The Leeds Thread

[WALMOT]

After the high's of winning in London last night we get the sad news that we knew was coming when it was announced Peter had gone in to a hospice.

RIP Peter one of the finest footballers to come from Dundee.

[thisal]

The images of Peter Lorimer  in full follow through and standing 2 arms in the air are iconic and usually one followed the other. 

[Clockwork]

Very sad to read about Peter Lorimer yesterday, a huge part of that amazing Revie team of the late 60’s early 70’s.

[WALMOT]

Believing in Peter Lorimer

Hotshot

Written by Moscowhite • Daniel ChapmanArtwork by Eamonn DaltonMarch 21, 2021

Imagine having the confidence.

You’ve the ball at your feet, you’re thirty yards from goal. Ahead of you is Mick Jones, who will win any ball in the penalty area. Near him is Allan Clarke, ready for a through ball. Paul Reaney is overlapping on your right. Eddie Gray is on the left wing, waiting for a switch of play, Terry Cooper backing him up. John Giles and Billy Bremner are zipping around you, in and out of pockets of space.

Imagine having the confidence. The confidence to think, sod all them. To think, they’re good players, but so what? I’ve got the ball. And I’m shooting here. I’m shooting from thirty yards, blasting the ball at goal, from thirty yards out, at ninety miles an hour, past all of them in less than three-quarters of a second. I’m cutting seven of the best footballers in the world out of this game, not giving them a touch. I’m making it about me, my foot, my shot, my goal.

If it goes in. If you miss, there’ll be hell to pay. Sniffer always scores, why didn’t you give the ball to him? Or Giles, with the better angle, or Eddie, who could dribble around that full-back all day? Seven outrageously gifted individuals are ready to develop the play, move closer to goal, build a chance, make the other team bend to their collective will.

But your will is stronger. You’re Peter Lorimer, and you won’t miss. Top corner, back of the net, arms in the air, now they can thank you, seven of the best players in the world can salute your power, and Jack and Norman and Gary too. 238 times, plus one that Franz Beckenbauer had ruled out. But only afterwards. There was nothing he could do while the ball was at your feet.

Football is a team game but goals are an individual’s business. We’ve all had that sinking feeling when the Goal of the Month competition highlights a ‘team goal’. Ugh. Look at the finish, a feeble tap-in among a gallery of netstretchers. There is a time and place to appreciate the build up. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of blinking, missing the real-time thunder, and waiting excited for the replay. What just happened? We have to go back through time and slow the tape down to find out. Now, that is a good goal.

Those were the goals that made Peter Lorimer so famous and so loved, but only a fraction of them were filmed and replayed. People watched Lorimer without a safety net. How could you dare look away when he had the ball? How could you follow its path when he shot?

He did also cross. But his crosses were like his shots, designed to become goals as quickly as possible. Powerful passes to Jones or Clarke, but only if they were ready to apply the finishing touch. It would be fascinating to be able to add the number of his assists to his record, but perhaps the numbers would become overwhelming. It’s enough that he’s Leeds United’s record goalscorer, and he didn’t even play up front.

All those goals, from midfield or the wing, when United had Jones and Clarke in attack, were sheer belligerence. Clarke scored 151 goals for Leeds, but how many might he have had if Lorimer didn’t have such a powerful, accurate shot, had a penchant for through balls instead? We describe Lorimer’s shooting accurately when we say it was devastating. He was stopping the game, putting the ball beyond the other players, creating by destroying.

Before his talent took him to the level where the goalposts came with nets, young Lorimer must have ruined so many kickabouts on the recreation grounds of Broughty Ferry. A quick game after school, everyone anxious for a touch, running and laughing and trying to show their skills. Then comes Peter, and it’s a cartoon wallop and the ball is gone and everyone has to stop. Is he going to run and get it back? Well, why should he? Blame the ‘keeper who didn’t stop the shot, not the wonderkid who scored the goal.

