![]() So, the potential Cardiff banana skin turned into a skinful after all! Remembering the previous 7.0 win in 1972 and Barrie Davies’s commentary on Match of the Day, I was taken back to the best attacking team I have ever seen play for Leeds United. Could this line-up go on to match it? Some way to go! However, Wednesday’s trip to Coventry showed that there should be no lifting off the accelerator in the league, even if we weren’t as incisive in terms of goals. (At least we’re scoring goals though, unlike Burnley who are so intent on keeping their back door closed that they’ve forgotten how to unlock the front one, and so are stuck in a remarkably quiet place, unsure of what to do next). And so, we move on to Saturday and Millwall at home in the FA Cup. It seems remarkable somehow that we’ve never met Millwall in the FA Cup before – especially when you consider that the competition began more than 150 years ago, in 1872 (and, yes, I remember the Centenary Cup Final very well indeed!). It isn’t as if either club is new (i.e. less than 100 years old) either. Millwall Rovers were formed in 1885, the current incarnation retaining the name even though they haven’t played in that part of London’s Isle of Dogs since 1910. We’ve never met Millwall in the League Cup either – and that competition is in its 65th season now, although I still somehow think of it as a ‘new’ development. Maybe it’s my age, as the League Cup began in the year I was born. I’m sure that statisticians can prove that the probability of one team meeting any other is actually not that high, but then, equally, the clusters of results that seem to come up against certain of the same teams must be even more unlikely. Either way we’ve only faced Millwall in cup competitions on two occasions. Both were in the Full Members Cup – an additional tournament introduced in 1985 and running until 1992 - for clubs in the top two English divisions after the Heysel disaster, after which English clubs were banned from playing in Europe. Obviously, it was another money-making exercise which was hijacked by corporate sponsors. It was known as the Simod Cup by the time we played Millwall in it at the Old Den on 8 December 1987. We lost 2.0 but, honestly, after Billy Bremner had taken Leeds to within minutes of both promotion and Wembley in the spring of that year, did anyone really care? Just 5,034 turned up for the match… Almost a year later, on 29 November 1988 even fewer – 4,242 – braved the elements to see Leeds lose in the same cup, at the same venue, and by the same score of 2.0. They beat us at The Den again this season of course – we’ve lost nine of the last 12 away games against them in the league – but at least this tie is at Elland Road. I’m not entirely sure why a ‘rivalry’ has built up between us; after all, they are just a small, underperforming club from south-east London… The worst memory for me dates back to 2009 when, having lost the first leg of the League One Play-Off semi-final at The Den, 1.0 (obviously), to a late goal from Neil Harris, the second leg took place on 14 May 2009 at Elland Road. The crowd of 37,036 was the highest attendance outside of the Premier League that season. After Jermaine Beckford had missed a penalty for Leeds, Luciano Becchio put us in front after 53 minutes – making the score in the tie all-square – but Jimmy Abdou equalized for Millwall 19 minutes later. Leeds could not find a way through the packed Millwall defence again and the match finished 1.1 leaving Leeds in League One for a third, consecutive season. Ah! The play-offs… When considering Millwall – and, thankfully, we don’t need to very often – we might often use the word ‘mindless.’ Although Daniel Farke wants to ‘keep the momentum up’ of our team, I hope he rotates the players more than usual, as this cup game is really not in our mind’s eyes, any more than Millwall deserve to be. It might be the FA Cup rather than some Mickey Mouse trophy (Chelsea won the Full Members Cup twice; what more can I say?) but a temporary derailment on Saturday would be far better than us failing again to reach the mainline station at all. This post was first published on No Place I'd Radebe on 8 February 2025. Read more in my book: The Leeds United Story, available on Amazon in print and digital formats, also Kindle Unlimited.
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![]() I was lucky enough to witness Largie Ramazani’s first goal for Leeds United – a well taken, curling shot to put us ahead at the Cardiff City Stadium. Although they were down to 10 men, we were only really able to breathe after Joel Piroe scored a second, three minutes from time. Some teams have that effect on you, don’t they? It is as if there is an inevitability that bad news is just around the corner. Millwall at The Den are similar (there’s bad news around every corner there, and would be even if Bermondsey was located in a circle!) and I’d argue that Preston and Stoke are in the same, uncompromising mould, making it even more satisfying that we converted last season’s defeats there into a draw and a win this season. Of course, we play the return match against The Bluebirds this weekend. After the struggles against Burnley on Monday – a small team whose ambition extended to playing for a home draw right from kick-off – many are expecting us to overrun Cardiff. Well, we’ll certainly outrun them, but they are a far better team now than the one we saw in South Wales - unbeaten in their last eight matches (seven