It speaks volumes of the talent in Leeds’s backroom staff that both Dennis Wise and former Assistant Gus Poyet (who became Juande Ramos’s assistant manager at Tottenham earlier this season) are being headhunted by top Premier League clubs, but where does that leave Leeds? The team is just a few points away from an automatic promotion slot with eighteen games to go in the current season, and considering the 15 point penalty the team began the season with, every game is crucial to Leeds’s push to the Championship. Losing Wise now could destroy a talented and successful team and leave Leeds in a similar position to Nottingham Forest – strong, overachieving, but stuck in a division far lower than the team’s reputation and history deserve.

Dennis obviously has to make a decision in his own best interests (although, personally, I wouldn’t go within seventy miles of the pending-death-sentence that is a job at Newcastle, where fans consider anything less than a 5-4 Champions League final win – every season – an abject failure. Unless you’re Kevin Keegan.) and I can’t begrudge his taking the opportunity to work in the Premier League. Still, it’d be a shame for Wise to exchange an opportunity to make history as a Leeds manager by overcoming a 15 point deficit to win automatic promotion, for a forgettable job as Director of Football at a mediocre Premier League club with about as much chance of breaking into the Big Four as I do of growing wings.

Go to Newcastle and be derided by a needy and petulant fan base, or stay at Leeds and be a hero at a team commanding the thirteenth largest average attendance in England despite being in the third-tier of English football? I know which I’d choose. Let’s see what Wise does.

Updates as the happen.

Kevin Scriven
On the pitch: Goalkeeper
Real life: Builder

Justin Gregory
On the pitch: Right-back
Real life: College student
Gregory, sadly, won’t get to play at Anfield: he picked up 5 yellow-cards and is due to serve a one-match suspension during the Liverpool game. The FA, being made up of aging, insensitive incompetents, refused to allow him to serve the suspension at a different time and refused to allow him to sit out on another, rescheduled game instead.

Jay Smith
On the pitch: Centre-back
Real life: “Works in planning”

Phil Warner
On the pitch: Centre-back
Real life: Drives a van

Tony Taggart
On the pitch: Right-back
Real life: Bin man (Garbage man for Americans)

Mo Harkin
On the pitch: Right-winger
Real life: Used to play for Wycombe

Jamie Collins
On the pitch: Central Midfielder & Captain
Real life: Primary School Teacher (Elementary School for Americans)

Charlie Oatway
On the pitch: Central Midfielder
Real life: “I work for Brighton and Hove Albion on a scheme called, ‘Albion in the Community’.”

Alfie Potter
On the pitch: Left-winger
Real life: Youth player at Peterborough United – currently on loan at Havant and Waterlooville

Rocky Baptiste
On the pitch: Striker
Real life: Training to be a taxi driver in London

Richard Pacquette
On the pitch: Striker
Real life: School Caretaker (Janitor for Americans)

The hell with Leeds – and with the dull, Premier League-only FA Cup matches the BBC will be showing this weekend – I’m slapping the radio on and listening to Havant and Waterlooville have the night of their lives.

None of which is to say that Beckford is a poor player: he’s scored more goals than anyone in the league this season, which isn’t something to be sniffed at. The problem is that Beckford thrives on two things: strong support from the midfield and poor defending.

Beckford doesn’t really have the skill to consistently create scoring chances on his own. Given a good ball in, however, he can use his superior pace to beat defenders while avoiding offside calls – he can run in from behind the last defenders and still beat them to the ball.

League One is almost tailor-made for that kind of striker – pacey, strong, and opportunistic. With Leeds, in this season, Beckford is in his element. The Premiership, however, is a completely different proposition. Beckford is fit, but not especially so in comparison to the members of any Premiership squad (with the exception of Fulham, who generally play like they’ve had a colossal fry-up before kick-off). Deprived of the innate advantage in pace that he enjoys in League One, and facing vastly more skilled and intelligent defenders, Beckford’s technical deficiencies would be more pronounced and he’d be largely ineffective.

All of which raises a question: if Beckford is, for the moment at least, a strong but unskillful striker, will he cut the mustard in the Championship if (when) Leeds are promoted? It’ll be interesting to find out next year.

Anyone out there have an opinion?

First, the positives: Micah Richards is excellent, and hopefully under a good manager like Sven-Gorran Eriksson, he will only get better.

Alright, now that’s out of the way, let’s move on to the bad.

Scott Carson took over from Paul Robinson in goal, and while that’s certainly a welcome development given Robinson’s current confusion over the role of the goalkeeper in a game of football, Austria’s blistering challenge for the title of “worst footballing nation in Europe” meant he had very little to do.

