Doncaster Rovers v Leeds United: Mac’s special help Whites cruise home - YEP 15/10/11

By Phil Hay
Simon Grayson was once a manager with problems but at present he will find only those he invents. A first away win of the league season carried Leeds United into the Championship’s play-off positions last night, far removed from the corner they once occupied. Grayson sounded words of encouragement amid signs of an impending crisis at the back end of August and United’s appearance in the Championship’s top six underlined the strength and conviction of his side’s response.
The club were liable to lose fifth place today as the division’s other fixtures played out but Leeds will feel that their point has been made regardless. Danny Pugh instigated their victory at Doncaster Rovers, converting Robert Snodgrass’ first-half free-kick, and doubt was erased by a sublime overhead kick from Ross McCormack, his 10th goal of the season scored early in the second half.
From there, a fourth league win in five games was wrapped up with a swagger, sealed by a Tom Lees header. McCormack’s finish aside, Grayson’s players rarely dabbled in the spectacular but their boss has seen too much of that in his time as a Championship manager at Elland Road. Faultless Their shape and organisation was faultless and Doncaster were annihilated by United’s brutal front six.
Clean sheets, meanwhile, are behaving like proverbial buses with two arriving in as many games after 11 without one. McCormack, in contrast, is in the form of his career with Leeds and his acrobatics poured more scorn on Scotland’s decision to omit him from their most recent squad. The striker’s goal was due reward from a game in which he and his partner, Andy Keogh, ran Doncaster tirelessly and wore them down. Keogh later struck the crossbar, a mean stroke of misfortune at the end of a telling performance, but Lees gave the scoreline the width it deserved in the 64th minute.
With Snodgrass fit, Grayson’s team was as easy to name last night as it had been all season. A certain amount of doubt surrounded Keogh’s position with Luciano Becchio breathing down his neck but United’s manager seemed keen to avoid change for change’s sake. In the end, Keogh was more than worth his place.
Doncaster, by comparison, threw in goalkeeper and new signing Chris Kirkland and included Herita Ilunga, their loanee from West Ham United, at left-back. The notable omission was Pascal Chimbonda who took a seat on Rovers’ bench after missing a number of training sessions earlier in the week. In all, only 10 of the players used last night started August’s Carling Cup tie between the clubs, explaining why Grayson was happy to disregard that game entirely. Dean Saunders’ line-up scarcely looked like a team condemned to a season in the bottom three, and Doncaster’s most recent results did not give that impression either. Their strikeforce alone, consisting of Billy Sharp and Jon Parkin, had danger about it, and Lees was given the task of containing the imposing Parkin. The 20-year-old had been safely on loan at Bury when Parkin ran riot at Elland Road with Preston North End last season but Grayson remembered that evening well. All United’s manager could promise was that his strikers, Keogh and McCormack, would cause trouble in return. McCormack had the sniff of his 10th goal of the season after only eight minutes when Paul Connolly found Keogh’s sly run onto the right wing, and McCormack’s attempt to covert Keogh’s cross with his heel was repelled by Richard Naylor’s uncompromising tackle at the near post. The sliding challenge from Leeds’ former captain left McCormack clutching an ankle and Grayson remonstrating with the fourth official about a defender whose aggression he once relied on. Grayson’s faith at the Keepmoat was placed instead in Lees and Darren O’Dea who saw off Parkin’s first opportunity by standing up to the striker’s close-range volley in the 13th minute. Amid a patient examination of each other, neither team were able to fashion a more promising opening until the 20th minute when Pugh scored. As he had against Portsmouth on October 1, the midfielder appeared on cue as Snodgrass flighted a contentious free-kick into the box and his emphatic volley swept beyond Kirkland before the keeper could move. Bemoaned Doncaster bemoaned the decision to penalise George Friend for bringing down McCormack on the touchline but Saunders had as much to say about the marking inside Doncaster’s box. Leeds saw an opportunity to squeeze Rovers out of the contest and Keogh threatened Kirkland again with an ambitious shot from 30 yards which swung away from goal. At that early stage, Doncaster’s committal of players to attack was leaving their defence badly stretched. Keogh and McCormack both had chances to punish Rovers, the former wasting one counter attack with a stray pass and the latter dispossessed by Naylor at the vital moment, and the rising heat of the game provoked a clash between Adam Clayton and James Coppinger on the half-hour. Coppinger was booked for swinging a knee in Clayton’s direction. The final warning shots of the first half came from Leeds, with Pugh failing to pick out a Leeds player six yards from goal and McCormack testing Kirkland with a long and hopeful free-kick. Only a glancing header from Parkin in the 41st minute forced Lonergan to scramble across his line and ensure that his far post was covered. But when Snodgrass looped a misguided cross over Doncaster’s box with Saunders’ defence in disarray again, it seemed that United were dithering over an invitation to kill the match before half-time. That fear was banished in the 52nd minute when Keogh guided Clayton’s pass to McCormack who controlled the ball in the air and, without pausing to think, whipped an overhead kick beyond the reach of Kirkland and into the back of the net. It was something for Craig Levein to ponder as he and Scotland prepare to twiddle their thumbs next summer. Doncaster’s heads dropped but Lees kept his when Snodgrass steered a cross into his path on 64 minutes, inviting the defender to rise and nod the ball beyond Kirkland. It is many months since Leeds were able to showboat as easily as they did in the time that remained.
