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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