of them in the league). We have history with Cardiff: quite a lot of it, going right back to our origins. Leeds United were first elected to the newly expanded Second Division of the Football League on 31 May 1920 along with… Cardiff City. Don Revie’s team never lost to them in league or cup competitions, although, naturally, they were in different leagues once we got promoted in 1964. Just before that golden period, though, they certainly had the evil eye over us. On 7 January 1956, we met them at Elland Road in the third round of the FA Cup. 40,000 fans saw Cardiff win 2.1. It ended an unbeaten home run of 32 games at Elland Road. Leeds had wanted to turn on their floodlights, but Cardiff refused, considering it an unfair advantage as they had never played under floodlights before. Incredibly this was the first of three consecutive FA Cup wins for The Bluebirds against Leeds at Elland Road – each in the third round, and each by the same score: 2.1. The two teams met in Cardiff on 6 January 2002, again in the third round of that year’s FA Cup. Leeds, top of the Premier League at the time, went ahead through Mark Viduka after just 12 minutes. However, there was an ugly, hostile atmosphere at Ninian Park that day - and, yes, we did visit the plaque back in September commemorating the old centre circle of that ground, to make sure it hadn’t come back to life again! Alan Smith - merely acting as peacemaker - was sent off just before half-time and Cardiff came back to win 2.1 (again) with a winner just three minutes from time. I think that defeat represented not just the turning point in our season but also in our history. Doom and gloom quickly followed and blocked out the light in West Yorkshire for far too many football seasons. Between 2004 and 2015, in second tier matches, we failed to win one of the 14 fixtures against them: losing ten of them. The most gut-wrenching match against Cardiff that I remember from recent times took place at Elland Road on 14 December 2019 in the Championship. We were two-nil up after eight minutes, and three-nil up after 51. We were beginning to wonder why we’d been so apprehensive beforehand. Football history? Bah humbug! Cardiff promptly pulled a goal back on the hour before, in the 82nd minute, Sean Morrison scored another to make it 3.2. The excitement was much too much for him though, as he got sent off four minutes later. Surely, against 10 men and with just four minutes remaining, we would see it out now... Of course not. We are Leeds and this is Cardiff we’re talking about. They scored an equaliser two minutes before the end and that was that. And they are that: a bogey team that could well come back to bite us again on Saturday. At least we’ll be prepared… This post was first published on No Place I'd Radebe on 29 January 2025. Read more in my book: The Leeds United Story, available on Amazon in print and digital formats, also Kindle Unlimited. ![]() As Leeds United prepare to make the trip over the hill to Burnley again, my thoughts turned to previous encounters in this West Yorkshire-East Lancashire rivalry. At Turf Moor – where Burnley have played since 1883 – I remember well the 4.0 Premier League victory in May 2021 when three second-half goals for Leeds sealed the deal on our best away win there for almost 90 years; that record-breaking match took place in the Second Division and ended in a 5.0 victory on 21 November 1931. In December 2010 – also in the second tier - we scored another three second-half goals there after being 2.0 down at half-time. Our own Jonny Howson scored the winner just five minutes from time, with the travelling Leeds United fans commiserating en masse with their hosts, suggesting they should have gone Christmas shopping instead… In 1967-68 we were going for the league title and top of the table in April, but successive defeats in our final four matches of the season – against Stoke City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Burnley – saw us finish fourth for a second, successive season, and letting Manchester City to become champions for only the second time (their first coming back in 1937). The Burnley game at Turf Moor ended in a 3.0 defeat. In the following season when we did win our first league title, we had lost at Manchester City but then only lost one more league game that season, 5.1, to a young Burnley side managed by Harry Potts on 19 October 1968. Curiously, when we were again challenging for the title in 1973-74, we only lost four league matches all season – three of our conquerors being the same as in those successive defeats in 1967-1968: Stoke City, Burnley and Liverpool. The Burnley defeat – 4.1 on 23 March 1974 – was our only home defeat of that season. The ‘Eddie Gray match’ at Elland Road on 4 April 1970 - the only win in our last six league matches as that season imploded - saw Leeds win 2.1 with both goals scored by Eddie, the second of which has often been described as the finest goal of all time to be scored by a Leeds United player, as he skilfully outwitted at least four players in Burnley's defensive line. However, when researching my book, it is a story about David ‘Soldier’ Wilson that really captured my imagination. Also, at Elland Road it was in our previous incarnation as Leeds City that we took on Burnley on 27 October 1906 – in just the second league season of the club’s existence. Manager Gilbert Gillies had recently signed powerful striker David Wilson from Hull City where he had scored 13 goals in 15 appearances. Just 23 years old and a former soldier from the Boer War – hence his ‘soldier’ nickname – his thick moustache gave him every appearance of a player from that Edwardian era. Wilson was winded in the first half after a challenge with the Burnley defenders and left the field complaining of ‘a heavy pain in his chest’ after 15 minutes of the second half. A heavy smoker he clearly was in evident pain in the dressing room; medical assistance was sought with the thought that he was having a heart attack. In the meantime, two further Leeds City players had to come off injured, so Wilson offered to go back on the pitch to what was described as a ‘storm of cheers.’ Doctors advised him against it, and he was obviously too ill to carry on, leaving the field again after just three minutes. He lost consciousness in the club bath and died. The official cause was heart failure from over-exertion. The eight men of Leeds City held out until just before the end when Burnley scored to win the match 1.0. The Leeds Mercury summed up Wilson’s heroism: “His devotion to the game and to the club proved fatal.” It may be a turf war, but getting home safely is everything. This post was first published on No Place I'd Radebe on 23 January 2025. Read more in my book: The Leeds United Story, available on Amazon in print and digital formats, also Kindle Unlimited. ![]() For those of us with a love of football history, any match pitching us against a team from Sheffield takes us all the way back to Victorian England and the birthplace of professional association football in this country. Having lived in Leeds and then close to the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, it also ties together my own personal path through life with those of the two cities’ very different football heritages. Weather permitting, this month will see another encounter in the world’s oldest football derby. Hallam FC will take on Sheffield FC in the quarter-final of the the Sheffield & Hallamshire Senior Cup. The match will take place at Hallam’s home - Sandygate - the world’s oldest football ground – where they have played ever since forming in 1860. Sheffield FC – emerging from a local cricket club - are the world’s oldest football club, forming in 1857. The first derby match took place 165 years ago and was played, according to a report from Sheffield FC, "in the presence of a large number of spectators,” and "was conducted with good temper and in a friendly spirit.” Sheffield won 2.0. It is known as ‘The Rules Derby’ after the code of football rules known as ‘The Sheffield Rules’ which were devised in 1858 and spread beyond the Sheffield city boundaries to other clubs and associations in the North and Midlands of England, making them one of the most popular forms of football during the 1860s and 1870s. The Rules were unified with London (Football Association) Rules in April 1877 enabling the FA Cup to be played as a national competition. Indeed, on Boxing Day 1877 representatives from the Sheffield area had travelled to Leeds to try to encourage the locals to take up or follow association football. Led by Fred Sanderson, President of the Sheffield Football Association, two teams from Sheffield played out an exhibition match at Holbeck Recreation Ground. This is considered to be the first association football match ever to be played in Leeds. Sheffield FC currently play in the eighth tier of the English football league system, while Hallam FC play in the ninth. Sheffield currently has two professional clubs in the English Football League of course – both of them in the Championship and thus promotion rivals –while we remain the largest one-city club in England, and arguably the fourth biggest in Europe behind Naples, Marseille and Amsterdam (after FC Amsterdam were disbanded in 1982). Without doubt it is Sheffield United we are more focused on at the moment, as the typically tight second-tier promotion race pitches us against each other, as it did in 2019, 2006 and, perhaps most memorably, 1990. However, Sheffield Wednesday – also formed out of a cricket club, in 1867 – know all about glory. They’ve won the league title four times, compared to our three. They have also experienced the ignominy of falling all the way down to the third tier, as we did, and almost the fourth. Our own, still sadly missed, Jack Charlton took the Owls back to the Second Division in 1980 before handing the reins over to Howard Wilkinson. He promptly took the club back into the top-flight in 1984, after an absence of 14 years. Unfortunately – and disastrously for them with the benefit of hindsight – despite that promotion, a fifth-place finish and an FA Cup semi-final, the club’s unambitious directors were disinclined to invest more money into his team. Howard therefore joined Leeds as manager in October 1988 where he was most certainly backed. Players he had either spotted, bought or coached at Wednesday joined the Wilkinson revolution at Leeds. Among others Carl Shutt, Mel Sterland, David Wetherall and Jon Newsome all have their places in our history, as does Lee Chapman who secured that promotion for us at Bournemouth, leaving the Blades in second place. Perhaps the most spectacular and far-reaching piece of transfer business in this regard was when Howard hijacked a deal that had been agreed to take 32-year-old Scottish midfielder Gordon Strachan from Manchester United to Wednesday. Matching the £200,000 offer, he persuaded Strachan to drop down a division and join Leeds