Seventy Days of Leeds United

You could say that Dave Hockaday should have had more time. You could also say that he got seventy times as much time as he ever deserved.

There’s no need to be nice any more, or to temper judgements against the chance that Hockaday somehow came good and it turned out he really was setting the controls for the heart of the Champions League, even as he was dithering uselessly on the margins of a horrible defeat at Valley Parade.

Does Hockaday deserve sympathy for finding himself in the situation he is in this morning, ex-head coach of Leeds United? No. Six months ago he was just hoping for another non-league gig after failing at Forest Green Rovers. Whatever the terms of his settlement with Leeds, his seventy days at the club will sure have beaten seventy days without work.

And while his reputation may not have gained anything from his association with Leeds United, his profile certainly has; and since his reputation was so low that he couldn’t even get a job in non-league, I’m not sure that’s a major concern. Or that it’s a concern that would even bother Dave; he hasn’t shown any signs of lacking self-confidence so far, so why start now?

Dave’ll be okay. His middle name is ‘Pressure’, after all, and so he’ll have thrived on Wednesday night, when all four sides of Valley Parade joined in a chant of ‘You’re Getting Sacked in the Morning’ after United went 2–1 down. Hockaday absorbed the pressure, summoned up his forty years of experience, and brought Dom Poleon on. Pressure? What pressure?

His name will live on. If we’ve learned one thing from Hockaday’s time in charge of Leeds United, it’s that coaches do make a difference; and that you can’t just take any loser off the street, put them in charge of a professional football team, and expect them to do a good job. We can call it The Hockaday Experiment and publish our findings: coaches with bigger names and better track records than Dave Hockaday have failed before and will fail again, but in football to be a success you have to give yourself the best chance of succeeding. And a non-league manager will not give you the best chance in the Championship.

That’s the sort of truism that shouldn’t need testing in a live environment, but here we are in Massimo Cellino’s lab, testing the limits of absolutely everything. Most Championship club chairmen would never have dreamed have appointing Dave Hockaday as, effectively, manager of their team; but Leeds United have Massimo Cellino, the original rebel, the guy who’ll try anything once.

We’re fortunate that Cellino doesn’t seem to be too stubborn when it comes to admitting his own mistakes. “After the defeat at Bradford I realised that my decision to keep David at the club following the defeat at Watford was wrong,” said Cellino when he finally sacked Hockaday, “and I had to change my mind on the coach’s position.”

Bellusci wanted too much money, but then Cellino changed his mind; Cooper was too expensive, but then Cellino changed his mind; Sharp was too old, but then Cellino changed his mind; Hockaday wasn’t the problem, but then Cellino changed his mind. That Massimo Cellino changes his mind so often and so easily might be Leeds’ only salvation, because his first instincts don’t seem to be up to much.

Let’s not forget that Eamonn Dolan was set to come from Reading until the compensation was deemed too expensive; since then we’ve thrown much more money than he would have cost at every Serie B player we can find. I wonder if Cellino thinks about not just changing his mind on that decision, but travelling back in time.

Dave Hockaday will forever be a punchline for jokes at Leeds United’s expense, but his tenure doesn’t really amount to a massive deal for us. He wasn’t with the club long enough to do any serious damage. What’s more concerning is what his tenure says about Massimo Cellino’s time at the club, which doesn’t look like it’ll end any time soon.