Football in the modern era was moved towards the playground idyll by Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, who didn’t so much kick the ball as caress it, placing it gently into the goal like a baby in its basket. Pep would have had to sell Lorimer. ‘A hat-trick of thirty yarders, Peter, yes, but why won’t you give the ball to Lionel Messi?’ Hmm. For what purpose?

Leeds United needed him: winning trophies was hard, and a player who could take all the strain from a match by scoring on his own was a great gift. As the wins stacked up, the fans worshipped him. But I wonder what Lorimer did for attendances at Elland Road. Don Revie and his players could never satisfy the casual Leeds public who came to see sport. With a 2-0 lead and a congested fixture list ahead, Leeds would relax, see the game safely to the end, and the crowd would jeer, complaining they’d paid for entertainment, not league points. We have to rebuild the scenes in our imagination, but looking through old scorelines and seeing a 2-0 home win, ‘Lorimer (2)’, you can imagine the game being settled by two first half thirty yarders, less than two seconds of incident, short-changing crowds who were always more devoted to the ebb and flow of rugby at Headingley or Hunslet. We tried watching soccer, they’d say, but they’ve this lad called Lorimer, keeps spoiling the games by winning them.

This bothered Revie intensely but I doubt Lorimer cared. There was a telling exchange on BBC Radio, when commentator Ian Dennis was remembering working with Peter on Radio Leeds. “He was always very humble,” said Dennis. Eddie Gray was also on the line, talking about the teammate he’d known since they were boys. “He was,” said Eddie, with characteristic diplomacy. “But part of that comes from, he had an inner strength. He knew how good he was.”

To put it another way, he didn’t have to boast, because he was Peter Lorimer. He could afford to be humble because it’s all written down in the record books, the footage is there to be seen. It’s natural. When he bought his first car, as a teenager in Leeds, Lorimer signed up for a driving course, did an hour, and decided he knew enough. There was no question of taking a test or getting a licence. He knew how to drive. He knew how to score goals. He knew he was good.

That his belief in his own abilities wasn’t naturally shared by others led Lorimer to stand a little apart at Leeds. Even the young players could look like old men, but Lorimer had the Beatle haircut, his lips had the Elvis curl. He was in the team aged fifteen, in September 1962, when Billy Bremner was already almost twenty, but he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t kept in. ‘No disrespect to players like Jim Storrie and others,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘I thought I was better than them. And I was.’ After the record breaking cameo, hindered by injury, he didn’t play in the league again until April 1965, and then Revie bought Mike O’Grady, forcing the two to compete for a place for the next four seasons. Oddly, it was only after O’Grady’s best season, ending in the club’s first league title, that Revie made his choice. O’Grady was sold, even though his crossing looked made for the team’s new striker, Allan Clarke, and his more traditional wing play promised better balance with Eddie Gray’s on the left. The number seven shirt went full-time to Lorimer, now almost 23.

Other players felt they owed Revie a lot, if not everything. He’d made Jack Charlton an England international, a World Cup winner. He’d coached Billy Bremner through his first games, rooming with him before away matches, guarding him on the wing. Norman Hunter said the course of his entire life was changed when Revie gave him a professional contract. But just as he didn’t need driving lessons, Lorimer didn’t need grandfathering by Revie. He needed Revie to stop giving him the number 12 shirt to wear. Perhaps the years of Revie’s doubts about him inspired Lorimer’s later criticism of his manager, who he said would ‘brag’ about having sixteen internationals in his squad, then pick the same eleven for as many as three games a week because he didn’t believe enough in the rest of them.

That strident tone is a feature of Lorimer’s autobiography, written with Phil Rostron in 2002. Revie was ‘so far ahead in his thinking’ but also a ‘manoeuvrer, manipulator and planner … like a mafia boss’. Lorimer talks about the players losing confidence in him as early as 1971, stifled by the rules, dossiers and teamtalks. There are passing mentions to Revie’s superstitions, and I can’t imagine Lorimer had much time for them. The manager was plagued by doubts, that seemed to affect his team. Lorimer was all about certainty.

