Latest news with #HowardWilkinson
BBC News
9 hours ago
- Sport
- BBC News
Wilkinson 'extremely grateful' for statue
Former Leeds manager and club legend Howard Wilkinson says he is extremely grateful for the statue that is being erected outside Elland Road. Wilkinson's legacy with Leeds is defined by leading the club to its last top-flight league title in 1991–92, making him the last English manager to win the First Division before it became the Premier League. Appointed in 1988, he also secured promotion from the Second Division in 1990 and laid the foundations for a modernised club structure, including investment in youth development."I think early it was over the telephone, and I just went, 'what, why? Statue?" Wilkinson said to BBC Sport West Yorkshire."All I can say is, I'm extremely grateful and very aware of what it means."Well, I will only be asked my opinion, and my wife will support that I am not the best in what is good and not good art. I do believe that creating a sculpture will require a great deal of artistic talent."Listen on BBC Sounds
Irish Daily Mirror
10-05-2025
- Sport
- Irish Daily Mirror
Leeds United legends set to line out in sun-soaked Bray this afternoon
Former Leeds United and England internationals Mel Sterland and Paul Reaney will manage a Leeds Legends XI against a Bray/Borough XI at the Carlisle Grounds was a member of Howard Wilkinson's 1991/92 First Division winning side alongside players such as Garry McAllister, Lee Chapman, Gordon Strachan, Gary Speed, David Batty and, a mid-season signing, Eric won the title on the second last weekend of the season with a 3-2 win at Sheffield Utd, Manchester United finished runners up, and it was the last First Division title win as the competition became the Premier League the 1992/ was Leeds first top flight win since the Don Revie era, coincidentally the manager that signed Reaney as a 17 year-old, a player George Best said he rated as one of the two best defenders he ever played 63, was born in Sheffield and made 114 appearances for Leeds (1989-94), scoring 16 goals. A right-back, he was a First Division (1991/92) and Second Division (1989/90) winner with the club.A colourful character, his autobiography Boozing, Betting & Brawling (Green Umbrella 2008) is quite a read while he had an acting role as the Sheffield United captain in the Sean Bean/Emily Lloyd film When Saturday Comes (1996)."I've watched Leeds all season and didn't doubt them for a minute, " says Sterland. "I think they were confident going in that they were going up because they had learned so from last season (2023/24). "They couldn't get a win towards the end and finished in the playoffs and were not as good as Southampton."This year they've realised that they are a good side with quality footballers and for me, personally, I think the manager Daniel Farke was absolutely superb."He knew what players he wanted, who he wanted to bring in, whether they could handle the pressure, because wearing that shirt anywhere comes with pressure and if that's not you, you shouldn't be playing for Leeds United."There was no stumble at the close like last season."The players that Daniel got in could handle pressure, 100 points shows we are a good, well organised side while the manager knew when to fetch the subs on."He believed in the players and if you've got a good dressing room you win things and it was similar when I was there with Howard Wilkinson, you fetch in good players who you could trust, who can handle the shirt and be honest because if you have a good changing room, you can win anything."Leeds have shown that, proved themselves, won the Championship to get their promotion to the big boys now."Aside from the manager, it was hard to pick out stars in the collective."They've all been magnificent, they all get medals to pick up, they've all shined."When we had injuries, other players have come in and they've done really well so it's difficult for me to separate them, every one of them would be in my 'three'.""But obviously there have been Joel Pirou's goals (19 of them) and the goalkeeper, Illan Meslier, is a young kid (25 years-of-age, France U21 international) and I know he dropped a few clangers and Karl Darlow came in for a few games but Illan came back better each time. "Ethan Ampadu, the captain, had some injuries but I'm looking forward to seeing him in the 80, was in the news earlier this week winning a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Elland Road his family moved to Yorkshire as a child and, having left school at 15 and working a car mechanic, was first signed at 17 by Don Revie Given his debut shortly before his 18th birthday - in a time before substitutes - Reaney was an instant hit with the manager and the fans as the club took the 1963/64 Second Division just short of 750 appearances for the club he was a double First Division, FA Cup, League Cup, Charity Shield, two Inter-Cities Fairs Cups and a 1975 European Cup runner-up. He remains part of the 'Legends' matchday hospitality team at Elland and Reaney's squad for today's game will include Carlton Palmer, Jermaine Beckford, Matt Kilgannon, Ian Harte, Ben Parker, Bradley Johnson, Ross McCormack and Andy the Bray/Borough squad, to be managed by Ian Morris (ex-Leeds and Shels) and Gary Zambra features a host of former League of Ireland stars including Robbie Doyle, Richie Parsons, Darren Power, Dax Kealy and PJ O' XI v Leeds Legends, Carlisle Grounds, Bray (kick-off 3pm) Adults €20, Children €10. There is a Meet & Greet Rochestown Lodge Hotel, 12noon-1.30pm Adults €20, Children € match will be played for the Tony Guirk Cup, a fundraiser for the ex-Bray Wanderers coach, Glenmore, Ballybrack player, former FAI under-age assistant to Brian Kerr who recently suffered a stroke.
