APPROPRIATELY for a chap with a rich seam of anecdotes, it was the North of England Institute of Mining’s splendid lecture theatre that hosted an all-too brief talk from Harry Pearson late last year. Before sharing an overheard tale of Peter Beardsley being spotted shopping for cheese in a local supermarket, he dispensed some advice for those inclined to slap some much-needed sense into football.

It was the same line as the one fed to Floyd Mayweather prior to fighting Arturo Gatti a few years ago: “He don’t need no strategy to fight Gatti,” his trainer and uncle, Roger Mayweather, said. “Close your eyes and throw your hands and you’ll hit him in the fucking face.”

The thing is, football’s got a knack of staying on its fucking feet. Time after time its weeble-like figureheads live to fight another day; and seldom has this been more evident than during the last week.

At Cardiff City, Peter Ridsdale wobbled but he wouldn’t fall down. The fog persisted at Notts County, who have less than a month to clear their tax debts. Chester City became yours for a pound, while Crystal Palace’s administrators had a hand in the line-up that lost at Newcastle United, where season-long chants continue to implore a “fat cockney bastard” to get out of their club.

Portsmouth fans, in a change of tune from those caught voxpopping gormlessly on Match of the Day at the time of Gaydamak’s takeover that they didn’t care about the money “as long as it all gets spent!”, demanded to know where it’s all gone and where it’s going to come from. With a hateful global brandname for a neighbour, you’d have thought that’s the last thing Manchester City’s fans would want their club to become – but it is, whether or not Garry Cook sees it through.

After seven days of distress for fans of the sides involved and delight to some of those who aren’t, it’s worth remembering that if nothing else, football is fraternal and its appeal would diminish without the presence of genuine, traditional rivalries. There’d be much more mirth to be had at the Glazers’ shenanigans if the themes weren’t so familiar.

Leeds United’s recent form slump brings missed sitters like Thorp Arch and expensive shanks like the £1.5m Levi libel bill back into focus. Some of those who actually do put money into the club are showing renewed interest in what the man who doesn’t is doing with it all.

We’re fans. We want the best for our club. We have no say in its custodians. All we can do is not wet our knickers every time its name’s mentioned in the same breath as some flash bastard we’ve never heard of, and keep fighting those that we have.

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BEING a scribe of some repute on the subject of comedy, smiley faces are William Cook’s bread and butter. Don Revie’s Leeds United team of the 60s and 70s, however, were no laughing matter. The combination of the gang’s all-white enamelling, he said, and the infamous smile embroidered on their chests was “macabre; like something from A Clockwork Orange.”

It’s hard to disagree. But the so-called “Smiley” badge’s two interlocking yellow forms on a blue circle are also an evocative and enduring signifier of an era in which Leeds United oozed an artistry seldom seen in football before or since. The game, via the choreographed showbiz as prescribed to Revie by Paul Trevillion, was absorbing the vibrant graphics and fashions of the epoch and taking its first, tentative, steps towards mass commercialisation.

It might look cheery, but “surely the greatest emblem football has ever witnessed” has a lot to answer for. Leicester-based Admiral Sportswear, who introduced it at the expense of the austere “LUFC” styling synonimous with rival manufacturer Umbro, clung to Revie’s coattails when he claimed the England manager’s job in 1974. Above, it features in a short clip from the evidently slick titles of The Don of Elland Road, a half-hour eulogy which first aired on Yorkshire Television as his reign was ending gloriously, as league champions for a second time.

The documentary was directed by Pudsey-dwelling Geordie darts nutjob Sid Waddell at the time he was also producer on Indoor League; a show in which one man’s hand-knitted cardigan skittles to smithereens almost everything I’ve just said about Leeds United and sartorial elegance in the 1970s. Ah, well. I’ll sithee.

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The thing about Jermaine Beckford, right, is that he’s such a… a… no, that’s not it. The thing about Jermaine Beckford is that he’s just so… erm, well, you know what he’s like. No, the thing about Jermaine Beckford is that it’s all… well… a bit annoying really, isn’t it?

It’s probably just me, but I’m finding it hard to get all vexed about something so inevitable. What’s unfolding right now started to unravel back in May, when Beckford rejected what the club’s official flypaper insisted was “what we believe to be a very good offer”.

