Shortly after that, I watched them live on TV for the first time. Unfortunately, that was the 1975 European Cup Final (daylight robbery, disallowed goal, penalty not given, heartache, Paris, fans ripping out seats and throwing them onto the pitch etc). In the 45 years since, my experience of watching Leeds has tended to go in 15 years cycles of boom and bust, or in my case, bust and boom.
My first 15 years of watching Leeds was spent mostly being told how good they used to be. Then under Howard Wilkinson in 1989 everything changed Looking back, the first time I felt swept along by genuine hope of better days ahead was Gordon Strachan's debut in March 1989. That was the first day when I realised that as a Leeds fan I would be able to stop living in the past. The promotion year of 1989/90 was the one and only year I've ever been a season ticket holder, and a lot of the enjoyment of watching that 1989/90 team was watching them hound and pressurise teams at Elland Road, watching Batty and Vinnie Jones and Speed and Strachan chasing them all over the pitch and boxing them in.
Shortly after that season's promotion, I moved away from the area so I became only an occasional visitor to Elland Road. For about another 15 years they continued to be a team to be proud of, with new stars like Viduka and Bowyer and Alan Smith, but then after the financial meltdown and relegation in 2004, things went very, very wrong, and stayed that way for almost another 15 years. After watching teams assembled during that time by Peter Reid and Dennis Wise full of loan signings who didn't seem to care, or even to know who each other were, I stopped caring too, and Leeds once again became a team of past glories, not present ones. For a lot of years from the mid 2000s onwards, I didn't know the names of any of the players, I'd even stopped checking the results. I would occasionally go with my brother if I found myself in Leeds, but that was it, the one highlight being in January 2010 when they beat Manchester United in the FA Cup.
I suppose I find it harder to care about football in the modern era anyway. In these times of wall to wall Sky TV, with games on every day, and with billionaire clubs and their millionaire players dominating everything, I find football and footballers harder to relate to than in the 70s and 80s.
A lot of the games I've found most exciting over the years have been games when Leeds have been behind and chasing the game. Letting in 2, 3 or 4 early goals changes your mindset, and sometimes the most fun games to watch have been those when they've got nothing to lose. Leeds 2 Ipswich 4 1989, Leeds 4 Liverpool 5 1991 Leeds 4 Stuttgart 1 1992 Leeds 4 Derby 3 1997 Leeds 3 Norwich 3 2017. I mean, watching all those flicks and tricks when they were 7-0 up against Southampton in 1972 is all very well, but sometimes what I've admired most has been them giving it a go in adversity.
The most exciting game I've seen live was Leeds 3 Millwall 4 in 2018. Leeds 2-0 down at half time and down to 10 men. For 20 minutes at the start of the second half they threw absolutely everything at Millwall and had them on the backfoot, scoring 3 goals. But then fatigue set in, and they couldn't hold on.
The best thing about the last two years of watching Leeds under Bielsa, is that now they play every game, whatever the score, as if they're 3-0 down and they've got nothing to lose. And they've got the fitness and the coaching to be able to keep it up for 90 minutes, instead of just 20 minutes running on backs to the wall adrenaline and then running out of steam.
These days, after so long stuck in the Championship, it's understandable that people are fixated on promotion, but sometimes obsessing over getting promoted makes it seem that results are all that matter. There's a danger (and I found this to be true in 1989/90 too), that you don't appreciate what you're seeing, because you're only thinking about the final score, and where that leaves you in the league table. Now we're all stuck in a Covid 19 no man's land, staring at the league table is all we've got. But for the time being at least, we're on top.
We're on top because of Bielsa, and because of his unswerving devotion, to a meticulously choreographed, running is everything, striving for perfection brand of football madness, And that madness has blasted me out of my apathetic 15 year hibernation. I've never found them more exciting to watch than I have over the last two seasons. And I've never cared more about the team and what happens to them than I do now. It's very possible I'm what you would call a 'fair weather' supporter. Maybe I only come out of the woodwork when things are going well. But on the other hand, after so much financial mismanagement, and a magic roundabout of not very inspiring managers, maybe I'm just a skeptic. For me 'seeing is believing' and I need to be seeing something 'out of the ordinary' before I can devote my time and attention to it.
So, thank you Bielsa. And thank you also to the players. Who have bought into his methods, and who are prepared to run for every ball, and to give it everything, from the first minute to the last. The current squad is now just as memorable to me, as the team of Bremner and Lorimer that I mostly only learned about in hindsight, and the one of Strachan and Batty and Speed from 1989/90 that I saw with my own eyes.
What I don't know, is how this season will end, or even if it will end. I don't know if we'll ever get promoted. But whatever the record books say, in the end that's just statistics, and statistics don't tell the whole story. Supporting a team is about having something to hope for and to look forward to; a way of playing that you can be proud of and that gets you out of year seat and inspires you, and gives you something to believe in. For a long time with Leeds that had got lost. Thank you Marcelo and the players, for bringing it back.
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