Tony on Tony — Square Ball 18/1/25

Soul Deep

Words by: Rob Conlon

At the start of 1995, Howard Wilkinson was being compared to the Decca Records executive Dick Rowe, better known as The Man Who Turned Down The Beatles. Leeds United were 8th in the Premier League, but there had been little festive cheer at Elland Road. In their four league games following Christmas, Leeds failed to score a single goal.

‘The game needed warmth, and there was neither the talent nor the temperament nor the weather to supply that,’ Simon Barnes wrote in The Times after a 0-0 draw with Aston Villa in the middle of that dour run. ‘The hard cold weather made for hard cold football, and nobody had the skill, let alone the personality, to warm things up — both sides suffered debilitating attacks of goal-shyness, a mysterious and terrible affliction that descends from nowhere to disturb individuals, teams and matches.’

Like many of the fans who were now questioning Wilkinson’s judgement, Barnes was finding it hard to believe that not so long ago this was the home of the champions of England and a certain Eric Cantona, who Wilkinson had willingly waved off over the Pennines. ‘It is a matter that goes soul deep,’ he wrote. ‘For Cantona can do tricks not just with the ball, but with an entire team. He is a catalyst, whose force of personality is at its best on the most humdrum of occasions. He seeks the humdrum and transforms it into gold.’

But Cantona was now elsewhere, like so many of Leeds’ title-winning team. David Batty had been sold. Lee Chapman had been put out to pasture. Gordon Strachan was due to retire as a player at the end of the season and was struggling to get on the pitch. Tony Dorigo, Gary McAllister, and Gary Speed were still trying their best, but they needed help — and more importantly someone to finish the chances they were creating. Brian Deane, Phil Masinga, and Noel Whelan were chipping in with goals, but with neither the regularity nor conviction to inspire their manager, teammates, or supporters.

After the draw with Villa, Leeds had scored 29 goals in the 23 league games. It was only two more than their opponents, who were in the relegation zone. Even Wilkinson was on record admitting that if United were to start competing at the top of the table again then they needed a goalscorer, and the man so often criticised for being as cautious as the football his team were playing was willing to take a risk.

By the end of January, Cantona was facing an eight-month ban for kung-fu kicking a Crystal Palace fan, and Leeds were unveiling their new record signing: Anthony Yeboah. The comparisons were immediate. “There’s no doubt Tony can make the same impact as Cantona,” Wilkinson said. “He comes to English football in similar circumstances, and, if anything, his pedigree and track record suggest he’s a more consistent performer.” Yeboah had finished the previous two seasons as the Bundesliga’s joint top scorer and was wanted by Bayern Munich, but he’d left Eintracht Frankfurt in the portent of a fallout with manager Jupp Heynckes. Leeds were committing £3.4m for Yeboah’s signature, but acknowledged the gamble by first taking him on a six-month loan and agreeing to a break clause in his contract after twelve months in case he failed to settle.

Wilkinson had never seen Yeboah playing in the flesh and had only watched videos of his goalscoring talents. The rest of the squad were no different.

“To be honest, we hadn’t heard of him until he signed,” says Tony Dorigo. “We didn’t really know his history or too much about him. What we soon worked out very quickly in training was that he was one strong, strong guy, and his finishing was exemplary. The power that he had with very little backlift was exceptional.

“Clearly the sharpness and all that sort of stuff, he needed to work at that. But he was an archetypal striker in that he saved his energy for when he needed it, let’s put it that way. He wouldn’t be tearing around the pitch closing people down. In every long-distance running discipline in training, Yobo was way at the back. We were trying to get him to hurry up. We’d have to wait for him to come in and he’d be knackered. But the last bit would be thirty-metre sprints and there he was flying, beating everyone because everyone else actually was tired and he wasn’t.

“He would very much play to his strengths and he seemed to come alive when there was a chance of a goal. Simple as that. It’s interesting because now you look at certain strikers and their all-round games, but sometimes you actually just want someone in the middle of those posts, putting the ball in the back of the net. That’s what he was, but he could do it in lots of different ways.”

It wasn’t just Yeboah’s finishing that stood out to the rest of the Leeds squad.

“I remember distinctly the gear that Yobo used to wear,” Dorigo says. “He had some rascal Versace gear. There was a dark green suit in particular, but the shirt was purple and had green and gold swirls. I needed sunglasses to look at the darn thing, let alone go out wearing it. He loved it and he looked great. He just had a smile on him all the time and he was always calm. He was quietly spoken, but there was an inner confidence in him.”

That inner confidence proved infectious. Yeboah’s impact on Leeds was transformational even before he got in the team. His presence in training and in the stands while he waited for his debut jolted goals from United’s other strikers, Masinga coming off the bench to score an extra-time hat-trick in a 5-2 win against Walsall in the FA Cup, before scoring twice in a 4-0 win against QPR as Leeds emphatically ended their wait for a league goal. Deane also netted in both games, but with Yeboah making a late cameo against QPR in his first appearance for the club, they were soon to be overshadowed by the new hero that Elland Road had been craving.

