Thirty years on from Leeds' title-winning season - Daily Mail

Thirty years on from Leeds' title-winning season former boss Howard Wilkinson and star men Tony Dorigo and Gordon Strachan relive the drama and antics... including Eric Cantona jumping in the pool with all his clothes on, and partying until 7am!إ  

Thirty years ago, Howard Wilkinson was washing down his late Sunday lunch with a bottle of red wine when his five-year-old son came bounding down the stairs.

‘He said, “Daddy, I think we’ve just won the championship”,’ recalls the then Leeds United manager. Young Ben Wilkinson was not wrong.

He had just watched Manchester United lose 2-0 at Liverpool on the upstairs television, a result which meant Leeds would be crowned the 1992 champions – the last before the Premier League era.

His father, meanwhile, had purposely chosen to avoid the action at Anfield after returning to his home in Sheffield following Leeds’ earlier 3-2 win at nearby Bramall Lane. He was not the only one.

‘I went to the Hilton Hotel for tea with my wife and my two boys were watching it on a TV in the gym,’ remembers Leeds captain Gordon Strachan. ‘I told them, “Do not tell me the score until it’s over”. They finally came running out to see me when Liverpool had won.’

One player who did watch the match was Tony Dorigo, Leeds’ player of the year that season. He had travelled south to meet up with England, who had a friendly match in Russia just three days before the final game of the season.

‘I managed to get a phone call from Howard,’ says the left-back. ‘He was slightly slurring his words. He’d been on the sauce by then.

‘He’d spoken to Graham Taylor and, if myself and David Batty didn’t want to go to Moscow, it wouldn’t be held against us. Graham was more than happy for us to stay and celebrate the title win. So, I jumped in a car and headed back to Leeds.’

Wilkinson stayed at home to celebrate, with people ‘turning up from all over the place’, including Sheffield United manager Dave Bassett. The players, though, congregated in their favourite haunt, the Flying Pizza in Roundhay, Leeds.

‘The place was buzzing. Then, at about 11.30pm, Batty said to me, “We are going back to yours, we are still celebrating”,’ reveals Martin Goldman, whose electronics company was a club sponsor.

‘I said to Adriano, the owner, “I haven’t got enough drink for this lot, give me 25 bottles of white and 25 bottles of red”. In the end, about 250 people came back to mine. It was unbelievable.

‘I had a house with a swimming pool and a football pitch. Eric Cantona jumped in the pool with all of his clothes on. He was p***** out of his head. We were playing football in the garden at 3am.

‘The last to leave were Batty, Cantona, Gary Speed and Gary McAllister - at 6.50am!’

Today marks an important date in the @Crap90sFootball calendar.

The 30th anniversary of Brian Gayle’s title winner for Leeds at Bramall Lane.

Wonderful technique. Wrong fucking net.

pic.twitter.com/EchGcG6Hoo

— A Funny Old Game (@sid_lambert) April 26, 2022

The players partied every night that week and, somehow, even managed to win their meaningless final game against Norwich before lifting the old Football League trophy. The following day came the open-top bus parade when more than 150,000 lined the streets of Leeds, although the journey did not start smoothly.

‘When you turn right out of Elland Road, there is a railway bridge,’ explains Strachan. ‘There was a press bus ahead of us.

‘One photographer was standing on a chair taking pictures. It happened in slow-motion. We were like, “Christ, duck!”. He nearly lost his head on the bridge. It was horrible.’

The parade was delayed for 20 minutes while an ambulance crew tended to him. But the bus did eventually arrive safely at Leeds Town Hall, where Cantona uttered the immortal words to fans: ‘Why I love you, I don’t know why, but I love you.’

‘Standing on the balcony and looking down, you could not see anything past heads and shoulders,’ adds Wilkinson. ‘It was Leeds United fervour at its best.’

Leeds were in the Division Two doldrums when, in 1988, the club’s charismatic managing director Bill Fotherby persuaded Wilkinson to leave top-flight Sheffield Wednesday and sign a £40,000-a-year contract with the fallen giants.

‘The club was in a sorry state,’ admits the man fans nicknamed Sergeant Wilko. ‘Changes had to be made and they had to be dramatic to get them out of the dream world and into the real world.’

