Did Grayson pay for Bates’ own thrift?
At Leeds on Wednesday, with emotions still high after a thrashing in the game the night before and a lack of deadline-day arrivals, the heat turned up on Ken Bates and the frustration and anger aimed towards him cranked up to the mega-watts, Bates did what he is so often good at, he got somebody else to pay for it.
It seems that the World of twisted logic at Elland Road seems to be that you give the manager the month of January to try to fine-tune his squad for the run-in to the end of the season and then you sack him the day after, to give somebody else the reigns over the former managers’ creation. Much like building a new garden-shed before moving out and handing the keys to the house to another family a day later.
As you can see, very sensible, but why was he sacked then? Well, the reasons emanating from the bizarre chairmanship of Ken Bates is mainly pinned on poor results and with Leeds only winning two in seven, a run culminating in a limp 1-4 defeat to Birmingham in an arena that boasted more empty seats than an audience with Michael Barrymore (a crowd below 20,000 for those figure-enthusiasts), that particular excuse may not be too wide of the mark.
However, as ever with the fiery Bates, you can’t be certain to take that at face-value and you have to scratch slightly lower to reach his “sustainability project”, which is tasked with “rebuilding Leeds United brick by brick”, to reach the point where it is clear to see where any particular conflict between manager and chairman lies.
Midfielder Johnny Howson was sold for £2 million in this transfer window while Max Gradel went for £1.7 million last summer, but Grayson’s only permitted business has been free transfers for the likes of Mikael Forssell, Michael Brown and the American Robbie Rodgers, who joined in January alongside a loan deal for Tottenham’s Adam Smith.
Smith became Grayson’s 33rd loan signing in his 37 month spell at Elland Road and even the village-idiot can work out such short-termism isn’t going to achieve success and yet, you can even pin the word achievement to Grayson’s season so far as he fought against the revolving door policy to leave Leeds tenth, four points off the play offs positions.
Factor in the sales of the £8million Fabian Delph and the £1 million Kasper Schmeichel and it is quite obvious, again to this village-idiot, that the distribution of money into “Simon’s pot”, as Bates calls it, isn’t exactly equal when the only net spend to arise this year has been a fee in the region of £300,000 for goalkeeper Andy Lonergan.
The back-four that shipped four to Birmingham on Tuesday contained Zac Thompson, a 19-year old centre-midfielder filling in at right-back, a centre back pairing of 21 year old Tom Lees and on-loan Celtic 24 year old Darren O’Dea while Aiden White, 20, played at left-back, yet the only solution to such inexperience that was exposed on all four (this page is now tired of saying four) occasions by the gigantism of Nikola Zigic, was to bring in Adam Smith, the right back, aged 20, with another deal that only focuses on the convenient, immediate future.
So with Grayson operating to the puppet strings of Bates who remains even more extreme than a Tory when it comes to austerity measures, it was only a matter of time before a lack of financial backing was going to leave him without a job. The search now begins for a successor, Neil Warnock and the perennial failure Paul Ince are the two front-runners, but the only thing this page can do, is not to make comment on that and instead wish whoever gets the job the most copious amounts of luck, they are going to need it.
@AdamGray1250
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