Telegraph
21-04-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
How ‘emotional' Leeds crashed through the doors of Premier League promotion
Judicious supporters will have started laying in yellow, white and blue bunting as soon as Liverpool consolidated their runaway Premier League lead around Christmas. On each of the last three occasions that Leeds United have been promoted to the top flight, under Don Revie in 1964, Howard Wilkinson in 1990 and Marcelo Bielsa in 2020, Liverpool have won the title. Coincidence it may be but now that it has happened for a fourth time, fans will hope that they will never have to rely on such profitable synchronicity again. An ownership consortium with more resources than any in the club's febrile history can, with shrewd investment in facilities and personnel, give them a better chance of establishing a foothold in the top division than five years ago, when the old board's dependence on Bielsa's disruptive ingenuity fractured and they riffled through one incongruous appointment and one flimsy signing after another. Such optimism was a devalued currency last summer after Leeds' timid defeat by Southampton in the Championship play-off final. Following on from their stumble in the last six games of the season, when registering four of 18 possible points cost them automatic promotion, a begrudging acceptance that disposals had to be made to comply with profitability and sustainability rules curdled as it became clear exactly who would be going. Crysencio Summerville's departure after a 20-goal season was inevitable but selling 18-year-old Archie Gray and then Georginio Rutter, the perennially sunny forward, were harder to stomach. The ceilings for the latter two were so high that it seemed like Leeds were selling their future for sustenance, tomorrow's jam sacrificed for today's gruel. Combined with other sales, though, the £140 million they recouped, more than any club in Europe, restored sanity to their finances. A series of prudent if modest signings took time to puncture the agitation over the loss of Gray and Rutter, but reflecting more soberly now it is plain that Leeds have pulled off a paradox: last season they had better players; this year they have a better team. Fundamental to that has been Daniel Farke, who has now secured three promotions to the Premier League in his four full Championship seasons at Norwich and Elland Road, and even in the year his alchemy malfunctioned, Leeds still accrued 90 points. Now they stand on the threshold of their highest points total in a season, most wins and clean sheets. It is noteworthy that unlike his predecessors, he insisted on 'manager' as his job title. In that role, especially in an age where anyone with executive authority is more or less mute, he has been unimpeachable. His leadership of a club he has consistently called 'emotional' (when 'neurotic' would be more accurate) has navigated Leeds through the release-clause exodus following relegation, last year's late collapse, yet another Wembley disappointment, more summer upheaval and a second spring wobble when top of the league. His effectiveness as a head coach has been criticised – tactical rigidity, clockwork substitutions, excessive caution, failure to rotate and dogmatic loyalty to certain players, as if he had swallowed the old 'form is temporary, class is permanent' deceit whole. But it is hard to imagine anyone else handling such a tricky assignment and the scrutiny it brings with such patience and good grace. It took them a while to get going and only a week after they hit the top of the table towards the end of November, Leeds succumbed to their third 1-0 defeat of the season, this one at Blackburn. Last season Leicester and Ipswich were almost out of sight by the time Leeds started to click in late autumn, but in 2024-25 they dealt with the loss to injury of their two starting central midfielders, the captain Ethan Ampadu and Ilia Gruev, by maintaining the two-points per game average that Farke maintained would propel them up. Sheffield United, Burnley and Sunderland were always within their grasp. The manager can take credit for that, fashioning a makeshift partnership of Joe Rothwell and Ao Tanaka, neither conventional holding players. Farke used their strengths in different ways, Rothwell in driving forward, breaking the lines like few others in the division, and Tanaka, a revelation and bargain at £3.5 million from Fortuna Düsseldorf, an absolute beast in duels. Truly a wolf in sheep's clothing, because it is Tanaka's passing and the quality of his four goals that initially catch the eye, but the astuteness of his positioning, his nose for an interception and raw-boned crispness in the tackle that triggers the transitions from defence to attack that allows Leeds to exploit the pace and stamina of their full-backs and wingers. Opposition coaches have likened the experience of defending against Jayden Bogle and Daniel James bombing down the right and Junior Firpo and Manor Solomon on the left to facing a front six. James has scored 12 goals, Solomon nine while Bogle has chipped in with six and Firpo four, a testament to their ability to time their runs to finish – what Ron Atkinson used to call 'arrives' – and also flood into inside-forward spaces to form triangles with the widest man and either Brenden Aaronson or 19-goal Joel Piroe, the four-goal hero in the 6-0 demolition Stoke. It is why, as well as their goals, Solomon has 10 assists, there are nine apiece for Firpo and James and five for Bogle who, in the words of the writer Paul Rogerson, has become 'the Cafu of the Championship'. But the journey to the promised land did not have to be as unsettling as this. The points lost from winning positions against Sunderland, Hull and Swansea would have already given them a commanding lead and every one was the