January Window

9

Elland Road, the home of Leeds United FC, is no place for the faint-hearted in January. Even on a midsummer’s day the area is as bleak as the hair on a witch’s tit, but in winter a northwest wind whips off the Yorkshire Dales and seems to take the spirit right out of you. Doubly so when you consider that the stadium is right next to Cottingley Crematorium and they do say that sometimes, when the wind is blowing in the right direction, you can catch the pungent whiff of an afternoon service of remembrance. The beautiful game was rarely ever played in Leeds and certainly never when Billy Bremner was the Leeds captain back in the seventies, a time when Leeds United was one of the dirtiest sides in football. And I have the marks on my shins to prove it wasn’t much better in the nineties and noughties, when David O’Leary was the manager and the likes of Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer were there.

Although my father knew Billy Bremner very well — Bremner captained Scotland at the 1974 World Cup — I met the man only once, not long before his untimely death in 1997. I mention Billy Bremner because I think there’s something very wrong about the statue of Billy that stands outside Elland Road. It’s only my opinion, but Billy Bremner looks like he’s black. In reality the diminutive Scotsman, who was born near Stirling, was a pasty-looking white man with red hair. I don’t know why the Billy outside Elland Road should appear to be black but it’s as if he’s been partly cremated in the crematorium nearby. The hair is the right colour, as it happens, and so is the Leeds shirt, but every time I see it I have a laugh because I’m sure Billy would have fucking hated it. Even the statue of Michael Jackson that used to stand outside Craven Cottage is more true to life than Billy’s statue; weirdly, Billy is blacker than Michael is, although maybe that’s not so strange. Anyway, Billy just looks creepy, like a shitty piece of sculpture by Jeff Koons, or a statue of a saint you might see in a shrine in Cuba or Haiti, as if he might come alive to put the fear of God and voodoo into any team turning up to play Leeds at Elland Road. Maybe that’s the idea. If so then it might work even better if the supporters were to carry it round the pitch before the match, because it certainly wasn’t working for Leeds when London City went there for the third round FA Cup tie.

Nothing was. Not even a spectacularly tasteless song about Zarco from Leeds fans.

It was Leeds United’s second loss in a new year that was only seven days old and their worst result since losing 7–3 to Nottingham Forest in March 2012. Christoph Bündchen, replacing Ayrton Taylor up front as our number one striker, gave City fans a very late Twelfth Night present of five golden goals in an eight-goal rout of Leeds United that proceeded without reply. This was the biggest win in our club’s history and it was doubly fortunate that Viktor Sokolnikov had flown back from the Caribbean aboard his private Boeing 767–300 just to see the match.

Bündchen was City’s hero but Juan-Luis Dominguin also scored two, and this was after Xavier Pepe made a forty-yard strike that was the first of the evening and already looks like being the goal of the season — a top-drawer goal conjured from absolutely nothing, which departed his right foot like an arrow from a longbow. There was nothing speculative about Pepe’s incredible strike: by contrast, Andrea Pirlo’s curling goal for Milan against Parma in 2010 seems like a long shot, in its full idiomatic meaning. Pepe’s shot was something else: head down, with every sinew of his muscular body engaged, he knew exactly what he was doing and the ball flew as straight as a high-velocity bullet. By the time the Leeds goalkeeper, Paddy Kenny, had started to move for it, the football was already in the top corner of his net. Small wonder that Pepe was recently ranked by Bloomberg as the seventh best footballer in Europe.

But it was Christoph Bündchen who gave the Leeds manager nightmares, and perhaps not just him. Bündchen is only twenty-one years old and has yet to be picked for his home country of Germany, and this prompted me to think that if the German manager, Joachim Löw, hasn’t yet found a place in his team for a player of Bündchen’s goal-scoring ability, then Roy Hodgson’s England had better watch out for the rest of the German team. It’s true that Christoph’s first goal was a well-taken penalty after a clumsy challenge brought Pepe down in the box when the score was ‘only’ 3–0. But the next four goals scored by the young German were nothing short of sublime, and at one stage it seemed as if it were Leeds United versus Christoph Bündchen, who, incredibly, doesn’t seem to have been ranked by Bloomberg at all. What made this even more satisfying to me was that I had persuaded Zarco to pay the German club FC Augsburg just four million quid for the boy when we joined City in the summer.

It wasn’t that Leeds failed to take their chances; in truth they only ever seemed to have one chance in the whole match and that was soon after Pepe’s goal when Lewis Walters intercepted a nonchalant pass by the City centre back, Ross Field, and chipped our reserve goalkeeper, Roberto Forlan — who had little else to do all evening — only to find our captain, the ever-reliable Ken Okri, hack his effort off the line.

At half time it was 4–0 and the lads seemed to take Zarco at his word when he told them to go and enjoy themselves and do the same in the second half as they had done in the first.

