Champions League 2001: Deportivo La Coruña vs Leeds United
As goalkeeper, Nigel Martyn knew what this pre-match bluster meant. "If they think they can score four, Deportivo must have singled me out," he said.
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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.
It felt in Leeds like all Europe had been made to eat Deportivo La Coruña's words with them. But even as the 'Weakest Team' won their next two Premiership fixtures, beating Southampton and Liverpool, Leeds were battling to maintain the mood.
The win over Depor had been followed by a ceremony remembering Christopher Loftus and Kevin Speight, on the first anniversary of their murders. The next day David Rocastle was laid to rest. He had died, aged just 33, of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was a former Leeds United player, a teammate then of David Batty and Gary Kelly, and had played for twenty years at Arsenal alongside Leeds' manager David O'Leary. Football is a small world: Rocastle had played with Michael Duberry at Chelsea and Danny Mills at Norwich. He'd been a childhood friend of future Arsenal teammate Ian Wright, who played with Nigel Martyn at Crystal Palace. And Rocky'd been loved wherever he went.
O'Leary attended the funeral, with a lot on his mind. While his team had been recovering from its difficult, injury affected start to the season and gathering momentum towards the Champions League semi-final and the Premier League's top three, a number of players, staff and club lawyers had been moonlighting in a courtroom in Hull.
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