Jump to content

The Leeds Thread


Guest The Ger

Recommended Posts

  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Leeds United player donates season tickets to children's ward.

Today was a special day for the young football fans who are currently spending time on the children's ward at Leeds General Infirmary.

Leeds United defender Pontus Jansson stopped by for a visit, and donated two seasons tickets to the ward for the children to use.
BBC

The 26-year-old Swedish international used his own money to pay for the two tickets, with the intention that each week a different family can come and watch the team play at Elland Road.
BBC

Jansson explained to BBC Radio Leeds what led him to make the gesture:

"When I was a kid, the biggest day during the week for me was the day I got to watch my team play. I hope, because of this these children can have the same feeling on Saturdays. It's a small thing for me to do, but I hope it makes a big difference."


:clap::clap::clap:

I hope the families and kids enjoy their day's at ER.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wood signs for Burnley for £15m plus add on's and Bridcutt signs for Forest for £1m so the revolving door keeps revolving.

I wonder who will be coming in to join as we badly need at least one striker if not two.

Still undefeated after 4 games and a league cup game tonight against Newport County before another Sky game on Saturday tea time at Forest.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Friend of mine and like minded Leeds fan has started a Facebook group with the intention of finding out how many people would be interested in joining a fan group to see if we can get a bus to games, even if it's just a few times a season. Search for Leeds United Scotland Fans, one of us will add you in if requested. Cheers

 

 

https://m.facebook.com/groups/124461821535380

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Friend of mine and like minded Leeds fan has started a Facebook group with the intention of finding out how many people would be interested in joining a fan group to see if we can get a bus to games, even if it's just a few times a season. Search for Leeds United Scotland Fans, one of us will add you in if requested. Cheers
 
 
https://m.facebook.com/groups/124461821535380


Good idea, theres also the Falkirk Whites who go down to a few games a season.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

We have an owner who has the vision to take us to the promised land and with the team he has assembled so far things are looking good.

Under previous managers yesterday would have been a hard fought 2-0 win but this team has flair and style and kept playing even when we were 5-0 up.

Also Happy Birthday to Mr Radrizzani for today.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From the Times who dont give the EFL much coverage:-




Leeds United are top of the second tier of English football for the first time since Howard Wilkinson was the manager and the fans were enthralled by David Batty and Gary Speed.

Early days, perhaps, but when your last decade has been one of unremitting misery it has got Leeds buzzing as a club and city. For the first time in history, Leeds have won four successive league games by at least two goals. They have kept six successive clean sheets. This is not bad work given that it was only May when Andrea Radrizzani completed his buyout from Massimo Cellino, a deranged businessman who had said he wanted “big balls” but brought in Dave Hockaday anyway.

Few clubs have been as mismanaged as Leeds United and, in modern football, that is saying something. In 2001 they played in the Champions League semi-final but by 2004 they were relegated from the top flight. Three years later they were in administration, docked points and down in League One. Given the history of hooliganism, the riots of Birmingham and Bournemouth, the Bradford chip van fire, the racism of the 1980s and the one-eyed revisionism of Don Revie and his team, few neutrals mourned this demise.

Yet fans everywhere should have felt sympathy at witnessing how self-serving egotists could take a community stronghold and fleece.

There was Peter Ridsdale, a fan with his heart in the right place but a misaligned brain, seguing into Ken Bates and his yo-yo approach to administration. The ground was sold. There has also been Professor John McKenzie trying to sack Peter Reid in the public glare of a Halifax hotel lobby and falling asleep at his first Premier League meeting.
Eyes were not on the ball, however big it may, or may not, have been.

GFH also had a stab at running the club and achieved the remarkable in being even more unpopular than all who had gone before. If Ridsdale was likely to sign his own grandmother, GFH would have sold her. Their low watermark was when they accused David Haigh, their former employee, of embezzlement, and he spent months holed up in a Dubai jail denying all wrongdoing. Mind you, it was a close-run thing after the talk of Iranian money breaching a UN resolution, while the spy cameras and cocaine in the boardroom exhumed memories of the old story about getting Michael Duberry off the wage bill by sprinkling drugs on his pasta. An ex-director was convicted of blackmail. Inevitably. Damned was an understatement. It went further than being a bit mean to Brian Clough.

Now Radrizzani is giving a good impression of a rational human being, buying back Elland Road and bringing the women’s team back into the fold. His managerial choice, Thomas Christiansen, looked like a gamble. Not many were celebrating getting a man who had been big for a bit in Cyprus. They are now.