Sky 14/10/11 - Whites secure first away win
Pugh, McCormack and Lees on target as Whites claim the points Leeds United secured their first Championship away win of the season following a 3-0 success at Doncaster Rovers on Friday night. Danny Pugh opened the scoring in the first half with a second goal in two games since re-signing with Ross McCormack and young defender Tom Lees sealing the victory with further efforts after half-time. Dean Saunders had registered two wins and a draw since replacing Sean O'Driscoll at the Keepmoat Stadium, but his side were no match for fast-improving Leeds, who moved into fifth place after stretching their unbeaten league run to five games. Former Wrexham manager Saunders had lifted the gloom at Rovers with the help of a plasma television and a half share in a race horse as rewards for his players in training and matches. But no incentives could make up for the gulf between these two sides in terms of cohesion and confidence and while Leeds manager Simon Grayson will be looking up the table, Saunders will now be aware of the full size of his task. Former England goalkeeper Chris Kirkland, on loan from Wigan, and West Ham defender Herita Ilunga made their debuts for Doncaster, while a third new signing, Pascal Chimbonda, started on the bench. Leeds were unchanged from the side that beat Portsmouth in their last match, with Finland internationals Mikael Forssell and Mika Vayrynen, as well as Luciano Becchio, named among the substitutes. Cagey opening Doncaster threatened first after a cagey opening, with Jon Parkin's low shot forcing a sprawling save from Leeds goalkeeper Andy Lonergan. Leeds responded with a swift counterattack, but Robert Snodgrass's driven cross was steered wide by McCormack. Leeds soon began to boss possession and were rewarded with the breakthrough in the 20th minute when Pugh volleyed home in fine style, direct from a Snodgrass corner. The home side were finding it difficult to get a foothold in the game and James Coppinger was booked by referee Kevin Friend after taking his frustrations out on Leeds midfielder Adam Clayton. Parkin will feel he should have hit the target with a header from Coppinger's cross shortly before half-time, but Rovers failed to muster any real momentum and it was the visitors who looked the more likely to add a second goal. Confidence Leeds sprayed the ball about with growing confidence after the restart and a moment of individual brilliance from McCormack doubled their lead in the 51st minute. The Scot flicked the ball over his marker in the area and, with his back to goal, sent an overhead kick into Kirkland's top right-hand corner for his 10th goal in 13 appearances this season. Saunders replaced Coppinger with Kyle Bennett in the 61st minute, but two minutes later Lees' thumping header from another Snodgrass corner put the result beyond doubt. Lonergan was replaced by Paul Rachubka in the closing stages and Andy Keogh struck the crossbar with seven minutes left as Leeds threatened to add a fourth goal. Twohundredpercent 13/10/11 Who owns Leeds United? How Football Documentaries Should Be Made Many years ago, I listened to prize-winning author and ultra-famous Arsenal fan Nick Hornby reading extracts from the book which made his name, Fever Pitch. And the reading was a disappointment. Hornby was good, but just not as funny as the voice, indeterminate and certainly not my own, in which I’d read the original. The same disappointment arose when listening to speeches by Guardian journalist David Conn. Conn is a decent speaker – even when “10-minute” speeches to Supporters Direct conferences exceed half-an-hour, but his words spoke louder from the page in the voice inside my head. This I know to be unfair, after watching the long-heralded documentary Who Owns Leeds United, which aired on October 10th in the BBC’s Yorkshire and Lincolnshire area. For the core material of the programme overpowered concerns about presentation, and the presentation itself was of a standard to which all football documentaries should aspire. The twenty-nine minutes on Leeds’ recent ownership history focused its attention, for reasons lawyers may be best-placed to describe, on the club’s current owner, Kenneth William Bates. Conn told the story of their ownership, since the departure of former chairman Mr Peter Ridsdale esq, with a refreshing clarity. And while the story contained nothing new to close observers of Leeds since 2004 – which would include many readers of this site – it would have provided valuable insight to those new to it. Conn took us methodically and simply, though never simplistically, through Leeds’ tale of financial woe, beginning with Ridsdale “living the dream” at the start of the century. “It is generally accepted that the Peter Ridsdale was financially disastrous for the club,” Conn noted. This isn’t, of