instead, making him not just his midfield fulcrum, but also his captain. We may still have doubts about the way the whole Cantona affair was conducted, but Strachan to Leeds was priceless. Howard’s return trip to Sheffield Wednesday on 12 January 1992 stays long in the memory. Leeds simply annihilated the opposition in a 6.1 win, with Lee Chapman scoring a hat-trick. It was probably Leeds’s best away win in the league since September 1930 when they won at Blackpool 7.3. Howard remains the last Englishmen to win the top-flight title in this country and, despite their fine football heritage, it seems more likely that Leeds United will be league champions again before any team from Sheffield. This post was first published on No Place I'd Radebe on 14 January 2025. Read more in my book: The Leeds United Story, available on Amazon in print and digital formats, also Kindle Unlimited. ![]() When researching the history of Leeds United for my new book, some of the FA Cup ties away from home brought back a lot of memories for me, which – against psychologists’ advice to people suffering from depression - I had buried deep in my consciousness. In fact, I first became a LUFC fan in 1967 after the ‘Great Injustice’ of that FA Cup semi-final against Chelsea. Colchester was heart-breaking, while Histon, Newport County and Crawley just made me very, very angry. However, it is a cup tie at Elland Road that I was thinking about this week when looking ahead to Saturday’s first-ever competitive visit of Harrogate Town. It’s unlikely that this derby match will ever take on the significance of Huddersfield or those pretenders from South Yorkshire or Teesside. Some are foolishly calling it a ‘home banker’ which anyone with even the slightest knowledge of football history, let alone the history of the FA Cup, will know to be lunacy – even in the mad world of being a Leeds supporter. I first thought of the Manchester City riot in the third-round in 1978 but quickly moved back four years to 19 February 1974 and a fifth-round replay against Bristol City of the Second Division. Leeds were top of the First Division at that time, nine points clear of Liverpool and unbeaten after 29 matches. In Don Revie’s last season in charge (though, of course, we didn’t know that at the time) we would go on to win the league by five points and most of us already felt the title was ours – even though we didn’t dare to say so publicly. After the debacle of 1972, I had been so hoping for another Double attempt and this year looked to be the most likely. More than 9,000 Leeds fans had travelled to a sold-out Ashton Gate for the first match in which Billy Bremner scored a 25-yarder to put Leeds ahead just before half-time. Keith Fear equalised in the second half, but – at a time when we are all discussing Leeds goalkeepers again – I remember David Harvey making an absolutely fantastic save from Don Gillies from just four yards out to keep us in the tie. Three special trains, two dozen coaches and a convoy of cars brought 3,000 Robins fans to Yorkshire for the replay, which attracted the highest crowd of the season so far at Elland Road (despite the unbeaten league run) with an expectant 47,182 fans packed in. The size of the crowd was all the more remarkable given that it took place in a period of industrial action by miners, which affected coal supplies to the power stations, putting electricity in short supply. Government regulations, aimed at saving energy, demanded that all but ‘essential’ industries switched to a three-day week, while homes were regularly hit by power cuts. The match therefore kicked off at 2.00 in the afternoon rather than under the evening floodlights; an ‘emergency issue’ of the match programme was issued - priced at 7 pence - and containing just 12 pages. Leeds dominated possession for most of the first half but without making any inroads – sound familiar? Peter Lorimer hit the post on the hour before Mick Jones had the ball in the back of the net five minutes later, however his challenge on the goalkeeper, who had managed to gather a cross from Roy Ellam, was deemed unfair by Wolverhampton referee Jack Taylor (remember him?) Bristol City – drifting towards relegation in their league – had clearly arrived with a nothing-to-lose attitude, buoyed by the draw against Leeds in the first match. They had several attempts on target before, in the 73rd minute, Gillies ran on to a diagonal pass from Fear in the penalty area and, despite the close attention of Norman Hunter, made no mistake this time, squeezing a left foot shot under David Harvey. The match ended, 1.0. This was probably the only Bristol City goal ever to make the front pages of the national daily newspapers and made a household name of Don Gillies, a former Scottish Merchant Navy deckhand and papermill worker, who had scored his first FA Cup goal and become an instant West Country hero. I remember the match as though it was yesterday, not nearly 51 years ago. I feel the disappointment all over again just by writing this. We’re top of a league again and, apart from the shock, cup loss can cause a blip in league form – just as it did then. However, in our current tight situation, winning might be more problematic, even if it’s easier to cope with! This post was first published on No Place I'd Radebe on 6 January 2025. Read more in my book: The Leeds United Story, available on Amazon in print and digital formats, also Kindle Unlimited. |
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