In defence, Wayne Bridge, Sol Campbell, Joleon Lescott, and Micah Richards demonstrated … well … very little, given that the entire Austrian team generated as many attacking chances as Scott Carson. It’s hard to evaluate their performance when their primary function – preventing goals – was taken up by the opposition’s attacking players. Wes Brown replaced Sol Campbell towards the end of the game, and wasn’t very good.

And now! To the time machine! Rewind to the last World Cup! Joe Cole, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, and David Beckham. And lo! It didn’t work any better than it did under Sven; it was worse, if that’s possible. Joe Cole was at least visible. If anyone has the faintest idea how Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard spent their game, let me know: I’ll be damned if a single one of Gerrard’s passes actually reached anyone (apart from a number of surprised spectators), and Lampard, on fire for Chelsea, looked like he’d been drugged. Surely someone, somewhere in the FA, has cottoned on that STEVEN GERRARD AND FRANK LAMPARD CANNOT PLAY TOGETHER! THEY ARE ESSENTIALLY THE SAME PLAYER IN A DIFFERENT BODY, THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BEING THAT FRANK LAMPARD IS IN FORM RIGHT NOW AND STEVEN GERRARD ISN’T! EITHER PLAY A 4-3-3 WITH LAMPARD OR A 4-4-2 WITH GERRARD AND BARRY, BUT PICK ONE OR THE OTHER, YOU BLOODY SORRY EXCUSE FOR A COACHING STAFF!

Sorry, had to get that off my chest. I haven’t mentioned Beckham yet, largely because anyone who’s seen a League One MLS game recently knows exactly what happened: he took a few largely ineffective corners and tried to score from a 40-yard free kick, for reasons known only to himself.

Up front, Michael Owen and Peter Crouch started the match. Michael Owen failed to score! Please, contain your astonishment – I know Owen is England’s first-choice striker, despite not having scored since playing Russia at Wembley three months ago, but even great-strikers-who-can’t-score-and-are-made-out-of-papier-maché have an off day. Or two. or sixty. He injured himself again in this match, so he won’t be playing for a while, not even in our upcoming friendly extremely important qualifying match against Croatia.

Peter Crouch scored again, which is nice considering he almost never starts at Liverpool and wouldn’t have started here if Wayne Rooney were fit. Jermaine Defoe replaced Owen after his injury, but that’s about all he did. And McClaren brought on Alan Smith to replace Peter Crouch during the second half, which is probably all the mention he deserves.

Yesterday, I slagged off the English youth system and the fact that, once the current crop of top English players retires, we’ll be left with Micah Richards, Theo Walcott, and Sir Alex Ferguson’s shoe-shine boy. Today, though, I’m taking a more positive note. For the love of God, this is an England squad that can call upon four members of the Chelsea starting 11 and a host of other top players from some of the best teams in the world. Why, for the love of God, could we barely beat a team that might have improved if reinforced by members of the Austrian FA’s cleaning staff?

Someone in the FA, please, listen to me. Find us a decent manager. Anyone. Someone who knows the basic, rudimentary techniques for building a functioning football team, rather than a mob of 11 individuals running around on some grass for 90 minutes. Someone other than Steve McClaren. I don’t care if we qualify or not anymore, largely because, if we do qualify, there’s a fairly good chance we’ll embarass ourselves repeatedly on live television.

I’m holding out for José Morinho, but to be honest, I’ll take anyone.

Forgive me, Steven, but I’m confused. If there were enough talented young English players coming up through the academy system, surely they’d be playing in the Premier League? If we have enough good English players to maintain the current Premiership standard, where are they? If they’re playing in the Championship, why does every (predominantly English) promoted Championship team have such difficulty staying in the Premiership without a hefty injection of funds to purchase (you guessed it) foreign players? If Rafa Benitez had skillful young strikers coming up through his youth system, would he really have needed to shell out millions for Fernando Torres? Aside from Ashley Cole, can anyone out there name a single world-class English left-back? Steve McClaren, incompetent though he might be, was forced to resort to playing a centre-back (Joleon Lescott) out of position against Russia, with disastrous results, because Cole couldn’t play. How bad does the standard of English players have to be that a centre-back was preferable to every other living English left-back?

What Gerrard – and the idiots who, like him, favour a quota system – seem to be in complete ignorance of is the simple fact that young English players are generally not as good as young Brazilian players, young Italian players, young French players. Exceptional, world-class players like Wayne Rooney are the lucky exceptions who somehow survived a system that produces players with virtually no technical ability beyond being able to thump a long ball upfield. We have a youth system that emphasizes the full 11-a-side game, neglecting technical skills and pushing smaller and weaker children out in favour of early-developers who, if many professional English players are anything to go by, aren’t that talented.

