They call me Mellow Yellow – classic 60’s Donovan.
I wish!
You younger readers will have to look Donovan up. Mellow Yellow wasn’t his best work. Catch The Wind is my personal favourite. But back in the day it was just a song about being – well – mellow. Cool and chilled.
As is the won’t of the newer generations, people want to know what the song “actually” meant. Was it that smoking banana skins made him high? Like most songs penned in the 60s, it could have been about anything. It was a good tune. We should just leave it at that. He was a singer in the 60s, he probably was mellow. Unlike most of us right now. We are certainly not mellow and neither are we yellow.
Yellow
None of us are yellow, even if we wanted to be. Definitely not a fortnight last Sunday at Carrow Road. It would have been an interesting conundrum if we did have a yellow away strip, wouldn’t it? We would have been clashing with all those flags in their end behind the goal. Flags that looked great, but all were gathered in at half time. Not like the scarves we were all given at ER the other night. Master stroke? At least the freebies weren’t a few hundred short, like the Stuey dallas T shirts at Highbury.
But we don’t have a yellow strip. Why? Borussia Dortmund wear yellow. They have a very famous yellow wall, don’t they? What’s wrong with yellow? Leeds is actually twinned with Dortmund too.
I, like many others want, and have been wanting us, to go back to the “blue, yellow and white, football in a Yorkshire Rose” for ages. It’s iconic. The YEP and Top Man shirts take us back to happier times, when football was for the fans and SkyTVisf**kings**t did not exist.
It was the days when football was played at 3pm on a Saturday, before big money meant you could buy the league and before you needed to spend money on a smartphone / technology to just get a ticket. Simpler times, happier times.
But, our Club stopped doing a yellow kit in the late 2000s after our brief foray into Europe, and then briefly revived it in 2015/16, when were weren’t happy nor iconic.
Remember This quartet?
This probably wasn’t the most memorable season of football ever, though.
Back to the now. Are we mellow yellow?
This weekend at Wembley we are the “home” team, so we are playing in white and can’t be mellow yellow. Even if we wanted to be, which we aren’t.
Mellow.
I am that.
I’ve decided if we win and get promoted that’s fine. But even if we lose and stay in the 2nd tier, it is still ok. It’s a bit like the character Ivan from the Mary Whitehouse Experience. Yes! It’s okay! See below
The Mary Whitehouse Experience – the days when David Baddiel and Rob Newman were funny. Any of you under the age of 50 will have absolutely NO idea what I am on about, but just watch the clip. It’s the bit at the end, it’s immature, adolescent and juvenile, but funny.
In a nutshell
Given our situation at the end of last season where we had the three amigos (twice over) trying to keep us up, nothing could compare to THAT. The 1st trio of Michael Skubala, Paco Gallardo and Chris Armas were followed by the 2nd unholy triumvate of Big Sam, Robbie Keane and Karl Robinson, all vying to undo the wrongs of SkinnyJeans. Too little , too late my friends.
So low was the bar to our April / Mays of late, only managing 2 victories out of the last 8 games of this season proper, still wasn’t enough to dampen the spirits of the loyal. This is technically relegation form in any other book. We were flying high at the top of the league. Leicester were a laughing stock in Leeds after their “it’s just another game to us” quip. We had the title in our hands, no one can deny it.
All we needed to do was win or at least get better results than Leicester and we would have won the league. Sadly not to be. Blackburn, Coventry and QPR! We only beat Boro because their two best players, Ayling and Greenwood weren’t able to play, thank God. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
Yet STILL, all we could think about was the miserable start to the season where the legacy of SkinnyJeans and his wayward player purchases inflicted more damage than anyone could have ever imagined. And, anyone who still thinks that the dismissal of Bielsa and subsequent appointment of SkinnyJeans was a good idea, might as well just ….. go forth and multiply ….. to Canada!
Bielsa will never come back, but like the song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. He was wronged. WRONG WRONG WRONG. But he has gone, and that is that. At some point, the truth might out. But like the conundrum of “who owns the ground?” in the B*tes and Weasel Shaun Harvey era, we may NEVER find out what went on.
Was it Radrizzani who couldn’t stand being constantly in the shadow of Bielsa? Was it Orta who wanted to be the main man? Orta was certainly the Fall Guy for it all. Or, was it the players who thought they didn’t need Marcelo making them train all the time to be PL superstars? Was it because the board wanted more control which Bielsa did not want to relinquish? Was Jean Paul Augustin the catalyst to our demise? No one knows, and probably no one will ever know.
