Keep Calm And Carry On TSS November 5, 2011 Leeds United 21 Comments It’s been a difficult few days for us Leeds United fans coming to terms with the embarrassing 5-0 defeat at home to Blackpool. The inquest into the cause of that defeat was led by angry fans, and once we’d finished blaming everyone from Lucas The Kop Cat to the Elland Road tea lady, with no one else left to blame, we turned on each other. A club whose fanbase was once impossible to divide, united by an “us against the world” mentality born of the hatred aimed at us from every possible direction has crumbled into a divided mess of angry name calling and relentless moaning. The defiant roar of “we’re Leeds United, we don’t give a f**k” is nothing more than a poignant reminder of how much we’ve changed. Of how petty we’ve all become. When did we start to care that our star winger was a little slower than average? That our striker is a bit short to pose any aerial threat? That our bench is perhaps a little less exotic than that of Leicester City? “We’re Leeds United, we don’t give a f**k” remember? This is a club built on misfits for Christ sake. By the end of the season there’ll be two statues outside our club. One will be a fiery Scottish player rejected by most clubs as being too small to make it pro, the second will be Don Revie; the laughing stock of many an FA meeting with his threadbare lucky suit, bingo games and Gypsy curses. But “we’re Leeds United, we don’t give a f**k”. They didn’t laugh when Revie’s team was tearing their set of generic footballers apart, guided by that fiery little redhead they’d all dismissed. Enjoy yourselves while you can people, because we’ll only come back stronger. We’re like a little Yorkshire terrier ragging away at your trouser leg – you might shake us off, but we’ll only come back more determined and hungrier than ever. Except, that’s not true any more is it? We’re so busy picking faults in the manager, in the captain, in the players, in each other that any claim to a die-hard, determined spirit should come with an asterisk stating *if we’ve finished sulking in time. That’s the crux of the matter you see. We’re a club of great contradictions. Where once we went Marching On Together throughout the ups and downs, we now moan more than Arsenal and handle defeat worse than Manchester United. There’s no togetherness about this fanbase at all. We expect results, and we expect them every week regardless of opposition and circumstance. The late Sir Bobby Robson understood the football fans psyche better than anyone, and was absolutely spot on when he said; “People want success. It’s like coffee, they want instant.” I appreciate the irony of a blogger writing this, but the game is so over-analysed these days that fans are finding fault in absolutely everything. Are there any managers left whose fans don’t seem to think they could do a better job? A manager shouldn’t be judged by the little things we can pick up on with video replays and the benefit of hindsight, nor should the players. They should be judged on results, and not on a game-by-game, or month-by-month basis but over a long enough duration for the unpredictable variance inherent in every sport to level out and give us a true reflection of their performance. I don’t know, let’s say a season for example? It’s a strange concept I know, but imagine that we saved all the energy we’ve wasted on moaning and belittling our players and manager and channelled it back into our “us against the world” mentality. Imagine that we rediscovered that unity our club was once famous for and our defiant spirit replaced the petty arguments and tiresome moaning. The next time you’re at Elland Road and you hear “We’ve been through it all together” blast out across the stands, take a look around at your fellow fans, at the 11 men on the pitch, at Simon Grayson prowling the touchline and at the rest of the players and coaching staff stood behind him. I’ve written this entire article in a collective sense (we, us, we’re) because we seem to have forgotten what united us all in the first place – we all want the same thing. The fans, the players, the coaching staff, the supporters, Lucas The Kop Cat, the tea lady. We are Leeds United. As for everyone else? Who the hell cares what they think, let them write us off at their peril. “We’re Leeds United, we don’t give a f**k”. And we thrive as underdogs. On and on…