Anatomy of a super-team: behind the scenes at Leeds United in 1971 (part one)
Here's a look behind the scenes at Elland Road close to the peak of United's greatest era, with a different focus to most looks at Leeds.
Here's a look behind the scenes at Elland Road close to the peak of United's greatest era, with a different focus to most looks at Leeds.
Smith, Milner, Lennon. Twenty-three, seventeen, sixteen. Rothwell, Horsforth, Chapeltown. 2004 wasn't only a battle against relegation, and liquidation, but to save the future that the club's youth prospects still teased was possible.
Welcome to the start of a project that will take approximately (checks calculations), oh, only eight years, to write about every (*most) Leeds player since 1992. And it all begins with Aapo Halme.
What we should have done then, Leeds fans and Terry Venables, was go out somewhere together (one of Terry’s nightclubs) and get hideously drunk together (so he could pick up the bill).
Gnonto's actions are disrespectful to the shirt, the badge, the city; at Harewood House, the peacocks in the woods there weep. There is something to all that. But Leeds United's history also says that, historically, we can get over it.
It was Bielsa’s Leeds, and he let us have it. It was a gift to us from a generous soul. And I, a selfish bastard, don’t want him to give anything like that gift to anybody I don’t like.
A report in The Independent listed the talented youngsters ready to come through. ‘But’, it concluded, ‘it is financial clout that is likely to determine whether George Graham stays to see them grow.’
'Bowyer for England!' the Leeds fans chanted. Then, to the same tune, 'Sign your contract!' Finally, even louder, 'Sign your contract for the lads!'
In the build up to the game Howard Wilkinson was eating at Flying Pizza, when a woman at a nearby table slumped, as the Daily Mirror put it, 'lifeless to the floor.'
An important win for Liverpool, maybe, but Johnny Giles didn't say what he was thinking: that they'd have never been happy with that at Leeds.