The Rangers players were each on a £20,000 bonus, but Howard Wilkinson wasn't thinking that far ahead. He said he didn't even know how many teams would be in the Champions League. "I was too scared to think about it."
The team playing at Rangers were the champions, and after 69 seconds Gary McAllister made winning the European Cup feel like a real possibility.
The indignity is not necessarily his heritage or his puking, but that Leeds could just as easily signed any of a hundred other players who didn't look like Steve Bruce who would have been exactly the same.
Alan Thompson looked like everything when Leeds United were desperately trying to avoid relegation to League One in 2007. What he looked like, in essence, was a new Gordon Strachan.
Howard Wilkinson was never afraid that his way might be wrong — you could only do what you believed in and take your result. But if the result was that he was right, well, he absolutely loved that.
Outside Swansea, I doubt Alan Tate ever made anyone happier than he made Neil Warnock when he joined Leeds United.
Fate might not always give our captains everything they deserve, but the good ones aren't playing for fate. They're playing for us.
Alan Smith did play for twenty seasons, but only six were for his hometown club, and like so much of the Ridsdale and O'Leary years, he left more questions than answers about what might have been made of everything Leeds, and Smith, had going for them.
Sol Bamba, on his way out, was taking more responsibility for the club he was leaving than any of the people who actually held responsibility for it.
Marauding forward from left-back in the no.11 shirt, firing spectacular shots from long range, it always felt like the next game would be his game.