Mighty Leeds Weblog

FLYING Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman The high-speed handbrake turn from Leeds United against Aston Villa to Leeds United against Norwich City was already remarkable before the squealing doughnuts of stoppage time. Out beyond listless on Thursday night, into useless, Leeds had turned it round from the start against Norwich, and they had to. Jesse Marsch’s aggressive pressing explains his focus on high morale, clear thinking, reducing stress: it’s almost impossible to play his way, running twenty yards full speed to tackle a centre-back, in a bad mood. There will be downsides to this. Marsch emphasises that football is “a business for men”, which it is not. And because his style of play is entwined with demanding a particular kind of positive mental masculinity, it positions stress and depression as part of a kind of anti-masculinity, which is one of those ideas that leads to silent mental health agonies among young men when they’re told depression is weakness and to ‘man...

Richard Sutcliffe FOR Ken Bates, the past eight or so years as Leeds United chairman have been far from easy. The return to the Premier League he targeted on day one after riding to the rescue as the Elland Road club threatened to buckle under ruinous debts has, much to his frustration, proved elusive. He has also been the subject of a hate campaign that led to the United chairman’s mobile phone number having to be changed along with that of his fax machine in Monaco. Despite all that, the 81-year-old insists his time as Elland Road chairman has been a happy one and that he remains proud of many things. Not least, that Leeds still has a football club to support. “Leeds, as a club, were on their last legs,” recalls Bates when asked by the Yorkshire Post about the deal that saw him take charge of United on January 21, 2005. “If I hadn’t taken over, the club would have gone into liquidation. I am certain of that. The tax debts alone were terrible and there just wasn’t the money abo...

By Richard Sutcliffe AS a jobbing freelance journalist at the start of the Millennium, I was part of the editorial team that used to put together the Leeds United matchday programme. It was back in the days when Elland Road hosted Premier League football, so meant I had a ringside seat as the club slid from the Champions League to the Championship inside the space of three often chaotic years. Part of my duties during what turned out to be United’s final two seasons before relegation was to compile a quiz for all the players and staff to take part in across the nine months of the campaign. The winners in what became a keenly-fought contest were Nick Barmby and Dominic Matteo. It isn’t, however, the prowess of either man when it came to answering questions about the club’s history, their team-mates and the Premier League that is my outstanding memory of that period. Instead, it is the week when Mark Viduka took part. The Australian international was, I’ll admit, one of my favourit...

By Phil Hay Leeds United will face of compensation bill of £2.5million if they move to appoint Gus Poyet as their next manager, the YEP understands. A seven-figure release clause in Poyet’s contract will complicate any attempt by Leeds to prise the Uruguayan away from Brighton and name him as Neil Warnock’s successor. Poyet is on the short-list of candidates drawn up by Leeds to replace Warnock, who left his role as Leeds boss after Monday’s night’s defeat to Derby County, and reports yesterday claimed the ex-United assistant would be interested in the vacancy at Elland Road. Brighton are on course to qualify for the Championship play-offs and Poyet, who led Albion to promotion from League One in 2011, is unlikely to consider leaving The Amex Stadium at the expense of a season in the Premier League but Leeds could make a formal approach for him if the Sussex club remain in England’s second tier. Any bid to recruit Poyet would be a test of the financial clout of United owner GFH Ca...

By Thom Drake Neil Warnock has quit as manager of Leeds after admitting that it would appease the fans if he was not in charge for the remaining games in the season. Their 2-1 loss at home to Derby meant it was three defeats in a row and Leeds are now looking behind them to make sure they avoid relegation rather than chasing down a play-off place. A statement on the club website said: 'Leeds United have parted company with Neil Warnock with six games of the season to go. LEEDS' RECENT FORM Leeds 1-2 Derby Ipswich 3-0 Leeds Leeds 1-2 Huddersfield Leeds 1-1 Peterborough Crystal Palace 2-2 Leeds Leicester 1-1 Leeds Chief Executive Shaun Harvey, said: 'We would like to thank Neil for his efforts during his time as our manager and share his disappointment that we could not achieve promotion this season. Speculation over the future of Warnock had increased after the match as he made it clear that he was unlikely to stay much longer at the club. Speaking to Yorksh...

What I Learnt This Week Neil Warnock I went shopping on Thursday. When I picked up some toilet roll it was a packet of six. Sharon said: ‘Don’t you think you should just get two!’... ...we both started laughing. Two blokes alongside us started laughing. I said: "We've got Blackburn, Leicester and Palace coming up away from home so you're right, we'd better make it a two." Don't get me wrong, I want to stay at Leeds as long as I can. We have 15 games left and 15 games is a lot of points to play for. I think the play-offs are still a possibility. I'd like any manager to get more out of the group of players than I did against Blackpool; they gave me everything. One report said: "The contest opened up in front of a sparse Elland Road crowd..." – 25,500 on a Wednesday, on a freezing cold night! It was a fabulous crowd. The new owners put the prices down and it was fabulous to get that many there. After Sunday's FA Cup defeat to Manchester C...