At the end of the day, we had a record breaking unbeaten run at home this season. Until the international break, we WERE Fortress Elland Road. Could the damage inflicted in the Wales penalty defeat really have hampered us so much? Have we been far too reliant on Ampadu (du, du), Rodon, Roberts and James? In no uncertain terms we have missed Dan James, and much to the chagrin of the Bamford haters, we have also missed Patrick. How much were Gnonto, Summerville and Piroe affected? Was Archie being played too much? Was Summerville’s head turned (like Kalv’s was) during the Internationals? ps look how well that turned out for Kalvin.
Or was it simply that we have been found out? It took two and a bit years for Bielsa to be found out. Have advances in pitchside surveillance technology made it easier to work out Farke’s game plan? It’s not really that hard though, is it? We play out from the back. All the time. Apart from Norwich at home, when Meslier played more long balls in the first 45 minutes than he had all season.
We play out from the back and try to get the ball to Summerville. Summerville will run down the wing and try to cut in and score (like his song). So, put two on Summerville and that cuts that avenue out straight away. The other option is to give it to Rutter, who will get the ball, run with it, then stop and turn clockwise (left like Zoolander) and fend off two before passing it to Summerville or Gnonto. Put two on him and that shuts another door. Too easy?
I am a bit sick of watching us pass the ball backwards, even from free kicks in the opposition’s half. I fret at how uneasy Meslier is on the ball before he tries to decide whether to give it to Rodon or Ampadu (du,du). If the opposition is clever, and run onto him, we risk giving the ball away. Suicide football. How much I miss the days of an old fashioned centre half foisting the ball into the East Stand! As much as people berate Cooper, and to some small extent, Struijk, how much pressure would have been taken off Meslier if we’d have just cleared it? Folk still moan about Meslier, the goalie who has kept the most clean sheets this season. Yes, Meslier.
Holding onto a one or two nil freaks me out too. Skinnyjeans did that. Remember Southampton in his honeymoon period? In fact his first game against Leicester when we should have won. Holding onto a draw, we were. It used to and still does put the hee bee gee bees up me. Whatever happened to going one nil up and going in for a second , then going for the kill with a third?
Norwich at home was a classic example. I genuinely didn’t stop worrying until we were four up. Although, Norwich in the semis was an uncertainty all in itself. After the first game at Carrow Road, where we had two shots on goal all game, I honestly thought the plan was to hold out for penalty shoot out at home with the crowd behind us. Even then, I couldn’t help thinking we would lose 5-4 on pens.
The mantra at the start of any season is, 1st, 2nd or 7th once relegation has been ruled out.
Play Offs
Once it looked like we weren’t going up as champions or second, play offs were a foregone conclusion with so few teams of any real PL worth apart from us and Southampton. All the talk about it being no shame that we didn’t get promoted on 90+ points, didn’t hold water for me. The other teams in the league are pants. Honestly, they are. Which is why it annoys me so much that we didn’t just get automatic promotion.
Coventry loss, Sunderland a mere draw which saw the ball not stray to our right side at all in the first 25 minutes. Blackburn FFS. Then a round thrashing by QPR. One win out of Coventry, Blackburn or QPR would have seen us go into the Southampton game either already up or just needing a draw. Southampton who would have been saving their players for the play offs. But, we just couldn’t do it. And that is the disappointment and frustration of today. We needn’t have been doing this.
Needless
We needn’t have been spending money and time on tomorrow.
We could have been spared hours of trying to get on line to buy a ticket, only to be sat staring at a screen wondering why the page was taking us to another page saying error. Seriously, how many of you reading this were fit to burst for two hours trying to figure out what was going on? How many of you just wanted to sit with your mates but couldn’t get four seats together, even though they looked available when you added them all into your basket? Why was that so difficult? And, how many of the digitally excluded struggled to get a ticket?
We needn’t have been putting ourselves through £10 – £15 pints of crap beer and tenner on something outside the ground that looks like it has been reconstituted from insects and fungi, tomorrow. We could have been spared hours on trainline trying to get a good deal on train fares and travel. Oh the excitement of Wembley! Not really. We haven’t done well in play offs for decades. Yes, some of you won’t remember the epic fails of previous play offs and Cup finals. I do. If only we’d have beaten bloody Blackburn! I would be on holiday right now! I’d be looking forward to fixtures in June and maybe even preseason.
Plus, this is all before the gossip about season ticket holders selling their tickets on for profit. That really isn’t on. But, there’s nothing like a play off final for the skankers to all come crawling out of the woodwork. Should you ever skank a fellow Leeds fan? If you have any decency, no.
Still, I am mellow about tomorrow.
Win, we go up. This means fewer games and cheaper tickets. But many long Southern and London trips with smaller allocations – and Bournemouth.
We lose. More shorter trips, larger allocations (apart from Luton), more expensive tickets but some cracking pub stops.
So, yeah. Mellow yellow.
As the song goes, whatever will be, will be. And as a final flourish, just because I know this annoys some, win, lose or draw Always Leeds Always Loyal