course, accepted by Ridsdale himself in his current energetic efforts to re-write this part of Leeds United’s history. But this was a documentary didn’t get side-tracked on such side-issues – unlike me. The tribulations of the “Yorkshire Consortium” of local businessman who in 2004 tried, and failed, to repair the financial damage done by Ridsdale, were faithfully recalled by then-chairman Gerald Krasner. Eyebrows may have been raised when insolvency practitioner Krasner stated that the consortium “were not rich men,” having claimed his Leeds chairmanship to be a “labour of love” for which he would normally have charged “a lot of money,” – many BBC Iplayer viewers in the Plymouth area would know roughly how much per hour he may have meant by that. But the documentary was honest enough about the consortium’s failings, even in its rush to get to the star of its show, Bates, the “unlikely guardian angel from the tax haven of Monaco.” The documentary was at its most revealing and disturbing at this point, with two stark, black-and-white photos of a younger Bates. The second was demonstrably Bates, though with dark hair. The first showed a clean-shaven, portly yet kindly-looking face, peering innocently out of a car window; proof that the camera may not perpetually tell the truth. Bates’ “colourful” business history was given a brief, wilfully disrespectful airing – “wheeling and dealing… he dabbled in ready-mixed concrete”, as dodgy-sounding a business CV as you could write, bang-updated by the addition of 21st-century business bêtes-noires, “property and banking.” Author Tom Bower, who devoted thirty-three pages of his book Broken Dreams – Vanity, Greed And The Souring Of British Football to Bates, gave us his précis of Bates’ 23 years at Chelsea, buying the club from bankruptcy and selling it just before it became bankrupt again. “Not a great achievement,” he noted. In a warning to fans currently protesting against Bates for developing Leeds’ Elland Road ground rather than the team, Bower said Bates, while Chelsea chairman, “redeveloped the ground and earned a lot of money for himself from it.” And he added that he didn’t think “selling (Chelsea) to a Russian oligarch was a great service to the fans,” which is not a view held by everyone with Chelsea allegiances – not yet, anyway. But the idea of Bates as self-serving twister was established. And Conn warmed to that theme immediately. Newspapers heralding the “Bates Era” at Leeds in January 2005 “suggested Bates had personally taken over Leeds. But Bates denied being anything more than the “UK representative” of an indeterminate entity called ‘Forward Sports Fund’ (FSF), which had actually ‘bought’ Leeds. With heavy emphasis on the words “overseas” and “tax haven,” Conn showed how difficult it was to demonstrate whether Bates was lying… or even telling the truth, for that matter. Economist John Christensen cited a purely hypothetical example of “someone who’s resident off-shore, say in Monaco.” Tax havens weren’t just havens from tax: “Professionally we call them ‘secrecy jurisdictions,’” he told us, adding emotively that “money-laundering and bad activities” could be going on “because we can’t find out who actually owns the club.” The secrecy of Leeds’ ownership, it was implied, also cost the club a £25m loan from Leeds City Council, and seconds of airtime later Conn added that “just two-and-a-half years after Ken Bates took over Leeds, the club was effectively bust.” At which point the documentary played the “small business” card. Conn interviewed Stuart Russell, whose ‘small’ firm Russell’s Patisserie, was owed £2,700 by Leeds. Not “a lot of money in the big scheme of things,” Russell himself noted, “but you have to make a lot of rolls to make £2,500.” So, a third of the way into the documentary, Bates was already established as a secretive failure who took Leeds into administration. This was the cue for a topical dig at the ‘Football Creditor’s Rule’ which ensures that usually highly-paid players get all their money out of an administration process, while Stuart Russell “got back a cheque for just under £50.” “Incidentally”, said Krasner, pretending the thought had just come to him, “a football manager is not a football creditor.” So Bates’ first Leeds manager, Kevin Blackwell, was left to scrabble for a small fraction of the, ulp, £993,332 he was owed. But two organisations stood to lose much more, “obscure off-shore companies called Astor Investment Holdings and Krato,” which had apparently loaned Bates’s Leeds £15m. Astor and Krato were quickly linked to “tax havens” and “closely-guarded” secrecy, just before Krasner explained that they insisted “that the person who has lost them that money be allowed to buy back the club,” as they told administrators, KPMG, that they would waive their bumper debts if, and only if, Bates remained “in charge” at Leeds, on behalf of… well, no-one, exactly, seemed to know. “Just to repeat,” added Conn, directly addressing the many viewers who had just shouted “Eh?” at their screens, “the investors who lost a staggering £18m under Ken Bates still insisted that he remain in charge.” The viewer was then taken on a European tour of companies and court cases to determine why Astor and Krato were so keen to get Bates back in charge. But even high court judges couldn’t find out ‘who’ let alone ‘why.’ Bates, of course, was “the most obvious person… to clear up the mystery.” The documentary had already shown him saying that “the one condition they made of coming in was that they did not want any publicity or their identities being disclosed.” But this was immediately followed by an “incredulous” Krasner saying Bates “didn’t even know who he was working for,” inviting the viewer to ask how, then, did Bates know what they were thinking? As the documentary-makers strongly suspected, Bates wasn’t about to answer their questions, claiming in an e-mail worthy of a school exercise book belonging to “Ken Bates, Class 2D, aged seven,” that he found the BBC (the “Bloated, Biased Corporation”) “thoroughly untrustworthy.” Further examples of Bates’ literary skills were cited; his reference to Leeds fans as “morons” (comfortably refuted by fan representatives’ concise, well-informed contributions to the programme) and his likening, in the official club programme column, of Leeds United to sex, in a passage which would have had any children reading the programme asking “what does that mean, Daddy?” Daddy, of course, wouldn’t have known, as what Bates wrote was, in fact, nonsense. But, as Lee Hicken of the Leeds United Supporters Trust pointed out: “there’s usually something in there that will offend someone.” Conn then turned to the football authorities’ regulations “designed to make sure that the people who own clubs are upstanding,” having just established that Bates was pretty far from “upstanding.” We were the taken on another tour of ignorance, as it was revealed that the Football League and the Football Association had declared Leeds’ owners to be “fit and proper” without ever knowing who they were. Nobody from the League, “including its chairman Greg Clarke, was prepared to talk to us on camera,” Conn added, implying that not even Clarke could defend their (in)action in public debate. The League instead provided a statement which said little more than that Leeds’ owners were fit and proper because the club said so, to which the most reasonable retort can only be, “Right, so who are they, then?”. And they couldn’t say what the club said because it was confidential. They, and Bates, would like to file such matters under ‘history’ now that Bates has bought the majority, controlling shareholding in Leeds – via “an obscure company based in (a) tax haven”, Conn added, probably unnecessarily by this stage. But even this apparent clarification raised more questions, as “just at the point when the riches of the Premier League were out of the club’s grasp,” – i.e. just as the club’s market value plummeted – it was put up for sale by FSF. This was yet more anti-logic for newcomers to the story to ponder, before being told Bates was the buyer, having been about the only person who seemed to know the club was for sale. Viewers were left to draw many of their own conclusions, not least on how Bates could redevelop Elland Road without apparent reference to its owners – a “company based in (a) tax haven,” as Conn noted “while we’re at it.” But the documentary transcript was much longer than other recent football documentaries of comparable length. It never felt too rushed to understand. And the right interviewees made the right points at the right times. And whilst the title’s eponymous question was never going to be answered – unless an anonymous source dropped the answers through David Conn’s letterbox in a brown envelope – it never felt like the piece of failed investigative journalism it technically was. Of course, seasoned observers already suspect who has beneficially controlled Leeds United since 2005, whether they have (exacted) that control directly or through, shall we say, ‘related’ individuals. But the point now is to force the football authorities to guard against a repeat – in that sense, the documentary was well-timed, coming hours before the government’s response to the parliamentary select committee’s report on ‘football governance.’ It is small wonder, on the basis of stories such as this, that even a government naturally inclined towards a laissez-faire attitude towards governance in so many areas of life is taking such a hard line on football at the moment. Square Ball 12/10/11 What Ken Said – 12.10.11 – Shot by Shot Taken from Yorkshire Radio’s interview with Leeds United owner Ken Bates today… Regular readers of What Ken Said will recall that whenever something doesn’t quite go the Ken’s way, like the recent protests by fans at Elland Road, he reacts with a lengthy monologue during his usual Wednesday slot on his own radio station. After Monday’s BBC Inside Out documentary on the last six years at Leeds United drew attention again to the secretive ownership and continued chairmanship of Ken Bates throughout that period, it won’t come as much of a surprise to find out that seven minutes and 10 seconds of today’s 12-minute ‘interview’ were dedicated to Ken’s monologue on the subject. That’s a total of 1,311 words (or 7,104 characters typed by my good self) – rather impressive for a TV programme that Ken himself describes as ‘a complete waste of time’. Another feature of Ken’s mono-rants is his attempts to discredit anyone who questions him, be it a journalist, fan, a former chairman, or indeed a fanzine such as The Square Ball. This week, TSB published a blog post entitled ‘Revealed: The £10m That Could Have Saved Leeds From Administration’ which used information given to TSB by the BBC after they had obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act while researching the documentary. It is information that is publicly available, should it be requested. It is not, as Ken suggests, illegal or unethical. Elsewhere, he also confuses TSB’s co-editors Dan & Michael while suggesting TSB, amongst others, lack transparency. It is an old line he has used twice before, most recently on April 2nd in his programme notes for the match against Nottingham Forest, and at that time TSB responded responded in full with an ‘Open Letter to Ken Bates’. Elsewhere, Ken talks about some other stuff including – shock! – football, because he’s a football fan, just like you and me… apparently. Ben Fry: Chairman, we’ll start with some fantastic news – Ramon Nunez has committed himself to the club and visa-versa until 2015. You must be delighted that the deal has been done. Ken Bates: I’m very pleased indeed and so should all fans. He’s an exceptional player, he’s a full international, of course, for Honduras and he played regularly until he decided he has got to concentrate on Leeds. I wouldn’t say he sacrificed his international career but he put it on hold. Once again, the fans have to be patient and realise it’s not as easy to re-sign players as it might appear. It’s taken a few months actually and Shaun has done particularly well with him because Nunez is a foreigner, we’ve had three agents to deal with so it hasn’t been easy. I’m delighted he has signed, he’s another quality player and I think that everyone should be very pleased. We certainly are. BF: Did the fact that he decided to put his international career on hold strengthen your view on the player that he did actually want to give something to the club? KB: It already confirmed our view of the player. It just showed that he was putting Leeds first and everything afterwards. He wants to succeed at Elland Road and we are delighted that we have not only got a player, we got one with that attitude. It’s interesting, I was just doing a bit of reminiscing in my mind while I was waiting for you to call me and it now means that we now have 16 players who have played for their country at international level from Under-18s right the way through to full internationals. Of the 16, 11 are full internationals and what’s even more encouraging is seven of our current squad are homegrown and are young. So I think some of the fans who have been complaining or have been disappointed that we haven’t been splashing the cash in the summer, actually realise that we have splashed it really sensibly and really wisely and I’m very pleased with the attitude that Simon has adopted in strengthening the squad and the way that Shaun Harvey has dealt with the finances of it to make sure we are a tightly run ship and we get what we want at reasonable prices. Two Finnish internationals both played last weekend and they cost us nothing. Obviously that reflects in the salaries we are paying but we have a good, strong squad. And if we beat Doncaster on Friday night, we’ll be fifth. We may only be fifth for 24 hours but it demonstrates we have a much stronger squad than people realise because of course it was obscured by the initial bad result against Southampton – no excuses for that, we were bad – and an unlucky defeat against Middlesbrough. From then on, we haven’t done too badly. BF: Are you now satisfied by the mixture of youth and experience the squad has? KB: Ben, you’re never satisfied, you always want somebody else. I mean, I’m a fan at heart, just as the rest of them are. I’m never satisfied, I always want something better but we’re making progress, step-by-step, brick-on-brick. We’re getting there. BF: Now lets move away from footballing matters just briefly to talk about