Ian Rush and Tony Yeboah at the high point of optimism

I own a poster, and I owned it once before, and it might be the most optimistic image of the 1990s. It's a photograph of two strikers standing in a lush green field, with trees behind them, at Leeds United's recently fully opened Thorp Arch training centre. One is Ian Rush, wearing a box-fresh all-white Leeds United kit with yellow and blue trim, made by iconic sportswear company Puma, sponsored by personal computer company Packard Bell. Next to Rush is Tony Yeboah, wearing the white kit's yellow inverse. Both shirts feature the classic white rose badge Leeds wore when winning the Second and First Division titles a few years before; the shirt cuffs and the socks include the beloved LUFC script logo from back when Leeds won the FA Cup in 1972. They each have their hands on their hips, standing upright, turning in towards each other — Rush a little taller, a little further forward, to be expected from a new signing who had just claimed squad number 9. He has the tongues of his boots flipped up to show the Nike logos, while Yeboah — the team's star player, Leeds United's no.21 — keeps his Puma Kings pushed down, and they're partly hidden by a splashy caption reading: 'Rush & Yeboah — Leeds United'.

The photo was taken, and a poster of it put up on my wall, in summer 1996. Pre-season, just after the Euro '96 tournament played in part at Elland Road, just after my sixteenth birthday. The version I own now is from Match magazine's poster mag spin-off, Big Shots!, which eschewed articles in favour of photos like this that you would carefully remove from the staples then blu-tack to the walls, consigning the rest — posters of no-marks from lesser clubs — to the bin. It's A3 size, and I bought it with a batch of other posters from eBay to replace what I think was the even bigger version of the same picture I had on my wall in 1996, the 'Giant Rushie & Yebo Poster' promised on the front of a copy of Leeds United's official magazine, that I still have without what sounds like an impossibly large poster. (Around this time, the official programme would come with wall-sized photos of players' heads.)

It's a weird image. It's a great image. God, Ian Rush was rubbish though. He'd scored 359 goals for Liverpool and Juventus before joining Leeds. For us, he scored three. And within months, in a game at Spurs, Tony Yeboah had pulled one of those yellow away shirts over his head after being substituted and flung it at manager George Graham, part of a horribly undignified exit for a wonderful player. However optimistic it made me feel at the time, it didn't last very long.

But as an image of pure optimism I don't think it can be bettered. Sure, Rush was 34, but Rushie & Yebo had potential. It didn't have to be a strike partnership in the traditional sense, of two centre-forwards linking up; it never felt like it was going to be that. It was going to be Tony Yeboah, blasting in volleys from thirty yards, and Ian Rush, popping up for tap-ins from three. It wouldn't matter if they never passed to each other, as long as Tomas Brolin was setting them up with dazzling assists. Yeboah would never stop scoring bangers. Rush would never stop scoring. Together? It was going to be madness.