Parades go by
"Memories like this can’t be bought. There will never be another day like this," Howard Wilkinson told the crowd in the Town Hall, and even the other days like that weren't quite like it.
"Memories like this can’t be bought. There will never be another day like this," Howard Wilkinson told the crowd in the Town Hall, and even the other days like that weren't quite like it.
Would Joe Rodon come out in a 1992 Umbro tracksuit? Would Pascal Struijk do a Jon Newsome and nearly drop the cup? Would Illan Meslier say he doesn't know why he loves us, but he loves us?
The game is better this way, trust me. And trust yourself, and how you felt when Solomon scored the winner. And trust the incomprehensible history of Leeds United Football Club.
Leeds fans are, as Farke says, emotional. It doesn't matter how it makes the manager feel, as Howard Wilkinson once said, but it mattered that the team saw their manager using fans' emotions as fuel for his own calm. Since Chris Wilder called his club's fans a 'disgrace', Leeds have won every game.
Going up and staying up are two different things; proposing and building are two different things; 1st and 2nd are two different things; football and everything else are two different things. From everything over the last week, I'll take the football.
From when Parker first took the ball knowing there would be a gap to run into, to the spot-on cross to meet the timing of Becchio's run, the goal was orchestrated by the left-back whose body, at the time, was ticking like a time bomb.
Bremner said this wasn't their last chance at glory, that the pressure wasn't on Leeds. But their long European history had to continue for money, for trophies, and to put Barcelona in their place.
The Premier League? What might be next are a lot of things we won't like. Gradually, then suddenly, Leeds United could change. But for two weeks we have a club with no stress and a team that, when there is no stress, wins 6-0 and makes us happy. It only becomes a moment when it's over.
On and off the pitch, in Oxford and Leeds and beyond, the club had to spend another weekend defending its reputation.
"There are players miles better than me who’ve never won anything," Barry Douglas once said. But that he won so much was down to resilience forged in his youth and an open mind to his career and his life.