Fotherby on Tour: Duncan Ferguson
Jim McLean wanted a clause in the deal with Leeds preventing them from selling Ferguson to Rangers. But Duncan Ferguson really, really, really wanted to play for Rangers.
Jim McLean wanted a clause in the deal with Leeds preventing them from selling Ferguson to Rangers. But Duncan Ferguson really, really, really wanted to play for Rangers.
It's easy to understand from the adjectives — diligent, hard-working, cultured-but-disciplined — why Trevor Steven appealed to Howard Wilkinson. Besides, he already had Steve Hodge, so might as well collect another midfielder Diego Maradona had run rings around in 1986.
Pairing England's most-hated footballer with England's most-hated football club would have sunk the likes of Emlyn Hughes into tabloid column apoplexy for months. Which would have been fantastic.
Outsiders might ask what the fun would be having a Premier League ready squad in the Championship and winning it by Easter while breaking records on easy mode. Leeds fans would answer that you shouldn't knock it until you've tried it.
Football clubs can write whatever they want into players' contracts, but they still end up dealing with a big group of twenty-something manifest destinies with Instagram accounts.
CEOs aren’t fun: they’re the boring looking guys, tense and sweaty, who are there to be screamed at when things go wrong, and to stay firmly out of the way when the team does cool things that have nothing to do with them.
Gnonto's actions are disrespectful to the shirt, the badge, the city; at Harewood House, the peacocks in the woods there weep. There is something to all that. But Leeds United's history also says that, historically, we can get over it.
Brace yourself, because the three weeks left in the transfer window are likely to be tougher to take even than the summer so far.
The challenge for Farke goes deeper than working out who is in and who is out, to making sure that the players who are in, whether by choice or circumstance come September 1st, feel like they’re in a good place.
The question for Leeds United is, how to exist in hell? To sign the players we want, win the games we want, sing the songs we want? It's what Marching on Together means — a turn inward to ourselves. We can't escape hell, but we can turn our backs on it.