the BBC documentary that was on on Monday night about the ownership of the club. Did you see it and what are your thoughts on it? KB: Well I saw it and funny enough it was almost exactly how I forecast how it would be. Frankly the total content was a load of rubbish and Shakespeare wrote a play about it called Much Ado About Nothing. If you analyse it, we had David Conn in Geneva rubbing his hands together, somewhat forlornly as he looked at the ships sailing by on the lake and looking up at the building where Chateau Fiduciaire is housed and then we saw David Conn talking to Platini having a nice shot of UEFA’s headquarters and Mr Platini who speaks perfect English, nevertheless the BBC thought they had to put subtitles on underneath. Then we had the same shot six times of Leeds fans going in the ground. Then we had three shots of the East Stand from the air, one shot of the South Stand, no two shots of the South Stand. Then what else did we have? Erm, then we had breach of copyright when they quoted me first of all from my Yorkshire Radio programme and then the match programme. Then they, I don’t know whether they broke the law but they were certainly unethical as they used the Freedom of Information act to obtain confidential correspondence between Shaun Harvey and the Leeds City Council and promptly handed it over to a fanzine, who put it on their website, totally in accordance with the BBC’s moral behaviour. Then we had David Conn saying this and David Conn saying that. Interestingly, he was described as an investigative journalist and he described himself as an investigative journalist and he said ‘after six years, I found out nothing’ – well he’s not much good as an investigative journalist is he? Then they dug up some ancient-looking economist who said, shock, shock, that a tax haven is an off-shore island that is also used for secrecy. Well what a non-event. Then we had photographs of me getting out of a taxi then me sitting on a platform then we had a photograph of Mr Krasner, sitting next to Mr Simon Morris, the former property tycoon who is now awaiting sentencing for a criminal conviction. Then we had Tom Bower. Now Tom Bower is an interesting person. He’s a writer who has a lot to say for himself, mostly unsubstantiated, but interestingly I had a run-in with him before. He did an article in the Mail On Sunday which he described in some detail of a meeting that took place in the Dorchester Hotel in London, even down to describing the type of cigar, the make of the cigar that one of the persons there was smoking. So only one problem, that meeting never took place and I’ve never met the person that was supposed to be smoking the cigar. It was a pack of lies. He made it up as he went along and the Mail On Sunday had to print an apology and pay a substantial sum in compensation, which went to one of my charities. That brings me on to the credibility of the people that took part in the programme because what is more interesting is the people who refused to take part in the programme. So you saw editing versions what was said in this meeting and what was said in that meeting. I mean Damian Collins, self publicist, once agains the DCMS committee report had nothing of interest to say, just recommend the usual things, lovely and vague, not specific, waste of time, waste of money. OK, it gave Mr Damian Collins his day in the sun. And then we had a fanzine guy on, I think he’s the man who asked me two years ago if I would give him an interview for his fanzine and I said to him ‘how many copies do you sell?’ he said ‘none of your business’. So what amuses me is all these people who are asking for greater transparency are a bit vague when it comes to transparency themselves. Then we had a gentleman from LUST. I don’t know how many members they got. I think I was told last time they had 328 [it's around 1,250 now - TSB]. Well Leeds United Members Club, I have just checked, have over 34,000 with 60 regional clubs. That puts something in perspective. And their chairman admitted and we have checked on the computer, that the last two seasons he had come to three games in two years. So I don’t quite know who he is speaking for. But let’s move back to the content of the programme itself. Then we had Mr Krasner speaking at length. Well of course, as you remember, Mr Krasner was my predecessor as the chairman of Leeds United and he made the point a time or two that under my chairmanship the club was relegated to League One. He seems to forget that under his chairmanship, the club was relegated from the Premiership to the Championship and of course the tremendous loss of income was a factor in the Leeds United’s financial difficulties and he made great inference in the fact that he hadn’t charged any fee for any work he did, well I think that was 10 months or something. I haven’t charged any fee