Jack Charlton deserved everything he got from the game and more, but was ‘awful to play with’; Allan Clarke was ‘unfathomable off the pitch’. Paul Reaney was ‘not what you would call a good footballer’, although Lorimer praised his defending: ‘the most excellent right-back’. Many of the criticisms are justified and there are plenty of compliments, too, but the attempts at diplomacy are almost funny. ‘Most of the decisions made by Jimmy Armfield were wrong’, he declares, but, ‘Jimmy is a very nice man’. Then again, although Gary Sprake ‘cost us a few trophies’, Lorimer was in favour of inviting him back to reunions despite him making allegations about match-fixing.

The most strained relationship was with Billy Bremner who, after taking over as manager from Eddie Gray, told Lorimer: ‘I want you out of the club’. He never gave a reason, and even when they laughed and joked together in later years, Lorimer never quite got over his unease. They had even been Scotland roommates — when, that is, Lorimer was allowed in the Scotland team. He had been given a life ban in 1969 for playing on an independent tour of South Africa, not knowing his national team were going to call him up, that was only rescinded when Tommy Docherty became manager and demanded his return.

You get a sense that, on the pitch and off it, Lorimer was used to settling things. In the best team in the world his right boot could win games on its own. How could he ever be wrong? That held through the awful years when he was on Ken Bates’ board, defending the chairman in a weekly column in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Lorimer then was like the bloke intervening in someone else’s argument who only makes things worse. The problems were with Ken Bates and Shaun Harvey, and no Leeds fan wanted to argue with their hero about what those two were doing. Yet it was a comment of Lorimer’s that, in 2012, I used to define Bates’ ownership. He said criticism of the board was ‘totally out of order, because we’ve done bugger all wrong’. The club had just been to League One for the first time in its history, the company that had survived since 1919 had gone bust, replaced by another that was loading on debt ahead of a disastrous takeover; Jonny Howson had just been sold, Simon Grayson had just been sacked. This was ‘The Bugger All Wrong Era’.

It’s made worse by reading in Lorimer’s autobiography where he says that in 1974, when Revie left, ‘If you had taken five drunks off the local Holbeck Moor at that time and given them that club, with that money, they could not have knackered the club more efficiently and more effectively than the directors proceeded to do’. If he could see it then, why couldn’t he see it in 2012?

In the end you forgive those few seasons of disappointing rancour because of the decades of pleasure, that we wouldn’t have had if that wasn’t how he was. It’s funny how playing styles can reflect or reveal character. Eddie Gray, the soft-footed magician of the wing, who nurtured two generations of young players in his own image as a coach, is a soft-spoken diplomat, a man with a steel nerve but time and a nice word for everyone. Peter Lorimer was exactly how you’d expect someone to be who could belt a football harder than specialised machinery. You could try to stop Gray with a tackle. It was better just to get out of Lorimer’s way. With both, sometimes you have rewind the footage of them playing to see what happened, but for very different reasons. Lorimer was not subtle.

But Lorimer was unwavering. That was the point. Football is a game of questions: can we pass? can we cross? can we beat an opponent? can we create a chance? can we score a goal? Peter Lorimer’s right boot was full of answers. At a constant speed of ninety miles an hour, a ball will take around 0.68 seconds to travel thirty yards. That journey 238 times would take a little under 2 minutes and 42 seconds. Games of football are supposed to take ninety minutes but Lorimer had the talent and the confidence to make most of that time irrelevant. He could thrill crowds with his ninety miles an hour goals while the best footballers of a generation stood and watched him, waiting for the restart so they could have a kick too.