The first thing Wilkinson did was remove all trace of the Don Revie era, taking down photographs at Elland Road of the team that won two League titles and an FA Cup in the late 1960s and early 70s.

‘The past loomed large,’ says Wilkinson. ‘Instead of an achievement, it had become a bit of a burden.

‘I sat the players down and said, “I am going to take those pictures down, which keep reminding people of what was. When we create a new what is, they’ll go back up because we have earned the right for them to go back up”.’

One of Wilkinson’s other inspired moves was placing microphones above the Kop at Elland Road to amplify the crowd noise. He also wanted a new training ground, which eventually arrived two years after their title win, because ‘training on a s*** heap is not the best way to be champions’.

But sports science was his real passion and he transformed the club’s culture. ‘I had to say to the ladies in the restaurant, “What they’ve been eating, they can no longer eat here”,’ says Wilkinson.

Out went fish and chips, in came such things as seaweed tablets. He would take urine samples from his players to ensure each individual received the right rehydration drinks. He would weigh his squad members every Monday, fining them £100 for every pound they were overweight. He brought in athletics coach Wilf Paish, who had guided Tessa Sanderson to gold at the Los Angeles Olympics.

The professionalism Wilkinson wanted to instil was exemplified by Strachan, who had arrived from Manchester United three years earlier and led Leeds to promotion in 1990. He was 34 come the start of the 1991-92 campaign, but was still Wilkinson’s on-field general. Others were not so lucky.

‘Howard cut through the nonsense,’ says Strachan. ‘He won Division Two and said, “Right, we’ve done that, I’m gonna rip up this team and start another one”. He went out and bought players to take us on - McAllister, Rod Wallace, Dorigo.’

Australia-born Dorigo, who signed for a club-record £1.3million from Chelsea in the summer of 1991, also remembers a funny man.

‘It’s buried deep, but he has a dry sense of humour,’ he says. ‘When I signed, I went away with England on tour. I came back needing a double hernia operation. It was going to take six weeks to recover.

‘Howard pulled me into his office. “Wow, I think I’ve signed the softest Aussie ever”. I’m thinking, “Is he serious?”. He went on, “I had another left-back at Sheffield Wednesday, Nigel Worthington. He had the same operation as you. Doctor said six weeks, he was back in five”. I thought, “If he was back in five, I’ll be back in four”. So, I was fit in time for pre-season.’

Wilkinson’s reverse psychology had worked. But some of his other ideas were not so successful.

‘We did a lot of shape and always felt well-armed going into games,’ says Dorigo. ‘One time, though, the manager decided on a drill with no opposition and no football.

‘So, Howard rolls this imaginary ball to Mel Sterland at right back. He controls it and passes to the centre-halves. Everyone is going along with it.

‘The “ball” then ends up in midfield with David Batty. He wasn’t having it. He chipped it up and booted it straight out of play. That was the end of that. At least Howard saw the funny side.’

But there was also a temper, if needed. ‘Once, at half-time, Howard flipped the physio’s table,’ recalls Strachan. ‘It caught one of the lads and he had to play the second half with strapping on his wrist. But we loved him.’

At the start of the 1991-92 season, winning the title had not even come into Wilkinson’s thinking. His target was merely to win ‘one point more’ than the previous campaign when they finished fourth, but it soon became apparent greater glories were within reach.

‘I will always remember two games on TV - away at Aston Villa (4-1) in November and Sheff Wed (6-1) in January,’ says Dorigo. ‘We walloped two good sides. You start to think, “You know what, we’re looking pretty good here”.

‘The team could play in different ways - we could battle or be technical. Because of what Howard had taught us on the training ground, we knew exactly what to do in any moment.’

Three days after that win against Wednesday, striker Lee Chapman broke his wrist in an FA Cup defeat to Manchester United – one of a ‘winter trilogy’ of matches against their title rivals over three weeks. With Wilkinson fearing he might be missing his top scorer for the rest of the season, he moved to sign Cantona on loan from Nimes.

