From the opposite perspective the young fans who swarmed on to the playing surface on Saturday are surely unaware they were re-enacting a tribal rite familiar from the s. There might even have been a gleeful reaction to the suggestion that Leeds will be going into administration within the next few days, a fate that would condemn them to face their next campaign with the handicap of a statutory point deduction. Columnists should beware of using long German words where short English ones will do but, on this occasion, the Wagnerian overtones of Schadenfreude really do seem appropriate to the barely concealed delight in Leeds' operatic misfortune.
As ever, Ridsdale was quick to disclaim responsibility. But longterm fans of any club unlucky enough to have suffered a similar decline know the roots often lie very deep indeed and that previous administrations are seldom willing to share the blame. Even in the short term, however, it always seemed astonishing that such a star-crossed club could have put an attempt to regain their former eminence in the hands not just of Ken Bates but of Dennis Wise.
The Damned Utd was what David Peace called a remarkable novel devoted to an imaginative reconstruction of Brian Clough's 44 days at Elland Road in the immediate aftermath of the Revie era. Some of Revie's old players, most prominently John Giles, reacted to the book's publication last year by railing against its supposed inaccuracies.
Many readers, however, sensed a deeper strain of what is usually called emotional truth beneath the portrayal of an institution corrupted by Revie's paranoia. Football clubs are like garden spades. When the blade wears out, you replace it. Then the handle breaks and you replace that, too. But, somehow, it is still the same spade.
Which is perhaps why the men currently in charge of Leeds United seem so familiar. When it comes to paranoia, Bates could have given Revie lessons. And what was Wise, in his playing days, if not the short-passing, shirt-tugging reincarnation of Bremner? But in the other part of the mind lurks a nagging paranoia and insecurity. Leeds United has gone hand in hand with chaos, calamity and downright bad luck throughout its entire existence. Can it really be a coincidence?
What if everybody — fans, media, authorities — really do hate Leeds scum? When he came back to the club he told them all the stories about being kicked to pieces in Italy. I watched a full match of him playing for Juventus in the European Cup and some of the tackling is ridiculous. All these teams had read about Leeds being the dirtiest team in the country and were setting up ready to fight.
Popular… weren't we? Revie never needed an excuse to believe there were outside influences working against his team.
While he was a visionary manager in his attention to detail and famous dossiers on opposition players, he was also incredibly superstitious.
Before every home game he took the exact same route to the stadium, refusing to return home if he had forgotten anything. In , he enlisted Gypsy Rose Lee to urinate by the four corner flags of Elland Road and rid the stadium of the curse placed upon the grounds on which it was built by travellers who were evicted from the site.
In some ways, his obsessions became somewhat counter-productive. Revie eventually tried to shed the siege mentality he had instilled and rebrand Dirty Leeds to Super Leeds, embracing the brilliance of his own players rather than worrying so much about those in the opposition XI.
Revie in particular was quite sensitive because it was a family, and he created this family atmosphere. I think it bothered them too much.
In , Leeds City, the original club to play out of Elland Road, were thrown out of the Football League and disbanded after being found guilty of making illegal payments to players during the First World War — despite it being an open secret that this was commonplace among the majority of clubs. And now they will be informed by their parents how the club faced the very real threat of closure in the wake of fan trouble at Bournemouth in , or how they were cheated out of European finals in and — with the referee from the former, Christos Michas, later banned for life for match fixing.
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