The stereotype of individuals in football teams is of the dribblers, the tricksters, the playmakers. But the individual in Revie’s Leeds was Lorimer. There were dribblers who you had to stop and watch do their thing. With Lorimer you had to stop and watch him celebrate. His thing was forcing the referee to blow his whistle and stop the match, because the ball had gone in the net and nobody knew how until they heard the sonic boom following its flight.

Imagine having the confidence. Imagine Leeds without Lorimer’s goals, Revie’s team without his self-belief. When it comes to football, what, after all, is the most important thing? The precise thing Peter Lorimer knew he was better than anyone else at. 238 goals proved it.

[WALMOT]

Leeds United lost £64m during the coronavirus-hit 2019-20 season despite winning the Championship and gaining promotion to the Premier League.

The club spent £46m on players last season as Marcelo Bielsa's side ended a 16-year absence from the top flight.

It handed out £20m in promotion bonuses but saw an increased commercial revenue on the previous season largely thanks to merchandise sales of more than £15m.

Leeds made a £2.5m insurance claim for loss of profits due to Covid-19.

In accounts filed with Companies House, Leeds managing director Angus Kinnear said: "Despite the unprecedented operational and financial challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the group won the EFL Championship by 10 points whilst successfully maintaining the group's financial integrity with record commercial growth."

Turnover increased to £54.2m compared to £48.9m the previous year, which included a more than 60 percent rise in revenue from merchandise sales.

"The commercial figures illustrate the positive sentiment of the fan base and the new-found unity between supporters, players, management and, combined with promotion to the Premier League, represents the perfect platform for continued footballing and commercial success," Kinnear added.

[WALMOT]

Oh Stuey

Written by Moscowhite • Daniel ChapmanPhotographs by Pro Sports ImagesApril 11, 2021

Nobody should be surprised now if Marcelo Bielsa wins the Premier League with Leeds United one day.

Leeds is where it all comes true. A man is a madman until his ideas triumph, Bielsa once said, or until he moves to West Yorkshire.

Give him Argentina and it doesn’t work. Batistuta, Ortega, Crespo, it was all no good. “The worst failure in the history of the Argentina national team,” Bielsa said.

But give him Chile, in a state of depression on the international stage, until he took them to the last sixteen of a World Cup and revived a nation. Give him Newell’s Old Boys in a Copa Libertadores semi-final, their goalkeeper scoring the winner in a 22 minute penalty shootout, long after Bielsa was sent from the dugout.

Give him Leeds. Leeds, a player down, nine back with the keeper, no centre-forwards on the pitch, against one of the best sides in history being run by the greatest coach, bar one. Give him Helder Costa and Gjanni Alioski, of all people, Costa and Alioski, and give him Stuart Dallas, the labourer made not just good but gold. Standing in front of the world’s cameras a few minutes after scoring an epochal winner, Dallas looked as if he was ready to be told off for leaving scoring so late, sorry for putting the viewers through such a stressful game. “I think that you should never give up, no matter what team you play with,” he said, as if giving advice to a junior football team. Always do your homework and stay away from drugs.

I know Bielsa will always love Newell’s the most, and one football fan to another I respect that he’ll never change. But dear me Leeds must run them close.

In Leeds we’re used to Manchester City. They’re Niall Quinn and Jamie Pollock, they’re Paul Lake and Franny Lee. So it’s hard to estimate the response to this game in the Spanish speaking world, where the media built it up with analysis comparing Bielsa and Pep Guardiola’s playing careers, coaching careers, previous meetings, playing styles, family lives; they put together collages of photos showing them each through the decades. The histories of Georgi Kinkladze or David Batty weren’t in the equation.

Bielsa says he didn’t beat Guardiola in this game but that won’t be heard. “That Guardiola is the manager of the team that Leeds beat today, I don’t consider anything on my part,” he said. “Nothing that happened today had any influence from my part.” That’s not completely true, but for once Bielsa might be right to shrug credit from his shoulders to his players’.