By Leon Wobschall ROSS McCormack has urged Leeds United supporters not to lay the blame for the club’s indifferent recent results at the door of Neil Warnock – and says the players are culpable. United got their act together in highly-impressive fashion in Wednesday’s 2-0 home win over Blackpool which ended a four-match winless streak and kept their play-off hopes alive. While it was a key win in the context of United’s season, it was also for their under-fire manager, berated by fans in the recent defeats to Manchester City and Middlesbrough – which striker McCormack feels was unfair. He said: “We wanted to win for the supporters and for the gaffer too. “The stick he has been getting has not been nice and (the blame) it is really down to the players. The gaffer puts us on the pitch to go and deliver a performance. “Unfortunately, managers always get the blame. But it is really the players.” The much-needed home triumph moved United up four places to ninth and within six points ...

Leon Wobschall February 18 marked the first anniversary of Neil Warnock’s fraught time in charge of Leeds United. You would probably have struggled to find a more inauspicious occasion. Don’t expect for one minute that anything resembling a celebration – even in the loosest sense of the word – will have taken place at United’s Thorp Arch training ground among Warnock and his staff. Or for that matter among United’s multitude of the punch-drunk supporters, who suffered another blow to the solar plexus after witnessing the tortuous FA Cup exit at the hands of Manchester City in a TV shocker on Sunday afternoon. The milestone was truly a cursory one. While in an ideal world, Warnock would have been envisaging his side preparing for a definitive business end of the season which would hopefully culminate in a record eighth promotion to guild his hitherto impressive managerial career on his first anniversary, the reality has proved starkly different. And how. For the third time in the ...

Manchester City 4 Leeds United 0 Ian Herbert "Underneath, there's a bubbling inferno, ready to explode," Danny Mills had said before the game. Right observation. Wrong team. A match which seemed to have potential symbolism for Manchester City wherever you looked – a newly opened tram line yesterday to the stadium where Roberto Mancini appeared to be heading off the rails – instead left Leeds' Neil Warnock as the manager wondering why bother waiting until the summer to call it a day. Warnock offered applause to his club's supporters at the end – which was generous in the extreme, since their response of "Warnock, Warnock, time to go," was one they had used all afternoon. This was a fixture between clubs under Gulf ownership of vastly different kinds, with Dubai-based GFH Capital, who took over to wild Elland Road over-optimism in late December, already admitting they're short of cash. That kind of subtle point can be lost when a manager – one wh...

By John Edwards Michael Brown cannot be sure Leeds will add to this season’s catalogue of FA Cup shocks at the Etihad on Sunday, but he has a shrewd idea Neil Warnock will find a way of making them believe they can. He is just as certain it will be anything but orthodox. Warnock has form for springing cup upsets, and Brown has a vivid memory of the inimitable way he made it work in their days together at Sheffield United. 'We were playing Liverpool, a very strong Liverpool at that, and no-one gave us much chance,’ said the Leeds midfielder, ahead of the fifth- round tie at his first club, Manchester City. ‘We were in the dressing room shortly before kick-off, and Neil pinned up a team sheet and pointed to it. ‘He said, “Right, lads. This is the Liverpool line-up. I’ve just gone through the names, and you know what? I’d swap every single one of them for you lot!” ‘I don’t know whether it was reverse psychology or what, but we all fell about laughing. It relaxed us, and we wen...

YEP 14/2/13 By Peter Lorimer For a long time I listened to supporters telling me they wanted a change of ownership at Leeds United and wanted Ken Bates out. Well those fans got their wish eight weeks ago when GFH Capital bought the club. Yet now I hear United’s new owners coming in for stick as people make assumptions about what they’re doing and what they’re planning for the months ahead. Just to reiterate, they’ve been in charge at Elland Road for eight weeks. You can’t seriously tell me that a period of less than two months in the middle of the Championship season is a fair period of time on which to judge a takeover. There are always questions to be answered when it comes to the running of a major football club but there’s a need for patience and understanding too. All the same, I’m pleased that a couple of the new directors are holding a fans’ forum on Monday. You could hardly accuse them of ducking the public and the event’s an opportunity for anyone who attends to raise ...

