Rebooted: O’Leary said he didn’t want Leeds job – then christened himself ‘Boss’ — The Athletic 2/4/20

By Phil Hay

The rumours were rife and the pin-point detail in George Graham’s pre-match spiel gave the game away.

He would not usually overanalyse the opposition, but there was nothing he couldn’t tell Leeds United’s squad about their next fixture. Graham knew too much. The job at Tottenham Hotspur was his.

His players suspected as much. They’d read newspaper after newspaper naming him as Tottenham’s choice to replace Christian Gross. The build-up to Graham’s last league match as Leeds manager, a 3-3 draw at White Hart Lane in September 1998, merely confirmed the inevitable.

Robert Molenaar, one of his defenders, saw the writing on the wall. “He wasn’t someone who talked a lot about individual players, but before the game with Spurs, he told us everything,” Molenaar says. “It was so detailed, like he’d been studying them for a while. We weren’t stupid. We knew why he’d been looking so closely.”

The deal was ratified days later and, in a diplomatic sense, Graham was doing nothing by halves: an old and decorated Arsenal player and then manager abandoning Leeds and choosing to embed himself with the other club in north London. On one of his trips to White Hart Lane with Leeds, the team bus was attacked as it crawled past a pub full of Tottenham fans and, to quote Eddie Gray, “forced to do a runner”. But Graham willingly shook Alan Sugar’s hand and crossed the divide. No job too volatile or too political.

Back in Leeds, there was a general shrugging of shoulders. Peter Ridsdale, the club’s then-chairman, had tried to retain Graham and there was concern in the boardroom that the Scot would now make efforts to poach star players such as striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, but the relationship between Graham and the crowd at Elland Road was one of uninspired tolerance. The football would never be thrilling. Graham would never go the whole hog in using Leeds’ academy players. One day he would up sticks and that would be that.

Ridsdale took stock, agreed compensation with Spurs and threw in a telling comment as he mapped out his next step: “We have a very able assistant in David O’Leary.”

O’Leary was known to be deeply ambitious — and single-minded, to the point of ruthlessness. He was three years on from retiring as a player and, despite his association with Graham at Arsenal and Leeds, there was no suggestion he’d follow him to Spurs. Instead, Leeds gave him a run in caretaker charge and later committed to a permanent appointment, which inspired their last waltz before the club’s implosion. O’Leary’s credentials were consolidated this week in 1999, when he won the Premier League’s manager of the month award for March.

Initially, he was coy about his intentions. “I distinctly remember talking to him about the job in a corridor at Thorp Arch,” Molenaar says. “He kept saying the same thing: ‘I don’t want it, I’m not interested.’ So, at the time, it was a bit of a surprise that he took it. But when I look back now, I’m sure he was trying to see if there were enough grounds for him to replace George. He was trying to see if the players would support him and, you’d guess, make sure it didn’t look like he wanted the job if he didn’t get it.”

David Wetherall has the same memories. “It wasn’t a case of the players supporting his appointment or not supporting it, because as far as we were concerned, he didn’t want the job,” the former centre-back says. “He’d said quite openly that it wasn’t for him and he wasn’t in the running, so from then on the conversation in the dressing room was, ‘Who’s it going to be?’ None of us expected it to be him and if what he said was what he meant, neither did he.”

O’Leary, a former Republic of Ireland international, was known as “Paddy” to the players at Leeds and, in the traditions of a managerial assistant, stayed much closer to the squad than Graham. After he took charge, he called the players into a meeting in the canteen and gave them a short speech. “All he really said was, ‘From now on, I’m “Boss” — that’s what you call me,'” Molenaar says. “He didn’t speak much about a big change of tactics or in the style of play — at least, not in that meeting. But pretty soon, in training, we started to see the difference.”

Graham was famously defensively minded, the inventor of the famed Arsenal back four. Times were changing in football but his outlook had not, and he liked Leeds to think hard about how they should play without the ball. O’Leary quickly shifted the emphasis to retaining possession and using it to hurt the opposition. The best of the younger players generated by Leeds’ academy — Harry Kewell, Jonathan Woodgate, Stephen McPhail, Alan Smith — were suited to having the ball at their feet and O’Leary made the most of that coaching. “For the club, it was a good thing,” Molenaar says. “Those players needed to play like that.”

Gunnar Halle, a midfielder whom Graham signed from Oldham Athletic a few months after taking charge of Leeds in 1996, feels the Scot’s conservatism was required at the start of his reign. “He had this reputation for being a bit boring, but when he became manager, the team wasn’t in a good way,” Halle says. “They were losing games, so the first thing he wanted to fix was how the team played defensively. He tried to get some discipline and then think about other things.” In Graham’s first season, Leeds scored just 28 league goals and contested nine goalless draws.

“With David, we didn’t get this dramatic change at first,” Halle says. “It wasn’t like everything changed from one day to the next, but he was more offensive in the way he thought. He also had the benefit of working with George, so he knew what to do defensively. And yes, he used more of the young players. That was important.”

Leeds courted Martin O’Neill while O’Leary was caretaker, but O’Neill remained loyal to Leicester City. There were other proven candidates too, including former Leeds player Gordon Strachan, but Ridsdale was swayed into appointing O’Leary by the team’s performance in a UEFA Cup defeat to Roma in Italy. After 18 months as Graham’s assistant, O’Leary got the job. “There were doubts originally,” he admitted, “but everyone has been supportive.”

“It was natural for him to want to be manager after George left,” Halle says. “The more you work as an assistant, the more you learn and the more you want to be a manager yourself.” Leeds won five of O’Leary’s first six league games, including a 3-1 over Liverpool at Anfield in which a young Smith came off the bench and scored his first goal. The results held up and O’Leary was named manager of the month after Leeds took all 12 points from their four March fixtures.

“The most positive aspect was the kids coming through,” Wetherall says. “It came at a cost to me, because I left at the end of that season. Woodgate was on the rise, so he and Lucas Radebe were going to play. I wasn’t going to get much game time. I have to admit that if I was choosing between an outstanding prospect like Woody and me at my best, I’d be choosing Woody too. That’s football.

“But Eddie Gray came to the fore and it’s probably safe to assume that him being in the first-team picture helped those kids no end. The football was different, no question. George liked a lot of defenders in his team, some in midfield or centre-backs at full-back. With David, there was a change in philosophy and no one can dispute that what came next was exciting.”

O’Leary’s legacy at Leeds is so complex that a one-size-fits-all verdict is impossible to reach.

The club’s supporters remember his football as some of the best they have seen in 30 years. Since Leeds’ Division One title win in 1992, only current boss Marcelo Bielsa has created comparable electricity. But within the game, O’Leary’s manner and personality made enemies. Ridsdale later claimed that by the time O’Leary was sacked in 2002, as many as 10 players were refusing to play for him. The Yorkshire Evening Post marked his dismissal with a scathing editorial, accusing O’Leary of “toe-curling arrogance”. His next job, at Aston Villa, was his last in English football, and his only post since then was a nine-month stint at Shabab Al-Ahli Dubai FC in the 2010-11 season.

Before that there were happier times; times when anything seemed possible — league titles, European Cups, the trophies which were never lifted. Molenaar says O’Leary opened the door to ambition, even though it meant the end for players like himself (the following season, Leeds paid West Ham £18 million for Rio Ferdinand).

“It’s pretty simple,” Molenaar says. “The football shifted from defence to dominance. Because of the shift, Leeds were playing this great attacking style and going for prizes. Who doesn’t want that?”