Any chance of using this game for its pre-kick off purpose and ascertaining the strength of one coach over another ended when referee Andre Marriner had a second look at Liam Cooper’s foul on Gabriel Jesus, a tackle few disinterested viewers would say needed reviewing. But the Manchester City players were very interested in making sure he looked twice and showed Cooper a red card.

This was near the end of the first half, when Leeds had just gone a goal ahead, looking ready to pull off a memorable if comparatively ordinary win, eleven against eleven. We’ll never know what Bielsa would have made of that outcome, but we did see his team already being forced unlike itself by the quality in City’s. It was not a case, to use Bielsa’s phrase, of Leeds imposing their style. Possession before the goal was 63 per cent City’s, all ten shots were theirs too. The Citizens had played more than 100 more passes, while the only numbers in United’s favour were things like tackles, clearances, blocks. Oh, and goals. The only one was set up by Cooper’s long ball into the left corner, Costa persisting, Pat Bamford assisting, Dallas pinging a shot, surprising, in off the post.

Without Cooper for the second half everything changed, but Bielsa’s influence was felt. First Pascal Struijk replaced Bamford, then Robin Koch replaced Tyler Roberts, Bielsa putting more value on players behind the ball instead of pressing from the front. Most coaches would leave a striker on to occupy the centre-backs and maybe nick a goal, but in Bielsa’s view any player can nick a goal, and as City’s centre-backs were playing in United’s half, defenders were better there than strikers.

Then it was up to City to find a way through to score, and with all their attacking players marked — and there were plenty — it was one of the centre-backs, John Stones, driving their attacks. He kept running through Leeds’ half like Albert Adomah being allowed to score for Aston Villa in 2019, although on this performance, if it was Stones being waved through that day he would have missed.

Leeds resisted for a long time, City’s passing numbers rising as rapidly as Leeds’ equivalents in tackles and blocks, but it’s a physical law that so much Mancunian pressure plus Ilkay Gündogan and Phil Foden from the bench equals a goal. A fractional misstep by the excellent Diego Llorente deflated Leeds’ offside trap, then a quick pass and Illan Meslier’s slip let Ferran Torres equalise from close range.

A draw might have been fair. But Leeds United’s performance was catalysed by feeling like Cooper’s red card was not fair. They played to Bielsa’s pattern, defending with numbers but still counter-attacking with as many as they could; Raphinha could have put Leeds back in front, using Kalvin Phillips pass over halfway from his own penalty area, but his first touch was too much and so was goalie Ederson’s sliding tackle. Counter intuitive counter-attacking was stored in Bielsa’s second half set up like energy in a coiled spring.

But that’s the frame, not the picture. Bielsa’s coaching has not turned Costa and Alioski into creative conquerors of the champions elect, or they’d be doing it every week. Dallas’ stoppage time brow of ice did not form in the weekly heat of murderball. Put through by the first two, Dallas, with three minutes of stoppage time left, calm, nutmegged Ederson with his shot. That wasn’t necessary. Meslier ran the length of the pitch to celebrate. That wasn’t necessary either. But of all the metrics used to measure soccer performances these days, Meslier’s speed across the turf says as much about this team as any other. Murderball isn’t necessary. But it’s better that it is done.

It’s not only this game, it’s everything. Bielsa gave these players the idea, showed them how to do things they didn’t think they could. But that only took them part of the way. The rest has been up to them. Bielsa showed them how to play, but it takes players who understand why they play to take their game and their club to these heights and these moments. All those hours of video sessions were, in stoppage time, in the bin, Bielsa’s ideas pushed in the back of the players’ minds. Adrenalin carried to the front their character and their determination and their feelings of injustice and their urgent desire for Leeds United to beat Manchester City, not for Marcelo Bielsa to beat Pep Guardiola, because the game and the shirts and the club is more important than the coaches or the players or the referee. That’s why Stuart Dallas almost looked ashamed in his post-match interview. He was happy for himself, but were the fans alright?