result of goalkeeping errors. While Illan Meslier once demonstrated the potential to be a great keeper, technical flaws and confidence issues, exacerbated by understandable uncertainty between him and his defence, have crept in alarmingly over three seasons. All the quality he has with his feet ultimately cannot compensate for dropping routine crosses when unchallenged at the feet of strikers or completely missing an aimless ball forward in the final seconds at the Stadium of Light. Firpo, who thought he had scored the winner only to be credited with an own-goal equaliser on Wearside, looked lacerated. One of the worst goalkeeping errors you'll see this season from Illan Meslier 😖 Watch our @EFL Highlights show on ITV4 tonight at 9pm ⏰ — ITV Football (@itvfootball) October 5, 2024 Joe Rodon, when three points turned into one via Meslier's handling at Hull and once more against Swansea, looked disembowelled. Farke persisted with him and did nothing in the January transfer window, making it as much a question of his competence as Meslier's, until the crowd's mutinous mood at the end of the draw with Swansea made his retention impossible. Karl Darlow's routine proficiency in the last five games has anaesthetised a collective anxiety. It could have been less bumpy too but for the frankly baroque ineptitude of some officials. Fairly tight offsides being misjudged have cost Leeds four goals in the last two months, three of them remarkably chalked off by the same linesman. At least they would have merely gilded the lily of victories even if they would have preserved a few fingernails. But the assault on James by Portsmouth's Matt Ritchie in the penalty area deemed negligible by Robert Jones could have prevented their sole loss in five months if properly punished. That defeat at Fratton Park was the second game in a run of four draws and a defeat in six matches, triggering the ubiquitous distribution on social media of that old meme from Twin Peaks featuring 'the Giant' whispering chillingly to special agent Dale Cooper: 'It is happening again.' All, of course, accompanied by gleeful choruses from opposing fans of 'Leeds are falling apart again'. This time they didn't, by virtue of Farke's confidence in his process, the belated switching of goalkeepers and some morale-restoring defensive grit from Rodon. Farke and Wilkinson similarities The hair of the Wales centre-half, who joined for £10 million from Tottenham in July after spending last season at Leeds on loan, gives him the air of someone being hazed by a swarm of bees. At times he plays with a barely suppressed fury teetering on the edge of a strop, but after a restless couple of years he has found a home at Elland Road and the crowd has taken to him. As Sunderland's young team ran out of guile and gas, a three-horse race for the two automatic places developed. Burnley, the Scrooge and Marley of the Championship, building up clean sheets like sandbags to fortify their bid, have proved irrepressible, earning Scott Parker and his £2,500 anorak a third promotion to match Farke's record. In the end it was Sheffield United who cracked. Having kept winning without convincing, they avoided racking up the draws that tend to kill you in this league until their functional performances caught up with them and they lost three times in a week to open the door for Leeds. Farke's team have crashed through it, giving their supporters some genuine moments of communal joy in the late victory over Sunderland, when holding on to three points against Preston which put their fate back in their own hands and Easter Monday's annihilation of Stoke. All the while Farke has stressed that his 'pragmatical' approach, his 'game-by-game' level-headedness and 'staying cool and composed' at crunch time would prevail. In that regard, he reminds us of Wilkinson, the last manager to take Leeds into the top flight in front of a crowd, a spree that was denied Bielsa by the pandemic. Wilkinson would go on to finish fourth in his first season back and capture the title in 1992, a prospect rendered impossible for Farke since the Premier League became the playground of billionaires rather than millionaires. The German lasting a season up there in this era of Dark Fruits-driven hysteria will require all his serenity, immaculate recruitment and a dose of better luck. It will, in his idiosyncratic words, be 'unbelievable hard'. But all that can wait as Leeds revel in their biggest party for 33 years.
BBC News
17-04-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Pick of the stats: Oxford United v Leeds United
Championship leaders Leeds make their first visit to Oxford for 35 years and know they just have to keep things sensible over the remaining four games to keep Sheffield United at arm's length in the race to go up the late kick-off (20:00 BST) at the Kassam Stadium, Daniel Farke's side will know a bit more about what they need to do. Even if the Blades beat Cardiff (17:00 BST), a draw for Leeds will keep them, effectively four points clear, given their superior goal United have lost four of their previous seven English Football League encounters with Leeds United (W2 D1), including each of the past three by an aggregate score of will be Leeds United's first EFL trip to Oxford United since a 4-2 win in March 1990 under Howard Wilkinson. Indeed, the three previous fixtures have averaged six goals per have lost only one of their past six league games on Good Friday (W2 D3), both scoring (9) and conceding (9) in each of those have won just one of their past six league games on Good Friday (D3 L2), drawing 2-2 at Watford last time in Leeds teammate Dan James (13 – seven goals, six assists) has more Championship goal involvements in 2025 than Manor Solomon (11 – five goals, six assists), with three involvements in his past two games (one goal, two assists).