After getting off the mark in a FA Cup defeat at Old Trafford in February, Yeboah went on a run of thirteen goals in seventeen appearances, taking less than four months to end the season as Leeds’ top goalscorer. “I’m usually more excited than he is,” Dorigo told The Independent after creating Yeboah’s third goal in a hat-trick display against Ipswich. “I want to shout, ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ But he’s incredible. He just relaxes and tucks it in.”

Thanks to Yeboah’s goals, Leeds finished 5th and qualified for the UEFA Cup, and his performances unsurprisingly attracted interest from clubs who were suddenly envious of the Peacocks’ talisman. “I had an offer from Manchester United,” he told the Daily Mail in 2020. “But I decided to stay at Leeds because of the way the fans treated me. I couldn’t have gone to any other club.” In Wilkinson, Yeboah had a manager giving him everything he ever wanted. “He was my best coach. He always told the players, ‘Give the ball to Tony and let Tony score our fucking goals for us.’”

But Yeboah was only just getting started. In the first six weeks of his first full season in England, he went supersonic. Has there ever been a more spectacular burst of finishing? On the opening day of the campaign, he scored a brace at West Ham including a thunderous half-volley that flashed past goalkeeper Ludek Miklosko before he could even react. Two days later, on a Monday night at Elland Road, Dorigo’s long ball was knocked down by Rod Wallace onto Yeboah’s ‘weaker’ right foot, and he volleyed what was later named the greatest goal in the club’s history.

“I’m claiming the assist absolutely,” Dorigo laughs. “I mean that precise pass in the air to the big guy Rod Wallace was spot on. It’s nice every now and then when I see a clip of that. It leaves my left foot and I hoof it up. I loved it because the crossbar was rattling. They look so good when they hit the underside of the bar and then bounce back up. The atmosphere in the ground was great. It was a warm night. It was a brilliant game and a brilliant goal.”

Two weeks later, Leeds played their first tie back in Europe, travelling to face a strong Monaco team. Yeboah’s hat-trick is best remembered for his superb second goal, arcing the ball into the top corner from the edge of the box, leaving a fan behind the goal with his head in his hands in disbelief. Eleven days later, he was scoring another hat-trick at Wimbledon and threatening to break another crossbar with a striker that overshadowed the greatest goal of Carlton Palmer’s career in a 4-2 win.

“Boom, boom, boom!” says Dorigo. “It’s weird because it’s like he thought, ‘Right, flick the switch. I’m gonna get it down and I’m gonna just hit the darn thing. Control, control, control, and then boom. I think I was still injured with my hamstring, I didn’t play in that one, but yeah, watching that goal was amazing. Carlton also bent one into the far corner, that’s right. Are we sure it wasn’t a clearance, no?”

With Yeboah scoring another wondergoal against Sheffield Wednesday the following week, he’d created a career highlight reel to match any striker in the history of the game within the space of 43 days, and was still saving a treasured goal in a famous win over Scum for Christmas Eve. Yeboahmania had reached its peak. Having professed his love of a local delicacy, Leeds company Nordale Foods were promising Yeboah two giant Yorkshire puddings for every goal he scored, plus one for the rest of the team, and were preparing to deliver 120 puddings to Elland Road.

“I want to know where mine went!” Dorigo laughs. “I did not get any. Yobo must have liked them so much he had them all to himself. I think what’s important is that when a player comes to a foreign country and is trying to understand the culture and what have you, you need to have a real open mind. I think that’s what Yobo did in that he just accepted anything and everything and did it with good grace and a bit of a sense of humour and embraced it all.”

For a player whose impact on the club was so seismic, Yeboah made fewer than fifty league appearances for Leeds, scoring 32 goals in 66 appearances in all competitions. Dorigo left Leeds a month before Yeboah was sold to Hamburg in September 1997 having fallen out with George Graham — “Yobo being asked to battle up front on his own was never going to be a match made in heaven” — but they were reunited a few years ago.

“I did an evening with him, I think it must have been before Covid, over in the Elland Road Pavilion. It was great catching up with him. He looked a bit bigger, I have to say, he was carrying a bit more timber. I don’t think he recognised me initially because my hair had gone.”

The big question around Tony Yeboah at Leeds United has been discussed many a time: which goal was better, Liverpool or Wimbledon? But Dorigo answers that when I finish the interview by asking him for his favourite memory of his former teammate.

“For me it was just the big grin that he had. He was a happy soul anyway, but he was happiest when he was scoring goals. I think that Liverpool one, just seeing his reaction after that was great. He was a great member of the squad, a great guy to have around. His wife was really lovely too.

“You get certain types of characters — he was the ultimate goal machine, and you knew what that meant with him: I’m here to score goals. But when he did it, he did it with class and composure and with a smile on his face.”