Stick the knife into Blades

Little sympathy for neighbours

There came a time, six years ago, when our club’s fans came 48 hours from the kind of decision that rips your soul apart.

What would you have done if, instead of being rescued from extinction by Ken Bates, Leeds United had simply imploded, dissolved and ceased to exist? Do you give up on football altogether or do you resign yourself to decades supporting a re-formed non-league spectre of the club you once loved? Or, do you do the unthinkable and attach yourself to another club, in the vain hope that they will inspire the same passions within you as Leeds once did?

Let me start by making a confession: I love Sheffield. I lived there for three years as a student, just as Kevin Blackwell’s Leeds were threatening to splutter out of existence, and I’ve got plenty of fond memories, an unhealthy number of which seem to involve falling out of Corporation after one too many Blue Pints. And so, the question was inevitably asked by my (non-Leeds supporting) friends; if the worst came to pass for Leeds, would I ever consider switching my allegiance to either Wednesday or United?

dread

The thought filled me with an instant, visceral dread, not surprisingly in Wednesday’s case as they were the same mess of a club as they have been for the last fifteen years. Sheffield United, however, were a club on the up. A new order looked to be establishing itself, and they were gravitating towards our long-held position at the top of the food chain in Yorkshire.

But the idea of supporting them horrified me even more, not least because I’d have had to replace my treasured LUFC calendar with a Sheffield United one. The thought of having Neil Warnock’s ghastly, beaky visage glowering directly at me every day for a month was not a pleasant one, not least because it would have been the first thing I woke up to every morning.

I’ve tried not to dislike the Sheffield teams, but it’s not easy. Even now, when the Sheffield United team contains Collins, Doyle, Lowry and Vokes, all of whom have featured for Leeds over the past year, I’m struggling to find sympathy for them. I doubt they’d want it, anyway; certainly we received none from them when we were at our lowest ebb.

The natural order looks to be shifting once more, this time in our favour. Wednesday continue to flap listlessly as the League One quagmire closes over their heads, while the Blades have been left nervously fidgeting as the trapdoor rattles beneath their feet. A big part of me hopes that they do survive, and that we’re then able to resume hostilities with a club that, until recently, ranked as one of our biggest bogey teams. By the start of next season we could potentially be two divisions apart, and it would be a shame to see Yorkshire’s biggest derby become a thing of the past.

Nah, forget I said that. Let’s send them down. Preferably in flames.