for the six-and-a-half years I have been here to put it in perspective. Two of his fellow directors, two of them charged nearly £100,000 a year, and Mr Krasner was a participant in the proposed profit share had he been paid depending of the performance of the club. So that he didn’t actually get any money, he was in for a ride on the profit, if it had been made. I think going back to the Yorkshire Consortium of which Mr Krasner was the chairman, it has to be remembered that they only put £5million into the club, so of which itself was borrowed but they borrowed another £15million from a man called Petchy. So of the £20million they used to buy the club, on five was their own and the £15million was borrowed at exorbitant rates of interest and each of the directors gave personal guarantees to repay that money and in the end they sold Elland Road, they sold Thorp Arch, an option on the land behind the North Stand, to repay Mr Petchy, which of course released them from their personal guarantees and saddled the club with the thick-end of £1.5million a year in rent and rising. The other thing you have to remember of course is that Mr Krasner backed Simon Morris in the administration to try buy the club back in competition with Forward Sports Fund. So all the comments Mr Krasner made have to be view in the context that he was a predecessor and an unsuccessful competitor. Now then, moving on, we have a club which is trading profitably unlike very few other clubs in the league, we have no debt, we have renovated the ground. Even Mr Damian Collins no doubt between clenched teeth said ‘Leeds United are financially secure and upwardly mobile’ – isn’t that all that fans want? The rest is just rubbish. The programme itself was a complete waste of money, such as sending Conn out to Switzerland with his camera crew trailing here and trailing there. There’s nothing in it. We saw shots of Switzerland, we saw diagrammatic… maps of three islands in the Caribbean. It told people absolutely nothing. A complete waste of time. But then, nothing new there, is there? I think what we now need to do is to move on and continue to run the club. Ah, one small point about prices and things, I was doing a bit of survey this afternoon and I looked up an independent report and there are 12 clubs in the Championship where it’s more expensive to go to than Leeds United. BF: Let’s bring it back to footballing matters then and focus on Friday night’s game. Coming up against a Doncaster Rovers side who have been rejuvenated. Do you now see this as maybe a tougher challenge than it was a couple of weeks ago? KB: Under O’Driscoll they were playing much more of a passing game. Dean Saunders has brought in a few Premiership players to obviously sharpen them up a bit and they have done quite well – won two and drawn one. But they now play a far more direct, physical game. We’re ready for it. It’s a very important one because as I said earlier, we can go fifth. Who knows, they might even be chanting ‘Bates In’ (chuckles). BF: After that, Coventry come to Elland Road on the Tuesday night, the 18th. Obviously midweek games are a bit difficult at this time of the year. You hope hope though, that the home form will continue and that the fans can come in numbers. KB: Fans will come in due course as we continue our good run. If we get success, the fans will come. We are still averaging 23,400 but we’ve won four and lost one in home games so we’re OK. We’re more relaxed than some people fear. BF: Given the recent form particularly at home, do you see top six ambitions being realistic? KB: We still thought that after the Southampton game. I mean fans, I understand fans because I am one myself, next Saturday trepidation but then what are we going to do next week? You can’t run a football club on a Saturday-by-Saturday or match-by-match basis. It’s the league table in May next year that counts, that’s what we’re looking at. I think we have a strong team, at last we have got a clean sheet, hopefully the first of many, as usual we are the top scorers in the league. We have a good ground and good support. BF: Let’s finish by focussing on one event which is coming up at Elland Road very shortly. It’s the 20 Years On event on October 29th. Ticket sales going well. It’ll be fantastic to welcome back Howard Wilkinson and members of his squad. KB: We hope as many of them that can come will come. It’ll be a great evening of reminiscence looking back over what Leeds have achieved and looking forward to what Leeds hopefully will achieve. BF: And if you would like to be here for the event, it is the night before the home game against Cardiff and the number you need is 08713341919 and choose option two. Chairman, as always, thanks for taking the time to speak to us on Yorkshire Radio. KB: Thank you, Ben

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