Jermaine Beckford marks the end of Leeds United's goldfish years

Posted Sunday, January 24, 2010 by theguardian.com

With their striker the star of this year's FA Cup, the Elland Road club have finally shed their traumatic history

Jermaine Beckford marks the end of Leeds United's goldfish years
Jermaine Beckford celebrates scoring Leeds' injury-time, penalty equaliser at White Hart Lane.

Leeds are a club much copied. They built a debt mountain long before Portsmouth, Newcastle or West Ham, pioneering the suicidal wage bill and lunatic transfer budget for others to emulate. After the reckoning has come the rise, as if they exist these days to provide hope for clubs who endure near-death experiences.

But there is more to them than that, as they demonstrated by confronting Tottenham's aristocratic pretensions face on and earning a replay through Jermaine Beckford's penalty in added time, his second contribution in a thrilling tie. Their fans are as truculent as ever and the old fighting spirit of the 1970s has returned to erase the gauchness of the Peter Ridsdale years. The League One promotion race is their real battleground, but the FA Cup has quickened the pace of self-recovery. Beckford, who has scored against Manchester United and Spurs in successive rounds, has used the competition as a personal finishing school.

The third-round victory over United at Old Trafford was the real attention-grabber, but this is close behind. Those who occasionally look farther down the list of 92 professional clubs than the Premier League's top four already knew Leeds were calling the shots in League One. But the victory over England's champions altered the dynamic in a partly unhelpful way. Until Beckford outran Wes Brown to hustle United out, Leeds could play the Phoenix role, plotting a way back up through the divisions. By the time they reached north London, though, Norwich were on their tails at the top of the table and the nation was tuning in expecting another prime-time upset.

That was seldom on the cards here, but how Spurs will dread the rematch at Elland Road. Two of the top six defences in the English game have now failed to cope with Beckford, a former Chelsea trainee who dropped all the way to Wealdstone to restart a stalled career. In modern football no one expects a young striker to be able to fall so far off the chart and still make a name for himself as Beckford has. This is a big torch to carry. It lights the way for hundreds of other youngsters discarded by Premier League academies. If he carries on this way, he can look higher than Newcastle United, his most likely destination in this transfer window before he elected to stick with Leeds for the rest of this campaign.

Beckford is the individual billboard star of this year's FA Cup and Leeds are the big romantic tale in a competition that squeals for our attention in a schedule crammed with Premier League and Champions League drama.

The Yorkshire revival is back on course. A draw and two defeats since the Old Trafford ram-raid had broken a sequence of 17 games unbeaten. Coincidence? A fair extrapolation is that the third-round win interfered with the team's ascent. Cup runs often work as a distraction for clubs bent on promotion. Mischievously, some of us wondered whether Simon Grayson's men motored to White Hart Lane thinking the best result would be a hiding.

If so they hid it well, as an early Tottenham onslaught subsided, and the 4,500 travelling fans proclaimed a first-half counter-surge after a torrid opening chapter. "We're not famous any more," sang the Leeds throng, subverting a chant many opposing crowds have tried to tickle them with since they plunged from a Champions League semi-final in 2001 to a league housing Yeovil and Leyton Orient.

Unlike United, Spurs saw the upstarts coming. Forewarned, by the Manchester miracle, Tottenham were in threat-elimination mode. Leeds assumed the Alamo pose. Grace under pressure was impossible. Patrick Kisnorbo's head, bandaged from the start, was emblematic of their defiance.

After 25 minutes of north London bullying, though, Leeds decided it was time to explore the other half of the pitch, and Beckford twice forced gymnastic reactions from Heurelho Gomes. No longer in command, Tottenham's millionaires knew they would have to grapple. Premier League players are meant to be softer nowadays, but they all carry memories of when football was always feisty (in their pre-professional years) and Harry Redknapp's team welcomed the chance to play old-school Cup football. Jermaine Jenas might as well have been reading a book when Leeds first equalised, but otherwise Spurs applied themselves valiantly. Even Roman Pavlyuchenko, he of the languid air, recognised the urgency of Tottenham's position, restoring his team's lead. But still to come was Beckford's meatily executed penalty.

In an interview with the Yorkshire Post last week, Ken Bates recalled being wheeled out as the new chairman five years ago by Gerald Krasner, who asked: "Do you want to shake hands for the photographers?" Bates replied: "Not now I've seen the books."

Leeds were losing £120,000 a week and were practically wearing the taxman like a rash. "The finances were completely out of control," Bates recalled on Friday. Now, the average gate is 25,000 and the club filed a £4.5million profit last season.

The assumption that Leeds will glide straight through the Championship next season is flawed, because they have achieved the current rebirth without risking a repeat of the luxury goldfish years. Run prudently, they will encounter one of football's deepest mysteries: how do teams escape a division where a kind of communism applies? Most teams are equal, and most can beat any other on any Saturday.

But that's another mission. First Leeds needed to regain their self-respect, their identity. The twinkly team of the David O'Leary years has retreated into a kind of infamy. This one is an older diagram of machismo, with touches of prettiness. You look at Leeds now and no longer see a history of trauma. You see a replay and Beckford writing his name across the sky.