From today's Times

[NottinghamWhite]

Article from today's Times:

A summer of customary upheaval at Elland Road has made way for a comparatively new phenomenon for Leeds United and their long-suffering supporters, with optimism and potential stability now their watchwords. It may only be six games into the campaign but the eminently sensible pronouncements of their manager, Thomas Christiansen, plus, crucially, the low-profile approach of new owner Andrea Radrizzani, have made a pleasant change to the chaos that came before under his predecessor, Massimo Cellino.

Still, this is the seventh successive season in which Leeds have started a campaign with a different manager at the helm and Christiansen has also had to contend with integrating 12 new signings into his squad while selling the club’s prolific leading scorer, Chris Wood — factors that might have bought the new manager some breathing space.
Instead, Saturday’s 5-0 victory over Burton Albion cemented their unbeaten start to the campaign, with no other manager in the club’s illustrious history able to match the eight unbeaten games with which the Spaniard has started life in the Leeds dugout.
Christiansen’s appointment, having been plucked from Cypriot champions APOEL, is just one of a number of coups pulled off by Radrizzani and Victor Orta, the new director of football. Together, they have ensured the departures of full back Charlie Taylor and Wood, as well as the loss of Kyle Bartley after his impressive loan spell from Swansea City last term, have not been damaging.

Samuel Sáiz and Ezgjan Alioski have both been particularly impressive in the early weeks of the campaign and on Saturday it was Pierre-Michel Lasogga’s turn to make his mark.
Signed on a season-long loan deal from Hamburg, the barrel-chested forward justified his decision to leave his heavily pregnant girlfriend in Germany and make his debut by netting either side of half-time.

The 25-year-old has been signed to help replace Wood, who left for Burnley in an £18 million deal last month, and the early signs are promising. “I have friends in the [Sweden] national team who played with him at Hamburg, so I know a bit about him,” Leeds defender Pontus Jansson said of his new team-mate. “He’s started with two good goals, and he’s going to be important for us.

“The change this year is that we have so many more offensive options. Wood was a good target, but now we have other players with other qualities. Last season a lot of things needed to go through Pablo [Hernández] because he is one of the best players in the league. This year when I have the ball I have far more options to find players.” Such attacking verve matched by results has led to in excess of 20,000 season tickets being sold this season, a 45 per cent increase on the 2016-17 campaign.

And while Christiansen admits pride at what he has been able to achieve in such a short length of time, he is wary of just how tough it will be to maintain the form that has seen them climb to second in the Championship table. “I feel proud, not only to have this start, but to have this start at a historic team like Leeds,” he said. “They are a big club, but this has just started and we need to keep performing well. There will be bad moments to come, for sure, but we have to enjoy the good results.”

Burton manager Nigel Clough admitted at full-time that Leeds were one of the best sides his team had faced since promotion to the Championship just over a year ago and, while Christiansen urges caution, Elland Road fans can see progress.

[Deleted User 728]

Good piece, especially given it's from The Times, which doesn't cover the FL in that much depth.

[NottinghamWhite]

Another.



Leeds United are top of the second tier of English football for the first time since Howard Wilkinson was the manager and the fans were enthralled by David Batty and Gary Speed.

Early days, perhaps, but when your last decade has been one of unremitting misery it has got Leeds buzzing as a club and city. For the first time in history, Leeds have won four successive league games by at least two goals. They have kept six successive clean sheets. This is not bad work given that it was only May when Andrea Radrizzani completed his buyout from Massimo Cellino, a deranged businessman who had said he wanted “big balls” but brought in Dave Hockaday anyway.

Few clubs have been as mismanaged as Leeds United and, in modern football, that is saying something. In 2001 they played in the Champions League semi-final but by 2004 they were relegated from the top flight. Three years later they were in administration, docked points and down in League One. Given the history of hooliganism, the riots of Birmingham and Bournemouth, the Bradford chip van fire, the racism of the 1980s and the one-eyed revisionism of Don Revie and his team, few neutrals mourned this demise.

Yet fans everywhere should have felt sympathy at witnessing how self-serving egotists could take a community stronghold and fleece.

There was Peter Ridsdale, a fan with his heart in the right place but a misaligned brain, seguing into Ken Bates and his yo-yo approach to administration. The ground was sold. There has also been Professor John McKenzie trying to sack Peter Reid in the public glare of a Halifax hotel lobby and falling asleep at his first Premier League meeting.
Eyes were not on the ball, however big it may, or may not, have been.

GFH also had a stab at running the club and achieved the remarkable in being even more unpopular than all who had gone before. If Ridsdale was likely to sign his own grandmother, GFH would have sold her. Their low watermark was when they accused David Haigh, their former employee, of embezzlement, and he spent months holed up in a Dubai jail denying all wrongdoing. Mind you, it was a close-run thing after the talk of Iranian money breaching a UN resolution, while the spy cameras and cocaine in the boardroom exhumed memories of the old story about getting Michael Duberry off the wage bill by sprinkling drugs on his pasta. An ex-director was convicted of blackmail. Inevitably. Damned was an understatement. It went further than being a bit mean to Brian Clough.

Now Radrizzani is giving a good impression of a rational human being, buying back Elland Road and bringing the women’s team back into the fold. His managerial choice, Thomas Christiansen, looked like a gamble. Not many were celebrating getting a man who had been big for a bit in Cyprus. They are now.

It will not all go right, of course. Leeds were on the back foot against Birmingham City at Elland Road yesterday. They held out this time. However, Leeds have also finished in the top ten in the Championship only twice since they were promoted from League One in 2010. They have never made the play-offs in that time. Their last cup final was the Coca-Cola drubbing by Aston Villa in 1996 that left Wilkinson “emotionally disembowelled”. Leeds are not so much a sleeping giant as a once-significant club put in a drug-induced coma by quack doctors.

Gordon Strachan, chief foreman of the 1990 rebuild, once told me: “It’s like David Bowie. Every so often you have to reinvent yourself.” Of course, there are reinventions and mad-cap experiments, but this is a club craving any semblance of success and they have got that. Top of this league, then, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister (a few hours in 2004 aside). The new regime has made its mark.

[90 miles a hour]

He's not a Leeds fan then seams like a very angry man but didn't we play Watford in Cardiff in the play off I won't waste my monie bying the times think he's had drugs on his pizza

[Barlow Boy]

The deranged businessman bit made me chuckle .

[SCOTTISH LEEDS]

Another good article:-

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/sport ... ard/13/09/

[PockWhite]

Another good article:-

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/sport ... ard/13/09/

Good to see Liam Copper has stepped up to the mark.

P.S. - Yes 3 good articles in this thread though, thanks for posting them.

[Otherworld]

Another good article:-

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/sport ... ard/13/09/

Badly researched, poorly written, full of errors. I hope that's not a professional journalist!