More than alright, thank you very much, Stuart, and more excited now about what Bielsa might achieve at Leeds than any time before. Winning the Championship bought Leeds a ticket to games like these, but no certainty about the outcomes, and that has turned out to be Leeds United’s strength. Unlike West Bromwich Albion, who came up with Leeds and quickly removed all doubt about their fate, Leeds have lived on the fine margins of every match this season: even the heavy defeats could have been won, even the big wins could have been lost. The difference between one and the other doesn’t look so big. But it’s a liminal space large enough to dream in.

Throughout his career Bielsa has taken players further and pushed them harder than any other coach. Speaking to DAZN last week, he chuckled over the origins of his nickname, El Loco, from back when one of his training sessions as a youth coach lasted longer than his colleagues’ three. He overmatches the game; you don’t need Bielsa’s coaching to win things, in fact, history shows quite the opposite. Working so hard to fail so hard is what makes him look like a madman. But Stuart Dallas and his teammates give Bielsa’s methods the reason that lifts them out of madness. They know how to do great things in football now, but why? Rewind your tape to the start of the 90th minute, wear it out and wear it out watching, again and again and again, the answer.

[WALMOT]

Burnley 0-4 Leeds United: Kids Stuff

Grow Up

Written by Moscowhite • Daniel ChapmanMay 16, 2021

Back when Leeds United were conceding six and four or three on the regular, Marcelo Bielsa kept outraging received wisdom by refusing to change his team’s style.

People complained it was like watching a basketball game, like clergy writing to the newspaper about all the sex on TV they can’t stop watching. Worse, they said, Leeds wanted it to be like a basketball game. And people keep saying it, every week, that Leeds want a basketball game, as if its something to be handed over in a brown paper bag to be watched, appalled, after the kids have gone to bed. Back and forth, end to end, up and down. Disgusting. Let’s watch it again.

Photograph by Alamy

Bielsa burnout is cut, dried and discredited but suspicion still lingers about the style. Leeds don’t concede six and four or three anymore, so something must have changed. Bielsa must have learned something about decency, some aspect of the big scary grownup Premier League must have frightened him out of his naivety, like a mirror showing him Sean Dyche’s face growling that he can’t go around like a child forever in this gritty mill town of men.

But what has changed? Nothing has changed. Oh, the results have changed. You never saw a game of basketball end 4-0. But what if Leeds were never playing hoop-la all along? It might have been what they were getting, but who said that’s what they wanted?

The questions about entertaining football, rather than winning football, that hit Bielsa after defeat to Brighton, showed how much the point was still being missed. All teams have the obligation to entertain, replied Bielsa. Otherwise, what’s the point? Selling season tickets to fans then deliberately boring them? (That noise was an offstage “Oi!” from Dyche.) All teams also have an obligation to win. Bielsa’s not very radical idea is that you can do both, which is where people close the textbooks, shaking their heads, sad and bewildered, he’s totally lost us.

Bielsa hasn’t changed his style to make Leeds more defensive because his style as he conceives it is defensively perfect. All styles of play proposed by all coaches are, more or less, but it’s only Bielsa who people think is setting up games on purpose for twelve-all draws. That has never been the idea. Far from a basketball match, Bielsa’s perfect game would stay end-end-end while the opposition were dispossessed over and over in their own third, where the goals would stack up towards the statistically feasible target — Bielsa worked it out — of 57. To nil.

That’s where beauty comes in, because if one team is scoring, according to Bielsa’s theoretical average, every 95 seconds, then some suspense may be lost from the result. So you’d better make sure those 57 goals are nice to look at, or else.

6-2 or 4-3 were never intended, so eradicating those scorelines didn’t mean learning to Premier League, but learning to Bielsa, better. Nothing about Bielsa’s coaching encourages his players to concede six because they’ll score seven. Those scores were human errors, Bielsa’s hypothesis of a perfect robot team thankfully not yet come to pass. Leeds United’s games are played by people, and the people changed, not the system. Diego Llorente, since he’s been fit enough, has been very good at the system. Pascal Struijk has got better at it. The team as a whole has got better at doing what Bielsa was always asking it to do.

