The Leeds Thread

[Bedford White]

On 13/03/2019 at 13:49, The 49Bus said:

If Leeds do come up they won't be on Sky as many times as they have been this season, unbelievable amount of fixture changing

I make it 20 league games up to Brentford away that have been on Sky this season. This excludes all red button games.  I would not be so sure we will not be on as much next season if we go up. The novelty of a Bielsa Leeds in Prem, coupled with an old school atmosphere at ER and some tasty rivalries revisited. Sky know many haters tune in the hope we get beat and this will not change whatever league we are in. Sky Leeds

[Bedford White]

Let's hope for a similar outcome to the last time the blades came to ER in an end of season promotion 6 pointer

[Herman Hessian]

GIRFUY - fucking vermin

[D'Jaffo]

[cameron2000]

Imo Norwich deserve to win the League and Sheffield Utd finish 2nd. Leeds I feel rely more of individual moments than the other 2 teams who play with very fluid systems. Sheffield Utd’s ‘Overlapping Centre Back’s’ have fascinated me this season.

[IrishBhoy]

See Barry Douglas taking a bit of a pounding on twitter from the Leeds fans. By all accounts he was one of the best left backs in the Championship last year but they don’t seen to rate him. 

[Marshmallo]

Felt a bit sorry for Cooper yesterday, he's been excellent all season but completely sold the jerseys twice yesterday. Looks like Jansson could be out for a while as well.

[WALMOT]

http://sportwitness.co.uk/bielsas-brother-british-double-standards-extraordinary-defence-leeds-united-manager/

[WALMOT]

Taken from the Dundee Evening Telegraph:-

For comedian Phil Differ there was no player better than the legendary Billy Bremner.

And for anyone who disagrees, the comic is set to try to sway audiences when he performs his new show Billy Bremner and Me at the Dundee Rep this month.

Phil, the man behind the annual Hogmanay television programme Only an Excuse?, tells the tale of his childhood dream to follow in the footsteps of the former Leeds United and Scotland captain.

However, his dreams soon fade as he realises there is one thing standing in his way – his own mediocrity.

Phil said: “I think lots of people expect to see me in a ginger wig pretending to be Billy Bremner, but it’s not a play.

“It’s an illustrated lecture of his life.

“I use music, slides and stand-up to tell his story.”

Like Bremner, Phil attended Stirling’s St Modan’s High School.

It’s this that Phil thinks made his admiration of the footballer so strong.

He said: “He had been through the school about eight years before me.

“I looked up to him so much because he was the captain of Scotland.

“Beforehand, I thought footballers came from another planet.

“For a footballer who had such a successful career to come from the same area as me was hugely impactful.”

Phil said Bremner’s archetypal Scottish charm also helped make him endearing.

He said: “You didn’t get a lot of games on television back in those days. I remember watching him on TV in the late ’60s. He looked like a real Scotsman. He had ginger hair and wanted to fight everyone.”

When asked how he came to realise that his professional football dreams wouldn’t come to fruition, Phil didn’t give too much away but did say he knew his life would take a different direction when he was about 17.

He said: “I think part of me thought that reading lots of books about football and playing Subbuteo would convert into the pitch and I would turn into a footballer. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case.”

Phil insisted that although he never got the chance to play football professionally, his love for the game hasn’t waned and in some ways he enjoys it better.

He said: “Although the show is a homage to Billy Bremner, it’s also about the joy of football.

“When you realise you’re not too good at the game but enjoy it for what it is, it becomes amazing. I still play 11-a-side at the age of 62.”

Although Bremner – who died in 1997 – is no longer here to witness the tribute to his life and career, Phil insisted he still has an idea of what he would say to his hero.

He said: “I think I would tell him I wished he picked the school team. I don’t think the gym teacher liked me.

“I would like to ask him who the best player he ever played against was. George Best said that Billy was the only player he never got the better of.

