Back to The Future

Bradley Johnson is worth £6million on the open transfer market, now. And he’s worth it to teams at the top of the Championship, who ought — they reckon — to be on their way to the Premier League.

That’s where Bradders was until recently, anyway, and where he’s spent a lot of his time since Ken Bates decided he wasn’t worth ‘equality’ and let him go, for nothing, to help kickstart the ex-Leeds revolution at Norwich City.

We don’t always need to look back. Johnson is effectively old news now, and while that generation of players — Johnson, Howson, Snodgrass, Gradel — are still around, their every move doesn’t quite have the strong emotional pull it once had on Leeds fans. Snoddy’s comeback from injury at Hull — tweeting photos pounding the running machine — is a feelgood story straight from Rocky, while Mad Max’s cruciate injury so soon after coming back from France is a bone fide sobber; never mind Bournemouth, I was looking forward to watching him play again on the regular, and I dread to think about the effect on his career.

But they’re old news. And we can say that not only because they left so long ago, but because we now have the beginnings of a team that might nudge them out of our thoughts. Why think about Bradley Johnson, when we have Lewis Cook? What matters Jonny Howson, compared to Alex Mowatt? Is Snodgrass really significant to us any more, when we have Sam Byram? — or at least his shadow, that will hopefully fill out bodily again with the closure of the transfer window.

The transfer window closed on Leeds United with a sense of relief and warmth. We kept who we had to keep, got rid of who we needed to get rid of, and we signed what we needed to sign, if not necessarily who. We’ll find that part out soon enough.

Jordan Botaka is the name, signed from Dutch Eredivisie side Excelsior; not, in the end, Anthony Limbombe, from NEC. Perhaps one Eredivisie winger is much like any other; and equivalent to Will Buckley, or Lloyd Dyer, or whichever Dyer we were apparently after, or any of the other names that popped up over that final weekend as the subject of United’s interest, but not a follow-up bid.

When the news of Botaka’s signing broke, he was actually mid-game, on the pitch for Excelsior, which didn’t suggest much in terms of stable, long-term planning — he was one late tackle away from screwing up our transfer window. But he came through, our policy endured, and he’s a Leeds player now. “God is good! To God be the glory!” he said on Instagram. “Let’s do this!”

As an example of a stable football club being run according to a plan and a policy, this transfer window has been held up. But unless, like in other recent seasons, you’re surveying the wreckage of a football club whose good players have all left, I’m not sure how you’re supposed to judge the success or otherwise of a transfer window in the week that it has closed, before another game has been played. Botaka is ready to do this; God is good. But he hasn’t done anything yet.

But Botaka has his chance, and if United earned one thing in this window, it’s a chance to let new players like Botaka, and relatively new ones like Chris Wood and Stuart Dallas, take their chances. They could be the future, and with that ahead of us, we can shrug off Bradley Johnson as Derby County’s problem: we have problems of our own. And for a change, they’re nice ones.