I struggled then to believe that Beckford had suddenly dropped out of favour because he’s a greedy bastard (any more than Gary Kelly met the same fate because he was injured, or Kevin Nicholls because he was a coward), long before an encounter with a broadsheet hack had me entertain the thought that his salary demands weren’t all that great: parity, it was claimed, with that of a teammate signed, like Beckford, when Leeds were in the Championship.

What we saw in the summer resembled two parties seeking an advantage from the contract situation of a player who’d just had the season of his life. Beckford, with some justification, desired a payrise while the club sought the biggest undisclosed fee it could possibly get – from a sale that failed to materialise. Now, with 20 further goals under his belt, if Beckford had decided to play out the remainder of the season, what’s the odds on someone somewhere sneering: “the least he could do is fuck off for a fee”?

Always an enthralling watch because he’s forever at odds with the world and its dog, Jermaine Beckford plays like football’s the most arduous of tasks, yet he takes great delight in goals. Just his own, usually; but they all count. Yes, his shooting’s erratic and his attitude’s off-putting, but arrogance is a survival instinct which has served him – and us – well in goalscoring terms.

As ever, all that matters now is how the club advances from here. The most startling aspect of last night’s development was that as I viewed a swathe of forums, blogs and tweets awash with comment, the chickenshits at Yorkshire Radio were still basking in Sunday’s glory, relaying pre-recorded interviews with Ken Bates from Monte Carlo. Or Cape Town, I forget which.

Much hinges on Simon Grayson’s managerial nouse and his elders’ ambition to back it with what’s required to fill his best marksman’s boots or, chances are, the second half of the season won’t resemble the first – and that’s the thing about Jermaine Beckford.

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FOR THE first time since we happened upon Austria Salzburg’s table-topping antics, Leeds United at last have an enviable lead over their promotion rivals too. But as we gorged ourselves on Leeds’ festive frolics, the Austrian winter break meant all they could do was cast an awestruck gaze in our direction while thinking about putting up those bloody shelves, just as the missus was promised sodding ages ago.

In October, with the winter nights drawing in, Austria Salzburg locked horns with PSV, the side they endured a brief fling with as a consequence of their rejection of Red Bull’s rebranding in 2005. Their support was initially welcomed by PSV, only to be shunned just days after it had supplied the impetus to avert a near-certain relegation. After three consecutive promotions from as low as the Austrian game goes, those same dedicated souls were merciless in thrashing the backstabbers by six goals to nil.

The term had begun quietly with a home friendly against Notts County back in July, when even less was fathomable about that particular club’s ownership than it is now. Who would’ve guessed that they were about to attract the corrosive influence of Sven-Goran Eriksson? Or that Sol Campbell would’ve seen through it all after a just one game? And who could’ve known that the funny little glyph underpinning the club’s brand new badge was in fact the logo of its holding company?

It’s precisely the sort of crass ownership stunt Austria Salzburg stand against – and please, if it is somehow legal in the English game (and my query on the matter remains unanswered by the Football League), nobody but nobody tell Ken Bates. That’s assuming, of course, that Forward Sports Fund really are more than just the sort of individual The Members once described “sitting at a desk with a plaque outside on the wall,” and actually have a logo of some description.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes. Football.

Held under a roof on a squeaky floor, the 2010 Salzburger Stier might not be as important as the outdoor game, but the tournament – played before a baying mob of beered-up blokes – which concludes today neatly overlaps its seasonal British equivalent: darts. And as everybody knows, darts is precisely what the new year’s all about.

It’ll be the end of March before Austria Salzburg resume a 4th division season in which 12 wins from 15 games has placed them 5 points clear at the top, so their intrepid fans will just have to wait until the resumption of what, in Waddellian terms, is the greatest comeback since Lazarus.

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WITH this fan’s world still a euphoric, mind-bending Escher-esque scene in which Simon Grayson smiles down from on high whilst a ruddy-faced knight of the realm slops out the sewers, let’s try and force yesterday’s events into some sort of perspective. One thing the national coverage of Leeds United’s humbling of all Mancunia elicits is that each step back towards the Premier League means we fans will rely less and less on Ken Bates for news and opinion.