“I would be worried my mouth would dry up and I would hardly be able to speak.”

Billy Bremner and Me is at the Dundee Rep on Friday March 29 at 7.30pm.

[Londonwell]

On 3/17/2019 at 11:26, cameron2000 said:

Imo Norwich deserve to win the League and Sheffield Utd finish 2nd. Leeds I feel rely more of individual moments than the other 2 teams who play with very fluid systems. Sheffield Utd’s ‘Overlapping Centre Back’s’ have fascinated me this season.

Could you explain this for someone who doesn't really watch the championship? Sounds interesting. 

[cameron2000]

Could you explain this for someone who doesn't really watch the championship? Sounds interesting. 

They play a 3-5-2 formation with wings-backs.

As you would expect the Wing-backs play quite a big attacking role in the team and have licence to bomb forward. What is very unique though is that when attacking, the Outside centre backs overlap the wingbacks and create an overload in wide areas. This has lead to a lot of goals and been very successful over the past 2 years (They got promoted from League 1 last season). When it doesn’t work, however, they are very vulnerable on the counter attack (not so much recently) meaning their matches are often pretty entertaining.

[Londonwell]

3 hours ago, cameron2000 said:

They play a 3-5-2 formation with wings-backs.

As you would expect the Wing-backs play quite a big attacking role in the team and have licence to bomb forward. What is very unique though is that when attacking, the Outside centre backs overlap the wingbacks and create an overload in wide areas. This has lead to a lot of goals and been very successful over the past 2 years (They got promoted from League 1 last season). When it doesn’t work, however, they are very vulnerable on the counter attack (not so much recently) meaning their matches are often pretty entertaining.

Cheers for that.

That sounds like a thoroughly entertaining way to play football. You’d be gutted though if you were the one centre back left to cover a counter attack.

[WALMOT]

Liquidators appointed after Leeds United entered administration almost 12 years ago have finally dissolved the original company which owned the club - with less than £750,000 paid to unsecured creditors.

Leeds United Association Football Club Limited, the firm established when the club were formed in 1920, was formally liquidated last month after KPMG filed its last report with Companies House.

KPMG oversaw Leeds’ insolvency in 2007 and was given the job of winding up the company which entered administration following the transfer of ownership of United to a new firm, Leeds United 2007 Ltd.

The Elland Road club were declared insolvent during the reign of former chairman Ken Bates in May 2007, with total debts in excess of £30m.

During a complicated and much-criticised process, Bates agreed another takeover with KPMG and bought back the club after Leeds’ largest creditor, overshore firm Astor Investment Holdings, agreed to write off debts of more than £17m provided Bates retained control at Elland Road, despite the former Chelsea chairman stating that he had no connection to Astor.

The rules of the EFL required Leeds to pay any football debts in full but the final report filed by KPMG on February 18 revealed that of more than £18.5m of claims made by unsecured creditors, a total of £745,568 was repaid.

The document, meanwhile, declared KPMG’s “time costs” for handling the liquidation as £548,751 and said the firm had so far been paid £499,008. The total cost of the process was almost £1m.

[WALMOT]

From the YEP a good piece about Carlos Corberan who has just coached the Under 23s to the PDL North league title with 2 games left:-

Very few people on the coaching staff at Leeds United have covered more road miles than Carlos Corberan this season. Monday night, when the club’s Under-23s won their league title away at Colchester United, was typical: home in the early hours of the morning, back in Thorp Arch at 8.30am. Between the first team and the development squad, he has prepared for or overseen 75 games, epitomising a boot room which never sleeps.

Travel is part of life in his industry but a willingness to go wherever, whenever has given Corberan an education. He holds an eclectic CV: six years with Villarreal and three as assistant manager, a stint in Saudi Arabia as number two to Raul Caneda – a confidant of Pep Guardiola’s – a brief crossing of paths with Fabio Cannavaro, a head coach’s job in Cyprus and now, in England, a place in Marcelo Bielsa’s iron circle. “I wasn’t scared about which country I moved to for work,” Corberan says. “My only focus was developing my footballing ideas and trying to be a better coach.”

