I often wonder what being a Leeds United fans means and why it can usually be associated with words like misery and despair. It wasn’t always this way though. Growing up in the 90s were great, up until the temptation of Champions League football and an inept Chairman whose greed got the better of him. ‘We lived the dream’ but was it really worth it? Fast forward 20 years and the word ‘inept’ raises its head again!
Now I don’t want to bring up the Bielsa era, as that usually becomes a theme these days, mainly because of the joy we had (for once) during his tenure; However, it looked like we had turned a corner and that the good times were back! My inner 90s child was ready to bask in the glory that was once enjoyed. That aura has been sucked out of me quicker than you can say Premier League.
I was thinking about what I could write about in this article, with a huge part of me wanting to ‘bash the board’, but I’m going to try and refrain from doing so (ok maybe a little bit). Leadership tends to filter down from the top of the tree and its visibly apparent that we have lacked the governance that’s needed to be a Premier League club, but what’s baffled me is how they got it so wrong!
Last season we broke the record for conceding the most goals in 1 month, that tells me we needed to change the defence, but did we, no! Ok that’s a white lie, but the players that came in had no EPL experience and as it tuned out, we looked to some of ‘the old guard’ of players to try fix the leaky defence. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and we successfully broke our own record again this season by conceding 23 goals in April, which has stood since 1965!
One thing I can’t get my head around is the mentality of the players, their drive to succeed, the mental resilience to get us out of this mess. No manager or owner or DOF can do it, its down to the players. They must bleed for the team and the fans, when the going gets tough they have to go to the depths of hell to save us from disaster. Disappointingly though, they haven’t, they’ve moaned, and they’ve felt sorry for themselves. The game against West Ham proved to me that they had given up, I’m even seeing pictures of Eddie Gray and Gary Mac turning up to give them a pep talk, but its too little too late (baring a miracle). We’ve had our chances, and we blew it.
The term Ups and Downs get banded around the twitterverse quite often now, theoretically meaning ‘shut up and back the lads’ which can be justified at times, but for me they don’t deserve to be backed as they’ve not shown us what it means to be Leeds. Post Spurs they will be clapped off I imagine, and I guess that will be the right thing to do, but deep down I hope they know that they had their part to play, and they’ve all let us down and that includes the muppets at the top.
Leeds Loco.
Image Credit: Stephen Craven, Wikimedia Commons, Ungry Young Man
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