“When the economy went to shit and profits tanked,” creative consultant Douglas Haddow writes in Adbusters magazine’s The Big Ideas of 2010 issue, “The sacred membrane that separated advertising and content was torn apart.” Same thing happened at Elland Road. The media strategy established by Bates after his 2005 takeover not only shielded him two years later from the club’s controlled demolition, but also supplied his best bet of digging gold from the rubble.

A £480,000 debt to the station was pivotal in Bates’ initial bid to regain control of the club, into which the broadcaster has done much in tandem with the Members Club and LUTV to welcome supporters with one hand while keeping them out with the other.

Naturally, on commercial media’s coattails came advertising, and the club established an in-house agency; precisely the sort that, Haddow insists, “spews their infectious bile over all that was once holy”. As if to dispel all doubt of this, Leeds United’s first signing of the 2010 transfer window today jumped a stricken south coast ship to join a regime which, in the last 12 months, has stocked its club shop with ready meals and target-marketed followers with pitchside ads for pornography.

Have no illusions that, as a database, the Members Club is infinitely more valuable to the club than it is to us, yet all it’s managed to glean so far from our names, addresses, dates of birth and purchase histories is that none of us can cook, or stop wanking.

The plum account at Elland Road is the selling of the L-shaped blockhead’s L-shaped block to anyone who’ll listen. The redevelopment of Stamford Bridge into what Bates dreamed as “one of the best grounds in the country” left it unfit for purpose with Chelsea on the verge of bankruptcy. But while external, contrary voices (such as David Conn’s ongoing distillation of the club’s offshore affairs for which the Guardian had their bottoms smacked) are dismissed as insubstantial, there remains little evidence that Bates’ scheme to replicate Fulham Broadway’s expensive mediocrity in, erm, Beeston is in our best interests – apart from his frequent say-sos on Yorkshire Radio, LUTV and in the programme that it is. Honest.

It’s with “a resounding shrug,” Haddow concludes in The Big Ideas of 2010, that audiences have “largely met the shift toward branded media” like Leeds United’s. However, as witnessed over the weekend, Ken’s stranglehold on the club’s message isn’t so fierce when it’s competing beyond the confines of the third division.

Gloriously anarchic, Leeds United fans are hard to chuck a blanket over but in 2010 our voices will crescendo to new, entirely authentic forms. It will be a year of mass individual expression as increasing numbers of bloggers, forummers and social networkers converge with new and existing independent initiatives run in the real world by fans, for fans. As Simon Grayson’s side flies higher, may the questions of those at the helm of our club become harder to ignore.

Here’s to 2010; to new friends and old enemies. Ha ha!

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“BAH, humbug!” from TBG in Square Ball magazine, on sale from vendors around Elland Road at Boxing Day’s game for a measly one pound sterling and also online at squareballshop.com.

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AFTER a break of almost five years, Leeds United return to Old Trafford in January and Mike Grella will hope to rise to the occasion.

The 22-year old New Yorker has found action hard to come by since arriving on the scene last season, but he’s thrived in this year’s FA Cup. His most prominent performance yet in Leeds colours came last month at Rockingham Road between two late, decisive, cameos: notching a goal at Oldham in the first round and the brace that finally nailed Kettering in the second.

A product of Gwyn Williams’ mercurial scouting policy which teams ex-non league Johnny-come-latelys (Tresor Kandol, Enoch Showunmi, Andy Robinson, Liam Dickinson, Lee Trundle) with ill-fated punts on unknown imports, Grella’s impact on trial was instant; banging in a debut hat-trick for the stiffs.

He’s thus far defied expectations that he’d follow the likes of Armando Sa, Sebastian Sorsa, Filipe Da Costa and Mansour Assoumani in having Elland Road’s back door hit his arse on the way out, and Leeds have twice since looked to MLS for raw recruits – but unlike Grella, Red Bull New York stoppers Babajide Ogunbiyi and Walter Garcia both flopped at Thorp Arch.

Ogunbiyi was last seen trying his luck at Oldham having finished a finance degree. Grella majored in sociology but it was his extracurricular activities at Duke University that really stuck out. In 2006, the Blue Devils’ ever-present leading goalscorer allegedly enjoyed an explicit online liaison with what he thought was a sexed-up sophomore, but he was in fact being screwed around by a bunch of frat boys from a rival college.