Stripping the external rhetoric away from Bielsa can leave you feeling obvious: don’t all coaches do these things, making Bielsa only a freak of degree? In this case, I don’t think so. I don’t think Sean Dyche believes Burnley’s style will help them win every game to nil, he just thinks it will keep them in the division. Beneath his surface he rages for better players, who could play different football and make him look like a better coach. Dyche wouldn’t play 4-4-2 if he had Lionel Messi in the team. And that’s the difference. Bielsa plays the same way whether he has Messi, Burnley or Leeds, and it might not work — his trophy shelf suggests not — but he has the courage to try.

So Bielsa’s Leeds have not adapted to the Premier League this season, they’ve just got better at being themselves, and now the Premier League has to adapt its understanding of what Bielsa’s Leeds are all about. If Leeds beat Southampton and West Brom the way they beat Burnley, those basketball comparisons will sound quite silly, but who has got a metaphor to make a steamroller sound entertaining?

Burnley could have hooped a couple, but one end of the pitch was benefiting from quality goalkeeping, while the other had Bailey Peacock-Farrell diving mournfully after Mateusz Klich beat him by shooting to his left. Struijk could have already put Leeds ahead, but put his header wide, and imagine if Ezgjan Alioski’s snapshot hadn’t gone out for a throw in. Imagine that Jackie Harrison backheeled it between the posts, as he did on another Alioski effort early in the second half, making it 2-0.

When it comes to rigidity of style, lets compare Dyche, swapping Chris Wood and Matej Vydra for Jay Rodriguez and Ashley Barnes, four strikers who were all ineffective in similar ways, with Bielsa swapping Pat Bamford for Rodrigo. Bamford had been tempted into physical battles with Ben Mee and James Tarkowski, but Rodrigo was too wise for that, hiding from them in secret places only Harrison could see. With an unexpected pass Jackie split the bigs, then a flash of control and a gentle lift over Peacock-Farrell was how Rodrigo scored his first. Two minutes later Kalvin Phillips found Harrison in Narnia, and his pass kept Tarkowski and Peacock-Farrell floundering outside the wardrobe while Rodrigo scored a deft ‘nother.

That was that, apart from Ashley Westwood crunching Raphinha, after getting a yellow card for crunching Raphinha and trying to start a fight about Raphinha’s reaction. In between Dwight McNeil crunched Alioski and tried to start something with him while he lay on the floor, before either he complained to the referee about something Alioski said or did, or Alioski complained about something McNeil said or did, or both. The facts have disappeared behind the curtain of the referee’s report, but what we saw — McNeil’s hard tackle, his crouching shouting over Alioski’s prone body, Alioski’s fingers and tongue waggling at McNeil and the Burnley staff — looked something like Dycheball in action. It’s a philosophy whereby it’s acceptable and encouraged and part of the game to kick opponents, but not to complain when the kicks hurt. Here’s the thing: kicks are not part of the game, which is why fouls exist, to stop players from kicking each other. You’re supposed to kick the ball. But in Dyche’s world of press conferences about pints, where piano lessons are forbidden and defending your way to losing 5-0 at Manchester City every season is honourable if you put effort in, he’s a gatekeeper of what we do or don’t want to see in our game. We do want to see: Tarkowski sticking his knee into Llorente’s back. We don’t want to see: Llorente reacting, as if he’s soft. Burnley’s players said Leeds’ first goal should have been ruled out for a foul on Vydra at the other end, but nothing about Tarkowski kicking Bamford over on halfway, to make sure he couldn’t score.

It’s a man’s game, isn’t it? Sigh. Yes Sean. And Leeds? They play like children, their coach is naive, like Peter Pan and the gang, refusing to grow up into Sean Dyche’s adult league. Their masculinity asserted, Burnley lost 4-0. I hope Bielsa never grows as old as some of the people younger than him.