It will not all go right, of course. Leeds were on the back foot against Birmingham City at Elland Road yesterday. They held out this time. However, Leeds have also finished in the top ten in the Championship only twice since they were promoted from League One in 2010. They have never made the play-offs in that time. Their last cup final was the Coca-Cola drubbing by Aston Villa in 1996 that left Wilkinson “emotionally disembowelled”. Leeds are not so much a sleeping giant as a once-significant club put in a drug-induced coma by quack doctors.

Gordon Strachan, chief foreman of the 1990 rebuild, once told me: “It’s like David Bowie. Every so often you have to reinvent yourself.” Of course, there are reinventions and mad-cap experiments, but this is a club craving any semblance of success and they have got that. Top of this league, then, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister (a few hours in 2004 aside). The new regime has made its mark.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From F365:-

Good to see us - and a few other local clubs - getting some recognition in the national media at long last :

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Marching on together as Yorkshire football is resuscitated…

Image

As a Bury lad who would bleed Manchester red even if biology dictated otherwise, Gary Neville really should not care about Yorkshire football. He should not care and yet he does care, writing two years ago this month that ‘the demise of Premier League clubs in Yorkshire’ should be a cause for national concern.

‘Children today wouldn’t think of Leeds United as a great football club. Or Sheffield Wednesday,’ wrote Neville mournfully. Not for him the glee of seeing his beloved Manchester tower over a bedraggled Leeds; as a proud northerner, socialist and philanthropist, he knows the value of football to an economically ravaged county over five million proud people strong. England thrives when Yorkshire thrives; English football thrives when Yorkshire football thrives.

Two years later, children may still be struggling with the concept that Leeds or Sheffield Wednesday are great football clubs, but that concept now feels closer than alien. Leeds are top of the Championship for the first time since their ignominious relegation in 2004, and both Sheffield clubs in a top six that reads like a tour around the UK’s industrial heartlands, taking in Cardiff, Preston and Wolverhampton. With Huddersfield Town improbably sitting between Tottenham and Liverpool in a nascent Premier League table, it finally feels like there may a crack in the curtains allowing in the weediest rays of light. Yorkshire football is by no means back, but it is twitching; hands are being tentatively squeezed and eyelids are fluttering.

You may expect a Huddersfield Town fan to revel in the sometimes self-inflicted crises of Leeds United, but such tribalism is for those who think the 20-minute train journey to Leeds is ‘going travelling’. Yorkshire folk are contrary, and I am comfortable with tutting at Leeds victories but then quietly smiling as I see their name back at the top of a table (below ours, of course).

We are fans that sing “we all hate Leeds scum” and yet chant “Yorkshire…Yorkshire…Yorkshire” at an even greater volume. I laughed when David Wagner referred to Robert Green joining from “the other club near Huddersfield”, but there was no laughter when the greed of a few threatened the very existence of a once-great football club.

Over 31,000 people were at Elland Road on Tuesday night, the bumper crowd testament not only to their unenviable status as sleeping giants or the unexpected excellence of this Thomas Christiansen team, but also an acknowledgement from Leeds’ latest owners that they should not take the loyalty of a still-substantial support for granted; fans could see them beat both Burton and Birmingham for less than £30 and there are more ticket offers planned. This club is finally united in something other than name. It has been too long.

When Neville wrote those words about ‘the demise of Premier League clubs in Yorkshire’ he was staring at a table containing no clubs from the region, with Leeds, Sheffield Wednesday and Huddersfield all mired in a miserable mid-table Championship cluster. Hull and Middlesbrough were both doing significantly better – and would be promoted that season – but those clubs are on the periphery of both Yorkshire and the Premier League. Nobody saw their one-season sojourns in the top flight as a resurgence for Yorkshire football. But this season feels different.

Central to that sea change has been the willingness of Huddersfield and Leeds to embrace life outside the provinces, with the Terriers managed by a German and counting an Australian, a Dane and a Beninese among their key players. The only Yorkshiremen are in the stands and the boardroom.

Meanwhile, Leeds are owned by an Italian, managed by a Danish-born Spanish international and boast a Swede as their talisman. There is little that feels provincial about football in West Yorkshire in 2017. Except the fans and their accents at Elland Road, as they sing Marching On Together as if they might possibly be marching towards some kind of triumph rather than another slow death.

It may yet all end in disaster, with the Tigers tumbling down the division like Mike Phelan’s Tigers and Leeds losing ground to leave thousands of Yorkshire folk shaking their heads and muttering that they “bloody knew is was too good to be true”, but for now allow us all to dream that the children of tomorrow will know that this vast, wonderful county has some truly great football clubs.

Sarah Winterburn

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...