Having represented the US at under-18 and under-20 level, Grella knows he’s going to have to shoot his way into contention for their World Cup campaign which opens against England in South Africa next June. “If you don’t play,” he says, “I don’t think you are going to get much of a chance to make the national team.”

Keep your pecker up, Mike, and it’ll get harder and harder to bring you off (What? – Ed). Stroke one home in the third round and you’ll bring Old Trafford to its knees while a whole nation stands to attention before (That’s quite enough – Ed)

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LAST week, Major League Baseball’s season came to a disappointing, crushingly inevitable conclusion. If I’d wished – and were it not for the ensuing domestic chaos, I might have – I could’ve watched every single ball game on MLB.tv. That’s 2,430 regular season games live in HD and home comforts for the monthly fee of $19.95.

It’s a package which, by comparison, leaves Sky Sports’ paltry 92 live Premier League matches – even with Champions League, Football League, SPL and Carling Cup thrown in as well (plus whatever else they have knocking around) – looking like something from the stone age.

No wonder then, that in the wake of Setanta’s demise, the FA dipped their toes online; first for England’s defeat in the Ukraine and then for Saturday’s FA Cup first round clash between Oldham Athletic and Leeds United.

With half the sparse crowd at Boundary Park shushed by Jonny Howson’s first-half howitzer, the FA could do little about the fact it was an otherwise dreadful game. But by the time Mike Grella added a second, the admittedly colourful language of our boisterous travelling support had been silenced as well; seemingly by a member of the TV production crew.

If the streaming of this tie was the FA realising they’ve got a lot of catching up to do, then the decision to muffle the sound of those present beneath fake crowd noise was it swiftly exercising control over one of its “core brands” at the expense of its followers.

Whoever would resort to such crude artifice? Don’t the FA realise that we know more about how effects microphones work than most supporters? Would censorship have resulted had Leeds fans been fastidiously singing about “When we win the FA Cup (Sponsored by E.ON)…” ? In fact, in future why don’t they just dub that on themselves?

I would say you’ve just heard it here first, folks – if it hadn’t have been done already. Middlesbrough match commentaries on local radio regularly used to feature the apparent sound of the Riverside metronomically chanting the name of the local cable TV firm: “COMCAST TEESSIDE! COMCAST TEESSIDE!”. They weren’t of course, so let’s just consider this a warning. I’m allowed to say that on here, right?

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WHEN Dieter Mateschitz unveiled Red Bull Salzburg in June 2005 flanked by his private aircraft collection, there was no doubt that the club had become nothing more than another branch of his firm’s forays into novelty sports events such as skydiving, wakeboarding and Formula 1. There stood 11 walking billboards for a drink: red and white strips for home games with all blue when playing away from a ground tackily refitted with laser lighting rigs and a “supersonic” sound system.

The insensitivity shown to Austria Salzburg’s identity alienated swathes of supporters, some of whom were further outraged at being denied entry to a pre-season friendly merely for wearing their traditional colours. “The red bull can’t be violet, or else we couldn’t call it Red Bull,” went Mateschitz’s response. “This is a new club with no history.”

Despite a successful start on the field, the club’s most dedicated fans moved quickly to safeguard its discarded past. Today, those who had egged-on the young Martin Hiden in the 90s are more likely to be found on the sidelines of Austria’s village greens than at Red Bull’s temple of mammon.

To the refrain of “scheisse Red Bull!” and backed by unprecedented terrace solidarity from fans of many European clubs, the Initiative Violett-Weiss – an alliance of Austria Salzburg’s 20 or so supporters’ groups – attempted to reason with Red Bull on the issue of colour. The firm filibustered, dismissing public objections to their takeover as hooliganism. During a home game against Austria Vienna, 1,000 pro-violet supporters noisily exited the stadium through a choking violet fug at precisely 19.33, the year of Austria Salzburg’s foundation. Vowing only to return with their resurrected club, the bearers of 76 years of Austria Salzburg’s history are now sitting on top of the fourth division: the halfway stage of their epic journey back to the Bundesliga.

It’s not been easy. Their small community has suffered the loss of its grandstand to fire, and the life of young ultra Gerhard Weiss on a coach trip to visit a group of sympathetic fans of Borussia Dortmund. Those who Red Bull termed a “violent group of so-called fans” have welcomed supporters from all over Europe to Salzburg’s violet quarter. The demands of having a four-figure crowd in tow everywhere they go may present challenges to rural venues, but there’s more danger of being duped by tall tales about Martin Hiden’s supposed appetite for ham than anything else. In fact, the most violent act I’ve witnessed there was a bloke getting heartily slapped by his girlfriend.

