Alfie Haaland ⭑ From A-Z since '92
Haaland was serious about not taking things too seriously, and it was a big difference for Leeds to have a player in the middle with so much personality.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, then check out all the players featured so far on this page. Or you can keep going below, with me and Erling's dad.
One of Howard Wilkinson's odder oversights after 1992 was how he allowed the best midfield in the country to evaporate. Leeds United won the First Division with David Batty, Gary McAllister, Gary Speed and Gordon Strachan, plus experienced England international Steve Hodge on the bench. In the summer Wilko added Arsenal and England's David Rocastle for a record fee, and even utility waif Scott Sellars. And then he let them all leave, one by one.
The last to go, Gary McAllister, might have taken Wilkinson by surprise. Leeds had spent a record fee for a teenager on Charlton's Lee Bowyer to add energy around the playmaking captain, but as a disputed takeover dragged through the summer courts McAllister got an offer from Strachan at Coventry that he couldn't refuse. When George Graham took over as manager a few months later, he found Bowyer homesick for whelks, Carlton Palmer a reckless liability, that Lucas Radebe was not a midfielder and that the youth team Marks Ford, Jackson and Tinkler were not up to the Premier League.
Graham's summer '97 rebuild was brought to Leeds by the letter H: Jimmy Hasselbaink up front, David Hopkin and Alf-Inge Haaland in midfield. We'll deal with David Robertson another time. After Mark Ford's desperation to impress in previous seasons, Haaland's introduction to central midfield was a revelation of confidence. A big strong Norwegian with masses of yellow hair, Haaland was surprisingly swift and unsurprisingly clumsy, and one of his key abilities was making that other people's problem. Like a badly trained labrador he raced around the pitch mixing fun and aggression, dominating between the boxes, scoring goals and stopping goals and annoying a lot of people. Even worse for them, he'd go away laughing about it. Haaland was serious about not taking things too seriously, and after two seasons of drift, it made a big difference for Leeds to have a player in the middle with so much personality.
He was an easy player to enjoy, but somehow his outward geniality kept finding trouble. It had taken a year for Nottingham Forest to bring him to England, after once-briefly-Leeds manager Brian Clough had apparently spotted him on television playing for Norway Under-21s against England. He was photographed in October 1992 arriving at the City Ground in a shirt, tie and brown donkey jacket, shaking hands at the club entrance with Clough and his assistant Ron Fenton. Fenton may have had good reason to smile: a couple of years later, agent Rune Hauge was found by an FA inquiry to have 'bunged' him a £45,000 'commission' — the same agent whose £425,000 'bung' had got George Graham sacked by Arsenal and banned from football for a year. The actual transfer of Haaland didn't go through until December 1993, after Clough and Fenton had relegated Forest from the Premier League and Frank Clark had taken over, when the Tricky Trees had a new Roy Keane shaped hole in their midfield. Within a season they had been promoted, and Haaland had been punched in training by Stan Collymore.