‘I’d seen him play before in a France Under-21 game at Highbury and I’d spoken with Gerard Houllier (France technical director) about him,’ explains Wilkinson. ‘I’d heard that Eric had burnt his bridges over in France. It was a gamble but, as it turned out over the short term, the gamble paid off.’

Leeds players partied every night in the week after they were confirmed as champions - but were still able to beat Norwich the following weekend before they lifted the league trophy

Leeds players partied every night in the week after they were confirmed as champions - but were still able to beat Norwich the following weekend before they lifted the league trophy

Cantona’s new team-mates welcomed him to the club by hanging his designer shoes from the dressing-room ceiling, but it did not take long for them to recognise his talent.

‘He scored a goal in training that none of us could believe,’ recalls Dorigo. ‘The goals were on the 18-yard box and the ball was thrown to him on halfway, on an angle running away from goal. It was miles out. Before it landed, he volleyed it back across the other way and into the top corner. The keeper didn’t move.

‘Rather than him run around celebrating, he just walked back to the halfway line and said, “Yes, that is what I do”.’

Off the pitch, Cantona’s arrogance was apparent on one of his first nights out at Leeds nightspot Majestyk, when he was astounded that he had to go to the dancefloor to talk to girls rather than them coming to him. So, what did the skipper think of the new signing?

‘You stand at a bar and talk about seagulls and trawlers,’ says Strachan. ‘Funny, if you’re French, that’s philosophy. If you’re Scottish, you’re Rab C. Nesbitt!’

Strachan, you sense, believes too much was made of the impact of Cantona, who started only six games but scored three goals. One of those was a stunning solo effort against Chelsea, when Leeds chairman Leslie Silver dug Wilkinson in the ribs and said, ‘That’s just cost me a million quid’ – a reference to what he would have to shell out to make the forward’s deal permanent.

That 3-0 win over Chelsea was significant as it followed a 4-0 defeat at Manchester City, which had seen many write off Leeds’ title hopes. They were second in the table, a point behind Manchester United with five games to play - their rivals had seven - but Wilkinson used one of his favoured golfing metaphors and told his troops to ‘trust their swing’.

Indeed, they went on to hit birdie after birdie, securing seven points from their next three matches, while Ferguson’s side bogeyed and collected just five from five. It meant Leeds headed into the penultimate game of the season at Sheffield United on April 26 knowing that victory would see them crowned champions if United then lost at Liverpool.

‘What a strange game,’ says Strachan, and few disagree.

The hosts took the lead through a scruffy Alan Cork strike before Wallace equalised when a deflected shot cannoned in off him. John Newsome headed Leeds in front but a Chapman own goal left their title bid in the balance. Then, 13 minutes from time, Blades defender Brian Gayle headed into his own net.

‘Stupid things kept happening,’ says Dorigo. ‘It was a crazy game. The wind was weird, like little cyclones, crisp packets whizzing around in a circle.

‘The goals were just the oddest. None more so than the last one, when Mr. Gayle decided to join our team for a moment. But whatever was thrown at us, we had to see it through.’

To this day, it still irks Leeds fans that Ferguson proclaimed, ‘Leeds didn't win the title, we threw it away’, especially as the Whites finished four points clear, with more wins, more goals and fewer defeats. But as Wilkinson points out: ‘That is an opinion, but what is carved into the trophy is not an opinion, it’s a fact.’

Ferguson also dismissed Leeds as ‘one of the most average teams ever to win the title’. So, does his side get enough credit? ‘That’s never really entered my head,’ says Wilkinson, still the last English manager to win the top flight. ‘The credit that matters is what they themselves feel - and what I feel about what they did.’

Strachan believes their manager deserves more praise. ‘It annoys me when you see managers called “legendary” who shouldn’t be spoken of in the same breath as Howard,’ he says.

‘We came fourth in our first season and then he won it, beating the best manager the world has ever seen. It’s phenomenal. That’s never been done with a promoted team.’

Certainly, Leeds supporters will never forget their own class of ’92, who brought the club their first title in 18 years. It remains their last major honour.

‘Leeds fans come up to me and say, “Sorry to bother you”,’ says Strachan. ‘I always reply, “You’re not bothering me, you’ve made my day”.’