Well, he probably asked for it – which is more than most football supporters do as the institutions we sustain with noise and with colour are bought and sold with increasingly frequency. Without our traditions, our culture, the lives we live and lend to our clubs, what would they be? What’s left when clubs exist for the benefit of those other than their supporters? In the third division, with ownership a mystery and Thorp Arch left unbought while plans for a commercial development estimated to cost over £80m sit on the drawing board, the endeavours of Austria Salzburg’s supporters is a timely reaffirmation of what we Leeds United fans already know: always question the motives of those running our club even when it’s on a roll. In fact, especially when it’s on a roll.

As for the only man to wear the all-white of Leeds United and the violet of Austria Salzburg, 36-year old Martin Hiden last year became the world’s first carbon neutral footballer (whatever that means), adding a righteous splash of green to an already extensive palette for one of the game’s least likely colourful characters.

This article appears in issue 4 of The Square Ball Magazine. Out now, only £1.

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WHEN George Graham checked behind the ears of the defender he’d bought from Rapid Vienna in February 1998, everything seemed to be as advertised. Within days, Martin Hiden slotted straight into one of his stoic yet occasionally engaging Leeds United line-ups on an afternoon it was neither: defeated by a single goal at home to Southampton. Nevertheless, the new acquisition settled in and was present at some memorable on-days (5-0 at Derby County) as well as some forgettable off-ones (0-1 at home to Wolves in the FA Cup).

Homesickness, however, was soon to become a worry for Hiden. English football’s only other Austrian, Alex Manninger, kept goal 200 miles away and much worse: no matter where he looked, it seemed that nowhere in West Yorkshire sold speck, a peculiarly Austrian sort of salt-cured ham. Bruno Ribeiro told him about a shop in Harrogate that stocked chorizo, but it simply wouldn’t do. Nothing could replace the distinctive juniper flavours of his favourite brand of speck, and in the depths of despair he reached for the bottle.

Summer brought the first indication to George Graham that all was not how it seemed with his £1.3m man: when the once brown-haired Hiden turned up for pre-season training with a brightly bleached barnet. If there’s one thing Graham hated, it was peroxide. So much so, that Hiden’s roots were barely showing when the man who once frogmarched freshly-blonded Lee Sharpe and Jonathan Woodgate back to the barbers by their ear holes walked himself all the way down the M1 to Spurs.

Hiden’s experiments soon left him with a bonce so red it resembled David Hopkin’s as seen through a pair of infrared goggles. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, a pothole in the turf of that club who wear the same disgusting colour ended his Leeds career. With a sore arse from the treatment table, Hiden eventually skulked back to his homeland; his hair a footnote in Leeds United’s history yet, it turns out, a token of the chameleonic nature of Austrian football.

Believe it or not, Hiden still plays in the Austrian Bundesliga. With revenues a fraction of those enjoyed by the other one in neighbouring Germany, it’s a grotesquely commercialised league. Playing kits are pockmarked with logos and the turnover of sponsors buries clubs beneath a colourful array of names and motifs. The games of hide and seek played with identity suits sponsors more than clubs, and some deals are more intrusive than others.

Take one of Hiden’s former clubs, for instance. Austria Salzburg were known officially as Casino Salzburg for a decade until an insurance firm, Wüstenrot, lent their name to the club in 1997. Throughout this period, the club wore its traditional hues of violet and white – until, that is, the hangover from a mid-90s purple patch that brought three Bundesliga titles and a UEFA Cup kicked in with a bang.

Amid cash concerns in the second half of the 2004/05 season, top flight survival was secured and Red Bull owner Dieter Mateschitz stated his intention to rescue the club. Outgoing chairman Rudi Quehenberger expressed his delight that “years of hard work for the benefit of football in Salzburg” had come to fruition, and the local company’s investment was roundly applauded. The strugglers suddenly became favourites for the title, but it quickly emerged that in brokering a deal with the energy drink firm, the club had sold its soul to the devil.

This article concludes here and appears in issue 4 of The Square Ball Magazine. Out now, only £1.

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