Corberan is 35 but has been fashioning a career in coaching for 12 years. He grew up in Valencia and joined their academy as a goalkeeper but never played higher than Spain’s third division and was never delusional about his ability. “I finished my career pretty fast,” he says, “and I was 23 when I started to feel like my future would be more in coaching than as a player.” So he took a degree in sports science and began applying for coaching badges. He and Marcos Abad, Leeds’ goalkeeping coach, are from the same breed: no major playing careers to speak of but UEFA Pro qualified and employed at a high level. Bielsa, a defender who retired in his 20s, could relate to that.

Villarreal, when Corberan was first given a contract there in 2006, were embracing the monumental shift in Spanish and European football caused by Guardiola; in and out of the Champions League and the UEFA Cup with Manuel Pellegrini on the touchline. “In one period in Spain, Guardiola started a revolution,” Corberan says. “The Spanish national team started to change their model of play because Spain came from a long period where they didn’t try to control games.

“From this moment there was a link between Guardiola and the Spanish national team and the style of Villarreal was in the same direction. It gave me new ideas about how you can train teams and what the best methodology is to have one style of play. It’s something that goes inside of you. It changes your mind and changes your feelings towards football.”

Guardiola’s football in certain respects was an extension or a hybrid of Biesla’s, much as Bielsa dislikes the idea that he had any influence on Guardiola’s genius. Corberan says Villarreal gave him the bug for “trying to control games with the ball, trying to keep the ball all the time, trying to dominate” and Bielsa’s philosophy at a very basic level is exactly that. Corberan was new to England but not to the ethos which now dominates Thorp Arch.

It was different when Leeds contacted him in 2017 to ask if he would be interested in managing their Under-23s. The club were in between managers after losing Garry Monk and their development squad was down on numbers, to the point of having 11 young professionals and no spine. Earlier this week, the Under-23s won their Professional Development League with two games to spare. In the season before Corberan’s appointment, they finished seven points adrift at the bottom of it. Corberan was not a silver bullet but he – and Leeds – has revived that squad in the space of two years.

He was recommended to Leeds by a colleague who had worked with him at Villarreal but relocated to Aspire, the ultra-expensive academy in Qatar which United formed a partnership with last season but speak less about these days. “I didn’t have any doubt about (the job) because I knew the project,” Corberan says. “I knew which people would come here.

“I knew Ivan Bravo (the Leeds board member who ran Aspire) and he’s someone with high experience. Victor Orta was the same. We didn’t work together before I arrived here but I knew about the experience he had in Spain. And when you’re young, when you love football, England is special. To have the possibility to come to England but at the same time work with people who you think have high value, especially at Leeds United, all the conditions were perfect.”

Orta, United’s director of football, recruited busily in Corberan’s first summer, building up the head-count at Under-23 level with academy signings, the vast majority from continental Europe. Corberan and the academy took the decision that, in order to develop the players with most potential, they would use some out of position, take risks with their line-ups and suck up some poor results. In the first half of Corberan’s first season, they won three games.

“When I arrived, the important thing was to create a model of how we wanted to play,” Corberan says. “The first part wasn’t about putting players in just because you needed players to play.

“For example, we made decisions to play without a clear left-back or without clear centre-backs. The idea was about which players had the potential to continue in this club and grow. Our priority was not results because, if our objective was results, maybe we would take bad decisions. You’d play players without futures here just because you need to get results. The idea was to know which players deserved to be here. Sometimes you have to stop your ego because of course, as coaches, we want to win games. But I understand that my project here is more medium-term.”

