Andy Lonergan ⭑ From A-Z since '92
Opinions of Lonergan did improve once everyone remembered he wasn't Rachubka, he was the other one. That still meant shivering memories of the 3-7 to Forest, and scepticism after he'd seemed to struggle with the pressure of playing for Leeds.
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, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
Or you can keep going below, with me and a safer pair of hands than Felix Wiedwald (sort of).
How much history changed when Andy Lonergan fractured his finger?
He was going along just fine as Leeds United's new goalkeeper, bought from Preston North End for around £300,000 to replace Kasper Schmeichel in 2011. He wasn't as obviously good a goalie as Schmeichel, but he didn't have a father we historically hated and he was good enough to keep United's other new 'keeper, Paul Rachubka, out of the team. A goal-and-a-half a game was perhaps too many to be conceding, but that was as much to do with Darren O'Dea and the other penny-pinched centre-backs chairman Ken Bates was grudgingly allowing as it was to do with the goalkeeper. Lonners was making some good saves with no significant dramas so if Simon Grayson could just either fix the defence, buy some new defenders, or keep his forward line scoring more than the back lads let in, things would go along just fine.
Lonergan kept his first clean sheet of the season in a 1-0 win over Portsmouth at the start of October, then didn't let anything Doncaster hit go past him in a 3-0 win at the Keepmoat. He only played that match until the 77th minute, though. That's when Lonergan went off the field with a fractured finger. That's when Paul Rachubka came on in his place.
This isn't about Paul Rachubka, although so much of that period was. A win at Coventry was thrown away. A 3-2 win at Peterborough needed a last minute winner after two mistakes for two goals. Defeat to Birmingham by a single goal that was his fault. And then the 5-0 defeat to Blackpool at Elland Road when his Leeds career had to end, for his sake and ours, at half-time, and after which Simon Grayson never quite seemed able to restore order.
Maybe it was always going to end for Grayson that season, and end the way it did, because Ken Bates was always going to carry on undermining his efforts, always going to accept a bid for Jonny Howson in January. But maybe the tone could have been different. Maybe the end of Grayson's reign didn't have to be mired in events like making Lonergan captain after Howson left, only for new manager Neil Warnock to take it off him again to the goalie's great relief.
"I don't mean this to sound disrespectful to the Leeds fans, but I didn't want the armband," Lonergan said. "It was a great privilege; a brilliant privilege at a massive club and no-one can take that away from me. But I was happy to give it to someone else. I did it at Preston but that was different. It was at a smaller club. With the Leeds captaincy there's a lot more to it. I felt that when I was captain I was under pressure to communicate more than I should. I just wanted to concentrate on my own job."
It was already the second odd outburst of Lonergan's brief time at a club where he was was trying to deal with more pressure than he'd known growing up at Preston. When he'd come back into the side, taking over from the loanee Alex McCarthy, it had been in a 1-0 defeat to Reading. Lonergan wasn't particularly at fault for the goal, and although his kicking had gone a bit all over most people were glad to see him back and he'd made some decent saves. But that wasn't how Lonergan saw it. He didn't think he'd done enough to keep McCarthy, who'd been ineligible against his parent club, out of the team. "Not after that," he said. "To be honest, I don't deserve to. I was poor. I feel like I'm starting from scratch again and I'm upset because that was my chance to get back in the team."
Grayson did stick with Lonergan, and so did Warnock, even after taking the captaincy off him and even after he conceded seven to Nottingham Forest in the biggest defeat Leeds had ever suffered at Elland Road. To be fair to Lonergan, he wasn't to blame for much of that night's disaster, or that in the coming summer Neil Warnock was going to do what he always did and sign Paddy Kenny. After Kenny's arrival Lonergan took himself off to Bolton, Fulham and Wolves, popping up against Leeds to concede a penalty while playing for the Trotters, and a Lewis Cook thunderbastard for the Cottagers. He hadn't made himself first choice at any of those clubs, though, and at Wolves, in his own words, "I had a stinker there. I was shite. I was crap for a season. I couldn't play well. I had a two year contract and I told them after one year, just let me go because it's not working for anyone."
There wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm in West Yorkshire, then, when Lonergan's escape route from Wolves led him back to Leeds. Opinions did improve once everyone remembered he wasn't Rachubka, he was the other one. That still meant shivering memories of the 3-7 to Forest, and scepticism after he'd seemed to struggle with the pressure of playing for Leeds. For Lonergan, Leeds was a known quantity and closer to his home in the north-west. ("I'm not daft like," he's told one podcast, "But I thought Wolves was closer to Preston than it is.") But it meant sticking with life as a back-up unless, somehow, he could dislodge the Peacocks' new number one, Felix Wiedwald.