After that Leeds were seldom threatening. The fifth goal came within seconds of the game restarting when another scorching shot from Pepe was well saved by Paddy Kenny; he then rolled the ball out to Kevin Beech, who found Bündchen on him in a flash. Beech attempted a desperate square pass to Stefan Signoret but Bündchen read it as if it had been written on the advertising hoarding in six-foot-high letters, intercepted the ball at speed, sold the poor keeper a sweet dummy and then toed the ball across the line. 5–0.

Bündchen’s third goal was pure magic and was made more impressive by the near superhuman length of his stride. Bündchen is well over six feet tall and looks more like a defender than a striker, which makes him very intimidating when he’s running flat out at you. Scornfully hurdling trailing legs that looked like obvious penalties if they’d brought him down, and selling dummies as if the Leeds players were toddlers in highchairs, the German must have changed direction three times before he found the space for a shot that he seemed to dig out of the grass, and which left the poor keeper dumped on his backside with his head in his hands. For all the world it looked as if he was just checking he could still hold onto something round. Zarco ran the length of his technical area in celebration, threw himself onto his knees and slid for several yards, ruining the trousers of a good suit and looking like someone who was already in training for Strictly Come Dancing on Ice.

With fifteen minutes still to go many of the Leeds supporters were making for the exits as if they were passengers on the Titanic, only the lifeboats were gone, and when Leeds conceded a stupid free kick, it’s unlikely that any of them were that surprised when Bündchen stepped up to take it and promptly scored again, blasting the ball cleverly underneath the feet of the players’ wall, which jumped as one to try to head it clear.

We were still celebrating that one in the dugout when Christoph scored the last goal of the match. In truth it was comedy gold: Paddy Kenny cleared his line only to gift the ball to Dominguin, who volleyed it to Bündchen as if recognising a player who was on the form of his life. The German wünderkind proceeded to run straight at the goalkeeper with the ball balanced on his head until, just as the keeper reached him, he dropped the ball onto his toe and tapped it in.

It’s generally held that the FA Cup is not what it used to be, that the bonus money in the Premier League means that no one much cares about the FA Cup any more, but that’s not how it seemed to us. A cold January evening in Yorkshire never felt as good as it did to me that night in Leeds. We took the ball with us when we boarded the coach to take us to Leeds Bradford International Airport and awarded it to Christoph, who — showing a sense of diplomacy far beyond his years — promptly gave it to the club’s absurdly grateful Ukrainian proprietor. As we drove away it seemed to me that Billy Bremner was shaking both his fists at the sky and the capricious gods of football.

On the coach I was already having to deal with a list of injuries as long as the faces of the Leeds supporters we’d seen outside the ground. The worst of these was our centre back, Gary Ferguson, whose ankle had locked up again.

‘There’s no diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperstosis,’ explained Nick Scott, the team doctor. ‘He’s just knackered. So that’s all right.’

‘Fucking hell,’ I said, knowing full well that Ferguson, who was a Scouser, was sitting right behind me. ‘The only part of that I understand is him being an idiot.’

‘He’s probably got some osteophytes floating around in the joint which are causing his ankle to seize up.’

‘That explains why his passing was so shit,’ I said.

‘Thanks a lot,’ said Ferguson. ‘I was trying me best.’

‘I know, that’s what made it so fucking painful to watch.’

‘We should get it X-rayed this time,’ the doctor told me. ‘I think we’ve reached the end of being able to treat this with anti-inflammatories.’

‘Or we could just shoot the poor bastard,’ I said. ‘Might be kinder. Cheaper, too.’

Osteophytes. We used to call these bone spurs, or parrot beaks, but whatever you call them the effect is the same: they severely limit joint movement and cause extreme pain. I knew what that was like as my own ankles were none too good after a decade playing the game; sometimes I count myself lucky that I went to prison and I didn’t play on into my thirties with the help of corticosteroids injected into my ageing joints. As it is I hobble through my flat in the morning like I’m looking for my Zimmer frame. A few years ago I saw Tommy Smith giving a speech at a dinner; I was shocked that Liverpool’s hardest ever club captain now needs sticks or a wheelchair to get around. It’s a hard truth but even today being an athlete can fuck you up.

‘Talk about a Pyrrhic victory,’ I said to the doc. ‘It’s the curse of Billy Bremner.’

‘Who’s Billy Bremner?’ asked Ferguson.

‘Black bloke, used to play for Leeds,’ I answered patiently.

‘And what’s a Pyrrhic victory?’

I saw no point in giving a history lesson to someone who thought that Napoleon was a type of brandy and that Nelson was a fucking wrestler. It’s true I have a university degree, though it’s a 2:2 from Birmingham, not a First from Oxbridge, but while I reckon I possess an above average intelligence, next to some of the lads on our team I’m Richard fucking Dawkins.

‘It means a win that’s so bloody good it gives you a hard-on,’ I told him.

Even before we reached the airport the weather suddenly changed for the worse. The team coach felt like our own little snow globe.