anyone want to manage a football club

Why a plumber should manage Leeds
Wednesday November 12th 2003


IT is not all bad news for Leeds United. When Cheltenham Town sacked Bobby Gould recently, the chairman, Paul Baker, received applications from a housewife, a guard at Rye Hill prison in Warwickshire and three computer nerds claiming to be dab hands at Championship Manager.

So the Elland Road vacancy might not be so hard to fill. By the time every serious football man in England has run a mile, there could still be enough takers from professions outside the game to make a lengthy shortlist.

A plumber, perhaps. Good at plugging leaks, mopping up other people's mess and standing knee-deep in - well, you get the idea. Actors would be out - WC Fields' advice about not working with animals or children should preclude a member of Equity taking a job at a club that numbers Jody Morris and Mark Viduka among the squad. An undertaker would be appropriate, although the way Leeds are heading they will only afford a pauper's grave when the time comes.

Which leaves Eddie Gray. The man they couldn't sack yet did, twice.

Leeds fans revere Gray. They hated Brian Kidd for not being him and for being a Manchester United man, which was as low as Leeds could go until Terry Venables, a Londoner, turned up. Now the board plays on this stifling parochialism by giving Gray the job until a deluded successor can be found. Presumably, had Gray turned it down, they would have asked David Batty to be player-coach.

Gray is a civilised, sensible man, but there is a reason he left the job on October 11, 1985. Leeds were fourteenth in the old second division and had been beaten 3-1 by Huddersfield Town. In all, Gray had been in charge for more than three years and had not come close to promotion, albeit in difficult circumstances. On the final day of the 1984-85 season, there was an outside chance of reaching the play-offs until Leeds lost 1-0 to Birmingham City against the backdrop of a pitch invasion, a riot and the collapse of a wall that killed a teenage spectator. Had 56 fans not also died in a fire at Valley Parade, Bradford, the same day, the incident would be more remembered. Police asked Gray to appeal to the Leeds fans for calm. "It had no effect whatsoever," he recalled in his autobiography.

Marching On Together: My Life with Leeds United is very illuminating, considering present circumstances. This is Gray on his appointment as manager in July, 1982. "I was never under any illusions about why Leeds chose me," he wrote. "The club were in financial trouble and I represented the cheapest and most convenient option. The biggest headache in halting the slide was one of finance - the decline in income made it exceptionally difficult to sustain the contracts of our highest-paid players. My spell as Leeds manager coincided with the club falling £2m in debt." Or . . . Seth Johnson's wages for just over a year.

Add on 21 seasons and multiply the club's shortfall by 40 and that is Gray's situation now. All that has changed is that his role as Leeds's elder statesman and saviour has taken on epic over-significance, as the past invariably does at Leeds.

Take David Batty. Despite playing his best football from the age of 25 to 30, at Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United, he is regarded as Leeds through and through. Now 35, this would be enough for a testimonial and a fond tribute at most clubs. At Leeds, however, Batty remains a cause celebre and fans flood the airwaves if he is not in the team.

Who in their right mind would take this job now? Leeds were never a big club in the tradition of Manchester United or Arsenal and now they grow smaller like harbour lights to a night fisherman. Soon they will be gone, their brief attempt to survive among the Premier League's biggest players only a memory, in the same vein as Howard Wilkinson's 1992 League Championship ended up as a triumph too fleeting to be of great importance.

It would need a madman, a masochist or an egomaniac to believe he could rescue them, short-term at least. Maybe that is why some are putting two and two together and getting Neil Warnock of Sheffield United - or a plumber. And, let's face it, everyone knows you can't get a plumber these days. ©The Times, London