Champions League 2001: Anderlecht vs Leeds United
Leeds were taking on Europe's best and winning, but the wars of words were becoming different since Leeds kept coming out on top. David O'Leary, however, was still finding plenty to say.
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2025/26 season marks 25 years since Leeds United were playing in the Champions League, and even if it does feel like yesterday, it's worth going back to check what happened.
Throughout this season I'll be writing about the Champions League campaign game by game, roughly around the anniversary of each match.
If you're a veteran, staunch member of Leedsista (thank you!), you might remember me writing about this match in Brussels about a year ago. You're not wrong! That was different though, mostly about the partnership between David Batty and Olivier Dacourt and how we never saw enough of them together.
If you'd like to go back and read that and compare and contrast, you can find it here.
Around that time, I also wrote about our European Cup games against Anderlecht in 1975, when Billy Bremner scored a gorgeous chip in a swamp — to read about that story, click here.
That was part of a series I wrote about the 1975 European Cup, that we won, and you can find all those articles on this page.
Now, on with this one!
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An undercurrent war of words was present all through Leeds United's Champions League campaign, attended by an underdog thrill when players like Frank de Boer, of Barcelona, complained about Alan Smith's behaviour and said the team, "seemed intimidated ... I wasn't impressed by any of the Leeds players."
When Leeds put them out of the competition, amid much complaining from Catalonia that Milan hadn't tried hard enough when the Peacocks went to the San Siro, David O'Leary zinged back. "We'll be in the Champions League draw on Friday," he said, "I wish them well in the UEFA Cup."
Now, though, there was a sense of Leeds ascending high enough to be shot at. In the Irish Times, Mary Hannigan wrote about her fear of O'Leary — her 'bogey man in the winter coat three sizes too big for him' — taking his team to the Champions League final in May. His words were haunting her dreams: 'Ah sure, as I say, we're only babies - barely walkin' at this stage, especially me because I'm still in my managerial nappies, we'll be back again in twelve years when we've learned the basic skills and are all grown up and shaving and such like.'
Writing a birthday card to her pal's daughter, Billie Jack Paul Norman Paul Peter Eddie John Trevor Allan, she shudders at the thought of 'a whole new generation of Irish girls-to-be christened Harryette, Davo, Nigel, Rio, Lucas, Oliver, Dominic, Gary, Alan, Marc'. 'Just as they were when we were young,' she wrote, Leeds are, 'still the sons of Satan.'
This was legitimately funny stuff, as hyperbolic hatred of all things Leeds often is. The team were more bothered about what they were hearing from Belgium. Anderlecht's coach, Aime Anthuenis, had said he wasn't impressed by Leeds at Elland Road and that he had confidence in his team's formidable home record: they had won 21 consecutive games at the Stade Constant Vanden Stock, and had won their nine European games in Brussels, beating Dynamo Kiev, PSV, Lazio and Manchester United along the way.
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