Rather than turning the Premier League into a glorified version of the Championship, we need to address, at a national level, the failings of our youth systems and of youth coaching in general, so that young English players can stand toe to toe with their overseas counterparts. Lowering the standard of the Premier League might create the illusion of more world-class English players, but the only way to create the reality is to build up our youth so that they don’t need help from the government – or Steven Gerrard – to be able to play in the world’s best football league.

So on to my all-time favourite Leeds player: Tony Yeboah. Ghanian Premier League top scorer two seasons in a row? Check. German Bundesliga top scorer two years in a row? Check. The only player to ever win the BBC’s Goal of the Month award twice in two consecutive months? Check. This is the man who gave me some of the best footballing memories of my life – I still remember being in the stands at Elland Road with my Dad, repeatedly chanting “To-o-ny Yeboah” until I lost my voice. He may have only played regularly for Leeds for one season, but good God, what a season.

Yeboah was born in Ghana and encouraged to play football by his Dad, a former professional player in that country. His performances in Ghana earned him a ticket to Germany in 1988, where he became only the second black person to play professional football there. He joined Frankfurt in 1990 and quickly became their best striker, ranking as the top scorer in German football in both 1993 and 1994 and striking fear into the hearts of every defence he encountered. Luckily for Leeds, Frankfurt’s newly-appointed manager foolishly fell out with Yeboah and two other high-profile players in 1995, and soon forced them out of the squad. Leeds manager Howard Wilkinson swooped in with a then-club-record offer of £3.4 million (roughly $7 million), having been impressed with the striker’s form after seeing him on a TV highlights show. Yeboah is still a legend and fan favourite at Frankfurt, with fans (according to Wikipedia) regularly wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “Zeugen Yeboahs” – meaning, “Yeboah’s Witnesses.” And with good reason: 6 months after Yeboah’s departure, the formerly Champions League-challenging Frankfurt were relegated. Despite efforts to bring Yeboah back to Frankfurt, the club couldn’t afford the star’s new transfer fee.

Yeboah played well in the last few months of the 1994-1995 Premiership season, but it was in the 1995-1996 season that he cemented his cult status amongst Leeds fans, winning the BBC’s Goal of the Month competition in both August and September of 1995, and later winning Goal of the Season for the second of them, his incredible strike against Wimbledon.

The August 1995 goal of the month, against Liverpool:

And the September Premiership Goal of the Month and 1995-1996 Premiership Goal of the Season, against Wimbledon:

Yeboah spent the rest of the season as Leeds’s talisman, leading the squad and earning the love of the fans, who voted him as the first-ever non-British Leeds Fans’ Player of the Year. It’s just a shame that the rest of the squad wasn’t quite good enough for Leeds to make the best of his talents.

Which brings us to Yeboah’s swansong – Monaco. Ah, Monaco. With an in-form Monaco considered one of the tougher teams in the 1995 UEFA Cup, Leeds travelled to Monaco nervously anticipating a difficult game. What they probably didn’t expect was one of the greatest hat tricks in UEFA Cup history, as Yeboah ripped the Monaco defence to shreds and gifted Leeds a 3-0 away win. The hat trick:

Sadly, that season was to be Yeboah’s last real chance at Leeds. A series of devastating injuries suffered while representing Ghana internationally kept Yeboah off the pitch for much of the next season, and after a series of disagreements with new Leeds manager George Graham, the best Leeds striker of the Premiership era left for Hamburg, back in the Bundesliga, on a £1million transfer. He played well there for a few seasons, before his play was seriously affected by allegations of tax evasion, resolving which drained him. In 2001, he left Hamburg for the football leagues of Qatar, where he spent a few (presumably relaxing) years.

Today, Yeboah lives in Ghana, where he runs a hotel called “Yegoala” in the capital city of Accra. When asked by The Times why he is no longer heavily involved in football, he said “I was thinking about the future of the Ghanaian people — people who have no work, people who supported me throughout my football career. So I wanted to do something to employ the people and in Accra I now have some 50 employees.” Since 2006, he has helped organise, and played in, an annual charity football match, the “Anthony Baffoe XI vs Anthony Yeboah XI,” and tutors a number of young Ghanian strikers.

Yeboah at a Glance:

Name: Anthony “Tony” Yeboah
Birthday: June 6th, 1966
Birthplace: Kumasi, Ghana
Nationality: Ghanian
Height: 5′10″
Position: Striker
Time at Leeds: 18 months (Jan 1995 to July 1997)
Appearances: 62 (45 league appearances)
Goals: 33 (25 league goals)
Why’s he great, in a nutshell? Did you watch the Wimbledon and Liverpool videos? Beyond his skill as a footballer, though, he seems like a genuinely good man who is trying to help young people in his own country. I really hope one day I can stay in his hotel and thank him for the memories he gave to me and so many people in Leeds.