United’s stirring revival under Simon Grayson gains another remarkable chapter.
By Henry Winter
Saturday was a famous draw, a result rooted in Leeds players’ never-say-die attitude under
Grayson, whose deployment of the outstanding Robert Snodgrass in the hole proved a tactical masterstroke.No wonder Leeds fans never stopped chanting. Grayson has got the whole club marching on together, his reputation as one of the game’s most promising managers again enhanced by the Cup.
Having masterminded the shock of the third round, the knockout blow landed on the distinguished chin of Manchester United, Grayson had once again set another Premier League side an unexpected challenge.
“Are you watching Manchester?’’ chanted the 5,000 Leeds supporters, many of them stripped to the waist.
Once again, Leeds’ mood had been excellent, brimming with defiance and belief. Despite recent travails in League One, Grayson is proving a master at motivation, a trait seen in his successful time reviving Blackpool’s fortunes.
Leeds may be short of technique in certain areas, but they lack nothing in effort. The bandage around Patrick Kisnorbo’s head is an emblem of their commitment to the cause. Their refusal to give up was another magical moment in this Cup season.
From first minute to the last second of added time, Leeds gave everything. During the opening storm whipped up by Jermain Defoe, Kisnorbo and the rest of Grayson’s players stood firm.
The team spirit, the bond of togetherness that Grayson has in his dressing room, was clear in the way Kisnorbo threw himself in the way of a thunderous Defoe shot and then Snodgrass blocked a Niko Kranjcar strike.
The hunger was unmistakable in the way Bradley Johnson snapped away at the cultured heels of Kranjcar, muscling the ball off the Croatian midfielder just after the half-hour mark.
The determination of Grayson’s players was exhibited in the reflexes of Casper Ankergren, who summoned up the ghost of Hull City’s Boaz Myhill, haunting Spurs with a series of saves from Defoe’s penalty and two Gareth Bale free-kicks.
Talk about Casper the Unfriendly Ghost. Leeds’ fans loved it, taunting Spurs with a chant of “you’re just a small town in Arsenal’’.
Once again, Grayson’s tactics had been intelligent. Having relied on a 4-4-2 system to win at Old Trafford, Leeds manager used a 4-4-1-1 system here that confused Spurs.
“There’s only one Simon Grayson,’’ chorused the visiting hordes. Without taking his eyes off the game, Grayson gave them an appreciative wave. Leeds fans love the way that Grayson, a schoolboy fan, has given the club its respect back. Wembley may be a distant dream but the Championship isn’t.
Grayson is certainly not afraid of making big decisions, dropping Luciano Becchio and moving Snodgrass from the right flank and into the hole.
Snodgrass, scheming in the no-man’s land between midfield and attack, caused Spurs problems. After forcing Gomes into an athletic save, Snodgrass lifted the ball through to Beckford, who struck a powerful right-footed shot that Gomes parried.
Spurs urgently needed somebody to cut the strings being so expertly pulled by Snodgrass. Redknapp’s centre-halves, Michael Dawson and Sébastien Bassong, did not know whether to stick or twist, to stay close to Beckford or step out to stifle Snodgrass.
Jermaine Jenas, the one slightly defensive player in Spurs midfield, did drop back but Snodgrass was influential all evening. Seven minutes in to the second period, the Scot was surrounded by three Spurs players but still won a vital corner, flicking the ball off Danny Rose.
Snodgrass’ curling corner, and painful hesitation in Spurs defence, allowed Beckford to equalise Peter Crouch’s earlier effort.
Redknapp had to solve the Snodgrass conundrum. Paying Grayson and Leeds a real compliment, the Spurs manager sent on that pedigree dog of war, Wilson Palacios, with instructions to deprive Snodgrass of room.
After 62 minutes, Palacios was fortunate that Alan Wiley, the referee, ignored the midfielder’s foul on Snodgrass. Clear penalty. Not given.
Grayson, standing in the technical area, spotted the infringement, grimaced when Wiley waved play on but refused to moan, quickly rallying his players.
Watching Grayson on the touchline, hearing him drive Leeds on, it is easy to understand why players loved playing for him, why Beckford has withdrawn his transfer request.
Greater riches are on offer elsewhere, like at Everton, but Leeds are worth sticking with.
They are clearly going places under Grayson which is why they could have sold out Saturday’s allocation three times over, why local radio now streams commentaries on the web because of the global interest in Grayson’s team.
To seize the initiative back from Grayson, Redknapp sent on Roman Pavlyuchenko, who promptly scored, but there was late drama when Beckford swept in the equaliser from the spot.
“We’re Leeds, and we’re proud of you,’’ sang the visitors. No wonder. Grayson has got Leeds on the march.