Why I won't ditch my faded first love

Locker Room: You might as well hear it from me as from somebody else, writes Tom Humphries. Things haven't been so good lately and I'm not embarrassed to say I've looked into the possibility of finding a way out. I've examined the ramifications of divorce, annulment, judicial separation.

I have to say first of all it's not me. It's you. It's true, yes, that as part of my midlife crisis I've been running around with Sunderland Football Club. They're flashy, sexy and appealing. But you, Leeds United, you have changed.

I have loved you since 1970, when the team I picked on their FA Cup run (that epic semi with Manchester United) turned out to play Chelsea in the FA Cup final of that year. Unfortunately I was in a school in Eltham, southeast London, an institution which was a covert training ground for Chelsea fundamentalists. Mine was the love that dared not speak its name.

Love? You try claiming to a room full of seven-year-olds you were being ironic when you chose to christen that black baby you sponsored "Allan Sniffer Clarke". Now all these years later, with Ken Bates as chairman and Dennis Wise as manager, you sink into what we still think of as Division Three. Ken Bates and Dennis Wise? And you hoped I'd stand by you! While you flirted with those two? Ridsdale and O'Leary look as sombre as the Bank of England by comparison.

As you go now to the oblivion of Division Three you hear the familiar cackles of glee. A club built on hate going back to where they belong, say the older guys. A club whose own hubris undid them, say those who just remember the loadsamoney Leeds United of Ridsdale and Davo.

And I have to defend you now! If a person can't see the romance in Leeds United while being nonplussed at the corporate heartlessness of Manchester United or Chelsea, well that person ain't a football fan. That person is a compliant digit in the football-industry ledger.

Ah, Leeds! When Bobby Collins signed from Everton back in 1962, back before I was born, you were in the dowdy backwaters where most people feel you belong. A plain country girl in a hick town. Mid-table, second division. More fancied for the drop than anything better.

But Bobby Collins sparked a little run. We finished fifth, and the following season we went up. It's strange to say, given how things have gone, but back then we had a huge rivalry with Sunderland. That promotion year we needed to take a point in our last game to go up as champions ahead of Sunderland, who were also going up.

Easter was a crunch time. On the same Saturday afternoon there were 54,000 at Leeds to see us play Newcastle and 64,000 up at Roker Park. We won by a goal to nil.

By the following January we were top of Division One (beat Sunderland at Elland Road to go top for the first time ever. Hey hey!).

And there's the romance. We were flat-cap-and-whippet unfashionable. Sunderland, who had gone up with us, had a legacy of huge achievement. At Leeds we had nothing only a dour but shrewd manager and a sceptical Yorkshire public.

There's a yarn from that promotion season. We were two-nil down at Elland Road to Derby County and the chairman, Harry Reynolds, got on the PA and told the crowd the club had ambition and were going to get promotion and were going to be First Division champions soon and every penny would be put back into the club. Everyone cheered up. We came back to draw.

Don Revie put together a team that would last and last. Jack Charlton had been there since he was 15. Billy Bremner was popped into the side and with Bobby Collins gave the midfield a fiery Scottish flavour. Paul Reaney was there.

A young Gary Sprake. Mike O'Grady. Terry Cooper from Pontefract. Johnny Giles was bought from United for £33,000. Alan Peacock came later from Boro for £53,000. Norman Hunter was there. Peter Lorimer from Dundee. Rod Belfitt? Remember him? Thin desperado face?

If you'd mentioned squad rotation back then they'd have thought you meant them to run around till they got dizzy. They played long seasons. FA cup games went to endless replays. They named the same 12 players just about every week.

In the 1969-70 season, for instance, we would play 62 competitive games (and score 127 goals. Yeah! So dour!).

We were runners-up for the first two years back in Division One. Lost on goal average to Manchester United the first time, in 1964-65 (when we were also beaten by Liverpool in extra time in the FA Cup final). Lost out to Liverpool the following year.

(That first year there were 66,000 at a fourth-round cup replay between ourselves and Everton at Goodison. Receipts? A quaint £15,000. We went on to beat United in the Cup semi-final! Romance, I tell you.)

Is that possible today? To come from nowhere, spend most modestly and climb that high? Those days are dead. Romantic football is dead and gone.

And we were loveable because of the heartache we endured. That team were league runners-up five times in the coming seasons. Resilience was what Leeds were all about. People forget that when we infamously lost to Colchester in the cup Billy Bremner wasn't playing and the defeat sparked a run of five successive wins which almost stopped Arsenal winning the double.

At one stage Arsenal had trailed us by seven points but the lead vanished on the afternoon of Jeff Astle's goal at Elland Road. Just Google "Jeff Astle goal" to see the YouTube footage of Leeds being robbed.

The football we played is often derided. Certainly Leeds were tough but at our peak we were gorgeous to watch. Just ransack YouTube again for some of Eddie Gray's or Peter Lorimer's goals.

Consider that in nine years of European football until the early 1970s we never conceded more than two goals away from home. Look at the back-to-back league wins in early 1972 that saw us beat Manchester United 5-1 and then Southampton 7-0. Forest were done 6-0 soon after. We won the FA Cup that season. Won it on a Saturday. On the Monday night had to play Wolves, away, to win the league. Exhausted, our boys lost 2-1. Nobody cared except us.

Playing in Wembley that weekend from the promotion team of the previous decade were Madeley, Reaney, Giles, Charlton, Bremner, Hunter, Lorimer.

From 1970 onwards success seemed always to bring its own punishment for us. The following year, in April 1973, we played nine matches in 21 days, six away from home, but struggled through to the FA Cup final and the Cup Winners' Cup final. We lost the FA Cup (to Sunderland, yes; they were back in the second division as loveable underdogs) and the Cup Winners' Cup final to AC Milan. The referee for the latter game was suspended for his handling of the match.

The next year we bounced back yet again and went unbeaten in our first 29 league games. Champions!

The era ended in Paris in 1975 with Bayern Munich's incredible larceny of the European Cup. Reaney, Cooper, Madeley, Hunter, Bremner, Lorimer and Giles still hung on from the promotion side a dozen years earlier (Imagine, we put Cruyff's Barcelona out in the semi-finals!).

In Paris we had two good penalty claims (both against Franz Beckenbauer) denied and Peter Lorimer's perfect goal, given by the linesman, was overruled, bafflingly, by the referee. The 11th set of runners-up medals in 12 years! Oh and Michel Kitabdjian never reffed a European game again.

Sure there was a catalogue of ugly tackles and we liked to overpower teams with muscle and method rather than make them dizzy with trickery, but we never deserved the hatred we accumulated for crashing the top table and staying for 12 years.

On Friday we went into administration and into the old third division. From nothing we have returned to nothing. Ah, there's enough romance in that to keep me interested. Marching on together.