[WALMOT]

Three years ago today our Owner appoinented a certain Argetinian called Marcelo Bielsa.

What a great three years they have seen under MB.

Long may he continue to sign one year contracts.

[WALMOT]

Another of Don's team dies as Terry Cooper died aged 77.

 

https://www.leedsunited.com/news/team-news/28425/rip-terry-cooper

[Clockwork]

Another of Don's team dies as Terry Cooper died aged 77.
 
https://www.leedsunited.com/news/team-news/28425/rip-terry-cooper

Sad news indeed and also that so many of that great Leeds side have passed away in such a relatively short period. Recall that the talented Cooper missed perhaps two of his sides most notable triumphs, the 72 Cup Final and 74 League campaign after breaking his leg at Stoke City.

[WALMOT]

Good to see that there is now a Glasgow White's.

Facebook page link is below:-

https://www.facebook.com/glasgowwhites1/

 

[Clockwork]

2 hours ago, WALMOT said:

Good to see that there is now a Glasgow White's.

Facebook page link is below:-

https://www.facebook.com/glasgowwhites1/

 

Nice Flag, with the Club badges of past era's. 

[WALMOT]

 

[Clockwork]

 

Good luck this afternoon at Brentford! [emoji106]

[WALMOT]

Whites confirm first move of summer transfer window.

Leeds United are delighted to announce an agreement with Red Bull Salzburg for the transfer of Brenden Aaronson, which will be completed on July 1^st 2022.

The 21-year-old will join for an undisclosed fee on a five-year-contract, running until the summer of 2027.

Aaronson made 41 appearances in all competitions for Salzburg last season, providing 10 assists and scoring six goals, helping the club win the Austrian Bundesliga and Austrian Cup for the second season in succession.

A United States international, the attacking midfielder has won 18 caps for his country, scoring five goals, recently helping them secure qualification for the FIFA 2022 World Cup.

Coming through the ranks with Philadelphia Union, Aaronson made a goalscoring MLS debut in March 2019, netting in their 1-1 draw with Atlanta United.

He then went onto establish himself in the side on a regular basis, making a further 29 appearances during 2019 and was handed his first USA cap in February 2020.

During the 2020 MLS season, Aaronson helped Philadelphia win the Supporters’ Shield for the first time in the club’s history, whilst he was also named in the MLS Best XI at the end of the campaign.

In January 2021, the midfielder completed a move to Red Bull Salzburg for an undisclosed fee, linking up with current Whites head coach Jesse Marsch, who was in charge of the Austrian outfit at the time.

He featured 24 times in all competitions, netting seven goals, helping Marsch and Salzburg win the Austrian league and cup double.

Along with completing a second Austrian double last season, Aaronson also played 10 games in the UEFA Champions League helping Salzburg reach the last 16 of the tournament.

In the coming weeks he will link up with the USA national team for their matches against Morocco, Uruguay, Grenada and El Salvador.

The transfer is subject to the necessary international clearance and a work permit.

 

The fee is £25 million according to reports. Lets hope we get another 5 or 6 signings as we need a full 25 man squad not the 18 that MB went with and made then numbers up with the kids.

Also the championship winning players should only be squad players at best or even moved on as their best days are behind them am afraid.

We have to build for the future and unfortunately these players are all getting the wrong side of 30 so we need them of the wage bill.

[Clockwork]

Lewis O’Brian to now make the move from Huddersfield to Leeds, after The Terriers miss out on promotion to the EPL in the play off final at Wembley?[emoji848]

[Crawford Bridge]

Minter.

[Ro Sham Bo]

How much did they pay for that Rutter guy? He's absolutely useless. 

[Bedford White]

On 29/08/2023 at 22:22, Ro Sham Bo said:

How much did they pay for that Rutter guy? He's absolutely useless. 

Not enough