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Search: ' Leeds Utd'

Stories

Snakes and ladders League One 2009-10

Tom Lines looks back on the season in League One, and the considers the divide between many clubs in the division and their well-to-do guests who have fallen from the Premier League

The FA’s decision to hold England matches around the country during the rebuilding of Wembley is generally agreed to have been a great success. Football’s heartlands got to see the national team in their own backyards while the players benefited from performing in front of passionate, knowledgeable crowds. Fans in League One are now enjoying a similar scheme involving former Premier League clubs. This season the division contained no fewer than four sides that have graced the top flight in the last six years. Charlton, Southampton and Norwich were making their first visits, while Leeds Utd had married a local girl and were trying to make a go of things.

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Blackpool 3 Cardiff City 2

Often contested by recent Premier League competitors, this year's Championship play-off final featured two clubs who last played in the top division in 1971 and 1962 respectively. Cameron Carter reports

Wembley, on a luridly hot day in May. Almost lost among the blue and tangerine hordes, down for this afternoon’s promotion showdown, glimpses of everyday north London life – the dreaming bouncers outside pubs, the Wembley branch of the school-age outdoor drinking club soliciting help to buy alcohol, the brightly-plumed, chirpy Lidl in the retail park. For the most part, though, this pocket of London is just Cardiff and Blackpool, ribbons of blue and tangerine filing magnetically towards the Wembley arch.

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Letters, WSC 278

Dear WSC
I was very interested in the letter (WSC 276) discussing the topic of the Duckworth-Lewis of football that is stoppage time. Are there any WSC readers who are aware of stoppage allowance for cheating ball boys? I attended Colchester v Southampton in December 2009. The home side took a two-goal lead before the Saints slowly clawed their way back into the game. However, our momentum was thwarted by a series of ingenious defensive set-pieces that can only be attributed to hours of practice on the training ground. They went like this: ball goes off for a Saints throw or goal-kick, ball boys strategically placed around the ground retrieve the ball in exaggerated slow motion or, if the pressure was really on, then not at all. One very clever set-piece saw the ball rest at the feet of the ball boy. He then sat motionless on his stool causing Kelvin Davis to have to race 20 yards to retrieve the ball. Should the fourth official have added stoppage time to thwart this cunning plan? And have any other away teams been subjected to such coaching genius?
Tony Cole, Leigh on Sea

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Flicks to kick

Rob Hughes wonders why so many football-related dramas fail to strike the right tone, especially in their action scenes

Lord knows they’ve tried. Ricky Tomlinson as England manager. Sean Bean tanking around in a Sheffield United strip. Sylvester Stallone between the sticks. Even Adam Faith as pint-sized proprietor of – oh yes – Leicester Forest (from a script by Jackie Collins, no less). All of them as inept, unconvincing and downright embarrassing as each other. So just why is it that films about football never work? Certainly not through lack of an audience. It’s a sport, lest we forget, adored by millions the world over, one with its own in-built dramatic arc. A ready-made fantasy in which slumdogs really can become superstars. Never mind Mike Bassett or Jimmy Grimble. Where’s our Raging Bull, our This Sporting Life? Even a Seabiscuit would do.

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Revie Revered And Reviled/Keep Fighting

Revie Revered And Reviled
by Richard Sutcliffe
Great Northern Books, £16.99
Reviewed by Duncan Young
From WSC 291 May 2011

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Keep Fighting The Billy Bremner Story
by Paul Harrison
Black and White, £14.99
Reviewed by Duncan Young
From WSC 291 May 2011

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Don Revie and Billy Bremner, manager and captain of the triumphant Leeds Utd team of the 1960s and 1970s, are inseparable in the public consciousness. There's also the idea of an unshakeable bond between them and, not far under the service, the suggestion that their success was sinister and tainted. The Damned United reanimated their pantomime villain incarnations, but feelings of injustice have inspired some authors to try to counter these perceptions and highlight what was good about both men.

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