​Having survived the traditional, attritional approach to football that is Millwall, Leeds United now move on to a different part of the capital.

We don’t often win in London these days, do we? Queens Park Rangers (QPR if we want to give them less credit) – our opponents on Saturday – are symptomatic of this malaise. We’ve lost our last four consecutive matches there in league or cup.

Formed originally in 1882 as Christchurch Rangers, they merged with St Jude’s Institute from the Queen’s Park area of West London in 1886, emerging from this piece of Victorian football alchemy as QPR.

From 1917 – apart from a couple of brief stints at White City in the early 1930s and early 1960s – QPR have played their home matches at Loftus Road in Shepherd’s Bush. Akin to playing in a cardboard box, it is a particularly unpleasant and claustrophobic destination for LUFC, having lost almost half of the games we have played there to date.

Known at the moment as the MATRADE Loftus Road Stadium - after its sponsor, which seeks inward investment for Malaysian suppliers - its 18,439 capacity is rarely tested, apart from when they import Leeds United fans for the day. And, yes, we’ll be taking more than the transit van load of Millwall fans at Elland Road this week.

As in our previous piece on Portsmouth, QPR joined the Football League in 1920 – the same year as us, but in the new Third Division as opposed to the Second from where we quite rightly looked down upon them, structurally and geographically.
We first came across them in a third-round FA Cup tie in London on 9 January 1932 which we lost 3.1. We faced them next in the late 1940s, losing both of our first two league games against them. In fact, it wasn’t until 3 November 1951 that we beat them anywhere (at the eighth attempt): 3.0 in a Second Division match at Elland Road. QPR were relegated at the end of that season, and we have often been playing in different leagues throughout our respective football histories.

Our first victory at Loftus Road didn’t come until 24 January 1969 in the First Division. Mick Jones scored the only goal of the game as we added that 1.0 win to an amazing unbeaten sequence of league matches. After losing at, er, Burnley on 19 October 1968 we didn’t lose in the league again in that glorious season as we stormed to our first league title.

On 27 April 1974 Jones’s strike partner Allan Clarke scored the winner in a 1.0 victory there to celebrate our second title. We’d already been assured of it after Arsenal’s win at Anfield three days earlier. A Guard of Honour welcomed the Leeds players on to the pitch for their rightful crowning as champions, and there was little blue and white to be seen, only white. The capacity was larger, then, with 35,353 crammed in – at least three of them playing with their hoops.

More recently I remember well the 2.0 away victory in the League Cup on 7 November 1978 when Ray Hankin and John Hawley scored in a 2,0 win as we got all the way to a two-legged semi-final defeat to Southampton. Yes, Southampton: who’d have thought…

The 4.0 aberration down there last season effectively killed our automatic promotion chances almost exactly 50 years to the day after Sniffer’s winning contribution to this particular North-South rivalry.

It’s time to go again; and bring home the points again. On On On.

This post first appeared on ​No Place I'd Radebe

Read more in my book: The Leeds United Story, available on Amazon in print and digital formats, also Kindle Unlimited.

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​For some reason, I had thought that Portsmouth FC were an older club than they actually are, perhaps along with the likes of Aston Villa and Everton who were among the 12 clubs to form the world’s first Football League in 1888.
In fact, Portsmouth were formed ten years after this, on 5 April 1898. Admittedly this is 21 years earlier than Leeds United’s emergence, and six years before Leeds City were founded. However, Pompey joined that Football League in 1920 – the same year that we did.

While we joined the Second Division, they were founding members (perhaps that’s where I’d got the notion from!) of the new third tier. Known as the Third Division for just the one season, it was then split into Third Division (South) and Third Division (North) as more teams joined, making it more logistically feasible to play games regularly without having to travel such long distances. Remember that on May 3rd when we pop down to Plymouth…

I can’t see that Leeds City ever played Portsmouth in a competitive match so the first Leeds team to play them would have been Leeds United in the first round of the FA Cup on 13 January 1923 – a 0.0 draw at Fratton Park. We won the replay four days later, 3.1, at Elland Road.

Don Revie’s first match in charge of Leeds ended in a 3.1 defeat on 18 March 1961, also at Fratton Park, but after our promotion in 1964 we didn’t play them again for almost 20 years.

It is back in the FA Cup that my personal memories of Portsmouth – other than as a naval base – really begin. On 15 February 1997, the sides met at Elland Road in the fifth round of the competition. Having lost to mighty Darlington in that season’s League Cup we’d managed to get past Crystal Palace after a replay and Arsenal at Highbury (at the first attempt) before drawing second-tier Portsmouth at home. Unfortunately, two Lee Bowyer goals weren’t enough as we lost 3.2.
Two years later – on 23 January 1999, in the fourth round – we repaid the compliment with a comprehensive 5.1 win on the south coast, before deciding to opt out of the competition in the fifth round at Tottenham (after a replay) to concentrate on the league. We finished fourth that year, also destroying Arsenal’s hopes of the title (remember that late Hasselbaink goal at Elland Road?)

However, the match against Portsmouth that stands out above all others for me came in the Premier League, at Fratton Park on 8 November 2003. In the previous match, we’d been destroyed by, er, Arsenal as the ‘Invincibles’ beat us 4.1 at Elland Road. We proved at Portsmouth that we were anything but. The loyal crowd in Leeds had shown tremendous support for manager Peter Reid but, after a long day’s journey into the known, it was washed away with the torrential rain.

In a truly hapless display, we lost 6.1. Alan Smith had quickly equalized their opening goal from two minutes earlier before the rest of the sky simply fell in. Two of Pompey’s goals that day came from Gary O’Neil. I often wonder what happened to him…
 
Seth Johnson and Roque Junior were in our team that day. Johnson surely couldn’t have believed his good fortune at how much he was being paid to play for Leeds United before everyone realised that he couldn’t actually play that well, and we could no longer afford to pay into his retirement fund. Junior never grew up to become the defender Reid had promised he would when making him his pre-season marquee loan signing from Milan. In the seven matches he turned out for us - in which he preferred to play the role of a statue rather than a defender - we conceded 25 goals.

It was a terrible time for our club, wasn’t it? Off the pitch, there could be no defence for the financial mess we had been led into, while pitchside we were all wondering whether our defence was already on the beach.

Reid was sacked two days later (and, thankfully, we never saw Junior again either) as Eddie did his best to save us for a second, consecutive season. As we all know, it didn’t work. We lost four of our final five league games - including Portsmouth completing a league double over us in a 2.1 win.
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Let’s hope it’s a fine day on Sunday.
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This post also appeared on ​No Place I'd Radebe 

Read more in my book: The Leeds United Story, available on Amazon in print and digital formats, also Kindle Unlimited.