Andy Peterson Despite the few positives of the takeover it's still pretty grim at Elland Rd, and I have no idea where we go from here... When the final whistle blew on Cardiff City’s 1-0 victory at Elland Road last Saturday there were many people with much to reflect on. For Malky Mackay it was all upside: new signing Frazier Campbell netting the winner after a misjudged clearance from Leeds United young right back Sam Byram, another win over United for the Blue/Redbirds and a ten point lead over the play off pack all represented satisfying aspects of your archetypal job done result. Having tasted defeat at home for the first time in three months his opposite number Neil Warnock, was suitably disgruntled with an insipid performance from Premier League referee Mike Dean, who waved away a couple of dubious penalty appeals. Whilst maintaining a reasonable amount of pressure on the Cardiff goal in the second half, his charges best chance came through Everton loanee Ross Barkley, who ...

Phil Hay Luciano Becchio looks set to depart for Turkey before the end of the transfer window after Leeds United left him out of their brilliant FA Cup win over Tottenham Hotspur. The club’s leading scorer did not attend Elland Road for the fourth-round tie and he is understood to be pressing Leeds to bow to repeated approaches from the Turkish Premier League. United have rejected three bids from an unnamed club in Turkey while also turning down an offer from a side in China but Becchio’s departure in the final days of January seems inevitable after his omission from the clash with Spurs. The 29-year-old forward submitted a transfer request last week after turning down a new three-and-a-half year contract and learning of foreign interest in him. Leeds offered to improve the wage of their highest earner but claimed Becchio was asking for a salary “beyond a level we could support”. His agent, Horacio Rossi, responded to that claim over the weekend by saying the improvement in Becch...

A manager with no money, a chairman with no buyer – the agonies go on for a club with the potential to be one of the biggest Steve Tongue Ten years ago this weekend, there were the first signs that life at Leeds United was beginning to fall apart. Having started 2002 as Premier League leaders, then missed out on the Champions' League football that a £60 million debt necessitated, the side managed by Terry Venables suffered a 4-2 home defeat on 17 November by the bottom club, Bolton, in front of a crowd that for once that season had dropped below 40,000. But the most pessimistic of fans could still not have imagined that the subsequent collapse would involve administration, 25 points deducted, three seasons in League One and nine managers in almost as many years – let alone Ken Bates. Ten years on, after a decade of trauma, the team sit in the bottom eight of the Championship hoping to beg or borrow a player or two, and with the last home attendance of 19,104 having witnessed a 6...

Phil Hay Leeds United were working to tie down a high-profile signing today with manager Neil Warnock ready to sacrifice all other loan targets if the club secure a deal. Warnock has moved for the unnamed player after asking Leeds to ensure that at least one new signing arrives at Elland Road before the Football League’s emergency loan deadline passes on November 22. The United manager, who has been told by chairman Ken Bates to beginning identifying targets for January with a takeover of the Championship club pending, warned that immediate additions were necessary to give his team a “fighting chance in the second half of the season” and prevent Leeds from “treading water” in the weeks between the end of the loan window and the turn of the year. United fell to 15th in the Championship after losing to Burnley on Tuesday night, a defeat which extended the club’s run without a league win to five matches. Warnock admitted after the game at Turf Moor that he had no expectation of signi...

LEEDS United manager Neil Warnock has renewed his appetite for Cup football. His side put their patchy league form behind them in their 3-0 Capital One Cup triumph over Southampton and Warnock is setting his sights on winning the competition. “We have talked about getting as far as we can and if we get beat, we get beat. I haven’t really tried in the Cup for a few years,” said Warnock after seeing his side cruise into the last eight. Warnock was referring to his Sheffield United side’s run to the last four of both the FA and League Cups in 2003. Since then, he has shared Southampton manager Nigel Adkins’s views on rotation, and had sympathy with his opposite number at Elland Road. “I’ve been in Nigel’s position at QPR, where you wonder about your team and your Premier League position, which is more important financially,” he said. “It is a conundrum, but we can only beat who is put in front of us.” Southampton are struggling in the Premier League, but the players who were involv...

hil Hay Phil Hay As Neil Warnock exited his post-match press conference, a Barnsley supporter in the corridor outside told the Leeds United manager to consider himself lucky. Warnock gave the comment some thought. “The harder you work the luckier you get,” he said. “In that case,” the supporter replied, “you must work harder than anyone.” They both had a point. Barnsley left Elland Road on Saturday aggrieved at the scoreline, the referee and the rub of the green but Warnock saw United’s win in a different context. “That’s our seventh game in about three weeks,” he said. “What we’ve done in that time is quite phenomenal.” If that overstated United’s form then the Championship table did not. Through a tangle of fixtures and multiple injuries, Leeds reached the season’s second international break in seventh position, with as many points as Huddersfield Town in sixth and four fewer than Cardiff City in first. The debate over Barnsley’s misfortune promptly sucked Warnock in. “I don’t t...