Terry Venables at Leeds — Square Ball 27/11/23

EL TEL

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

I don’t know if Terry Venables had many encounters with Leeds fans in the years after he was sacked from managing the club, in 2003. He wasn’t the sort of manager, or character, many United fans would seek out for company. I can imagine some awkward glances across Mediterranean hotel bars. A Leeds fan spotting that trademark perma-tan, those gleaming teeth; Venables spying a white shirt, a Yorkshire rose tattoo. Maybe mutual nods of recognition, then each turning away. It would be a shame, because if Venables ever did sit down with a Leeds fan to compare notes from his time in charge, I can imagine a lot of common ground. ‘I never knew things were so bad until I got there,’ Venables might say. ‘We never knew things were so bad until you got here,’ we might reply.

In some ways Venables was a dream managerial appointment, but that 2002/03 season woke everybody up. We had, as chairman Peter Ridsdale famously put it, while Venables was sighing heavily next to him at a televised press conference, “lived the dream”. Venables could — maybe should — have made our dreams come true. For Ridsdale and the board, this was the chance to put their stamp on the football club, rather than David O’Leary’s. When O’Leary got the job, he was just George Graham’s assistant, with a crowd of kids and a midas touch — while Ridsdale tried spinning it as a masterstroke, there was no denying that after Leicester’s Martin O’Neill had turned him down, there had been no other option but to try O’Leary and get lucky. Now Leeds United — and Leeds United plc — were leaving luck behind. Terry Venables was no punt. Venables was the well regarded former Tottenham and Barcelona manager, coach of the most exciting England national team in modern times. While O’Leary had spent his summer punditry gig at the World Cup talking himself out of favour and work, Venables had cultivated charm as a second career since the 1960s, singing, running nightclubs and boutiques, talking on the television. At times he had needed that charm, as he was hauled into the High Court for financial mismanagement, including his move from team manager to chief executive at Tottenham. He might not have fit many Leeds fans’ idea of a Leeds United manager — not just a cockney, but the widest of their kind — but he fit Peter Ridsdale’s idea of what he thought Leeds United should become: a player.

The problem, well, one of the problems, was that Ridsdale was playing Venables, and did it too well. Venables was not Ridsdale’s choice for the job — he’d tried again to get Martin O’Neill. But O’Neill was committed to the last year of his contract with Celtic, and Venables’ charm did its work on Ridsdale, to a point. He was given a two-year contract, but with a break option after one, Ridsdale apparently keeping the door open for his first choice. Until then Leeds needed a manager for right now, and Venables was the best option, but because Leeds needed him more than he needed the work — he missed part of pre-season filming a holiday programme with Judith Chalmers — Ridsdale did his own big sales job on football’s big salesman. It got Venables through the door. But you can’t kid a kidder for long.

The plan for summer, as Venables understood it, was that defender and captain Rio Ferdinand would be staying, despite all the public and private indications that he was moving to Old Trafford. Other players would be sold instead, raising enough money to fill the club’s shortfalls during another year without Champions League football, and leaving cash spare for Venables to spend. The way Venables told it, the illusion lasted as long as an embarrassing meeting with Ferdinand, to explain how the Leeds team would be built around him, ending with Rio breaking the news that while that all sounded very nice, he was off.

Ferdinand went, and one by one Ridsdale’s for-sale list stayed. Summer moves for Lee Bowyer, Olivier Dacourt, Gary Kelly and Robbie Keane all fell through — Keane eventually left in September — while Ridsdale created needless acrimony by telling a supporters’ meeting that David Batty was effectively retired through injury, which was news to Batty, who threatened legal action. Players who wanted to stay had been offered around then kept. Players who wanted to leave had been told to stay. Players who stayed were annoyed with players who left. Players were eyeing each other’s wage packets, their status, thinking about transfers and trophies. Players who had been upset by the club’s handling of Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate’s court case were still angry with the board. Everywhere Venables looked there were pissed off players letting off steam that had been building up for months, if not years.

It’s Venables’ fault that rather than fix things, he made them worse. His first attempt at enforcing discipline was benching Nigel Martyn, who didn’t want to travel to Australia for a pre-season tour when he’d just got back from the World Cup in Japan and South Korea. That denied the team arguably the club’s greatest ever goalkeeper. He escalated arguments with Dacourt, offering to ‘drive him to Italy myself’. One move Venables got right was dropping Bowyer, after a stamp on a Malaga player in the UEFA Cup that the referee missed, Bowyer’s last act of petulance in a now impossible relationship with Leeds. But that meant Venables was at odds with an entire first choice midfield — Bowyer, Batty and Dacourt — and in the next game his own midfield signing, Paul Okon, made his second start in Bowyer’s place. It soon looked like two too many.

Amid the acrimony were some good early results, and tactical ideas and training sessions that several players later said were a level above anything they’d experienced before. The level of talent waiting in the Academy was something else that didn’t match ‘the brochure’ Venables said Ridsdale had sold him, but sifting through the age groups he came up with sixteen-year-old James Milner, a bright goalscorer in wins over Sunderland and Chelsea as Leeds won four and drew one over Christmas, quieting the shouts at Elland Road for Venables to go. His coaching could still be sharp. But the club was becoming unmanageable.

The story of United’s collapse is not really about Terry Venables. The January transfer window repeated summer, as moves collapsed, promises were broken, and players Ridsdale told Venables he could keep were sold. At the end of January, after Ridsdale accepted Newcastle’s bid for Jonathan Woodgate, Venables was an angry contributor to the infamous press conference, broadcast live on Sky, when Ridsdale made his ‘lived the dream’ speech. To fans watching at the time, they looked like a single enemy across the table, joint representatives of the nightmare Leeds was becoming. Watching it again, though, and knowing what we know now, Venables looks more like a mirror of the fans’ own feelings, suffering with us through Ridsdale’s attempts at people-pleasing self-justifications. “As a supporter I did not want to take the offer,” for Woodgate, he said, but, “I have a primary responsibility to the shareholders”. Venables was rolling his eyes, and furrowing his brow, and biting his tongue, and gritting his teeth, and looking as angry and gloomy as any Leeds fan looked, watching on their televisions, watching him.

The problem at the time was that it felt like having Terry Venables in charge of Leeds United, this unwanted wideboy from the south, was just another part of the gloom. And for Venables, I imagine being in charge of Leeds, when he could have been in the Algarve working on his television career, felt the same. Six weeks later Ridsdale sacked Venables, appointed Peter Reid as manager, and after he lost his first game, resigned as chairman. What we should have done then, Leeds fans and Terry Venables, was go out somewhere together (one of Terry’s nightclubs) and get hideously drunk together (so he could pick up the bill) to get everything into the open and, at the end of the night, agree this whole thing had been a terrible idea, shake hands, and go our separate ways.