Leeds’ academy has always been a collective mission. These days it has almost 30 full-time staff and more than 100 in total. Orta’s better signings made a difference, Corberan’s coaching has worked (in the past eight months, Leeds’ Under-23s have lost all of eight matches) but some who have come through the academy – Jamie Shackleton, Jack Clarke, Robbie Gotts, Bailey Peacock-Farrell – were here long before either of them. The Under-23s were lacking any impetus when Corberan came in but the academy was not in disarray. “This club have always developed their academy and put players in the first team,” Corberan says. “It’s not true if I tell you that I came to a club which wasn’t working.”

Last summer, Leeds opened themselves up to a bigger revolution. Bielsa flew in from Argentina and laid out, in the finest of detail, how Thorp Arch would operate on his watch. Corberan knew of Bielsa – “when you’re a coach you try to know what the key coaches in the world are doing” – but did not know him personally and the appointment was followed by the recruitment a backroom team of regular Bielsa lieutenants. Before long, Corberan was invited into it: a go-between who would contribute with the first team but continue to manage the Under-23s, alongside a second academy coach, Danny Schofield.

Bielsa wanted the Under-23s to train as his senior squad did and play as his senior squad did, with many of the better prospects working with him directly. Corberan was tasked with facilitating the crossover, to very good effect. The development side, in Bielsa’s image, have run their division ragged. Bielsa has felt confident enough in them to give first-team debuts to no fewer than seven graduates.

“In the Under-23s we work like one part of the first team,” Corberan says. “One of my functions is to lead the process of the training with the Under-23s and to lead their games. This connection is key because both teams are working with the same idea, the same philosophy and with as close a methodology as we can.

“When I was at Villarreal, we played versus Marcelo when he was at Athletic Bilbao. I remember when he came to Spain, it was the same – a surprise and everyone wanted to know how he was working. But I think you can’t really know until you are working with him. Then all your ideas change.

“Until I started working with him, I only knew the opinion of the other coaches but I couldn’t feel it. Now I think that all the coaches who talk about Marcelo being one of the best coaches in the world, I totally agree with them.

“He’s someone who likes to control all the details. To be a coach, it’s one profession which is never going to stop, which is never finished. He tries to control the game and this is brilliant because I have the same idea, the same passion.”

Leeds have never spoken publicly about a succession plan for Bielsa, and no-one would seek to second-guess his longevity or his intentions, but Corberan is the one coach who will be left behind when Bielsa leaves. The others come and go with the Argentinian, a package around him, and Bielsa does not tend to stick in one place for too long. It might be that Corberan, on the strength of his impact with the academy and his education under Bielsa, presents an option for continuity when the time comes.

“My ambition when I arrived here was to help in the role I had,” Corberan says. “Last year, I was only focused on the Under-23s, to create a base and develop a style of play. This year, they moved me to be part of Marcelo’s staff and my only focus is to be helping him with the things he delegates to me.

“My only focus is to go year by year or step by step. This is enough ambition right now, not to think about other things which might be.”

[Bedford White]

Wall sold 1200 for tomorrow. Look forward to Right said Fred pitching up again.

 

[Bedford White]

Scenes after 3rd goal. It's on! MOT! 

[Rab B Nesbit]

14 hours ago, Bedford White said:

Scenes after 3rd goal. It's on! MOT! 

Great win for the Leeds, Whitey. 

[WALMOT]

I saw a good tweet yesterday.

“Has anybody come down since the game yesterday?”

 

“Yes, Huddersfield”

 

 

[List_of_Jericho]

Douglas out for the season, bit of a blow but hopefully Alioski can get back to the levels of a few weeks ago.

Going to be a few twists yet before the end of the season I think.

One more win guarantees Play-Offs at least (ever the optimist here).

Edited April 2, 2019 by List_of_Jericho
ETA

[WALMOT]

Not sure why Douglas came on for Alioski at half time but Douglas made a telling contribution with his assist for Ayling's goal even when he was injured.

Playing through the pain barrier until full time tell us everything about Douglas and this squad of players.