Rodrick Brown

The manager, squad and coaching staff have accepted wage deferrals to help others as football takes a back seat. The plinth supporting the landmark statue of Billy Bremner outside Elland Road bears an easy , yet evocative, message. “Side before self, whenever ,” it declares, reminding everyone of the previous Leeds United captain’s personal mantra.

In a really different way and a very different context, Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds are now showing they’re equally as big on teamwork because the trophy-hoarding, no-quarter-given Don Revie side Bremner led with such a memorable mixture of finesse and ferocity.

The Championship leaders’ reaction to being stuck during a coronavirus emergency-induced holding pattern with the Premier League clearly visible on the horizon has been impressively mature and measured. On Thursday Bielsa, his players, senior coaching staff and club executives accepted a wage deferral so as to guard the roles and incomes of 272 less well remunerated members of the club’s backroom staff and its army of casual workers. Other teams are now expected to imitate. judi bola terbaik judibolaterbaik.co

Bremner was aptly described as “10 stone of barbed wire” on the pitch but he would surely have approved of the present Leeds captain Liam Cooper’s role in negotiating an appointment designed to stop the loss of homes and livelihoods. within the absence of the customary 35,000 matchday crowds at Elland Road Leeds are, consistent with their chief executive, Angus Kinnear, losing “millions of pounds” per month.

With a £40m annual wage bill becoming unsustainable, first-teamers have agreed to their wages being temporarily capped – a discount to a sum within the region of £6,000 every week was discussed in recent days – leaving the balance to return when normality is finally restored. While the typical Championship salary is around £12,000 per week, Bielsa’s top earners, Patrick Bamford and Kiko Casilla, command around £30,000.

Never in Leeds’s 16-year top-flight exile has it been more imperative to secure a Premier League return, with its attendant, £100m broadcast revenue-funded cash infusion. However, given the lives being lost and therefore the economic crash, the club isn’t close to feel pitying itself.

Top of the second tier and 7 points beyond the play-off places with nine games to travel , the players might be forgiven for feeling like weary travellers left circling their destination in thick cloud. An awful lot of diligence – mental also as physical – has gone into reaching this position but the larger picture has been grasped.

Already Bielsa’s squad have donated sufficient money to stop the largely matchday-funded Leeds fans’ bank from folding, while individual players, most notably Cooper and Stuart Dallas, have gone into role-model mode, using social media to market social distancing. Holbeck Together, an area charity helping the elderly, has received the club’s entire food stocks.

Cooper and company can only hope the Elland Road larders are going to be refilled and therefore the season eventually concluded with the team still within the top two. nobody wants the present campaign to be voided, with promotion and relegation either suspended for a year or Leeds and second-placed West Brom becoming a part of a temporarily extended 22-club top tier.

Liverpool manager hopes crisis will bring greater solidarity
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Jürgen Klopp has said he was moved to tears by footage of NHS staff singing You’ll Never Walk Alone and hopes the response to the coronavirus pandemic will generate greater solidarity across the planet

The Liverpool manager has given his first full interview since the Premier League season was suspended on 13 March and said any problems he may have – like when football may resume and Liverpool may win the league – are “embarrassing” compared with the worldwide crisis. agen sbobet terbaik maxbetsbobet.org

He paid tribute to the frontline medical workers putting themselves in danger to treat the sick, many of whom have sung the Liverpool anthem while on duty.

Klopp said: “It’s extraordinary. i feel yesterday i used to be sent a video of individuals within the hospital just outside the medical care area and once they started singing You’ll Never Walk Alone I started crying immediately. It’s unbelievable. But it shows everything, these people not only work but they need such an honest spirit.

“They are wont to helping other people; we’d like to urge wont to it because usually we’ve our own problems and stuff. But it’s their job, they are doing it day in and outing . they carry themselves, if you would like , in peril because they assist ill, sick and seriously handicapped people, so I couldn’t admire them more and appreciate it more.”

Klopp insisted spirits remain high among his players and staff. He has watched the Taken trilogy “again” and tried to duplicate Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s dance routine. “Not as bad as you almost certainly think,” he said.

On a way more serious note, Klopp hopes there are often an enduring and positive legacy from the response to the pandemic. “In the longer term , in 10, 20, 30, 40 years, if we glance back and therefore the conclusion is that this was the amount when the planet showed the most important solidarity, the most important love, the most important friendship or whatever, that might be really great.

“So within the moment once you undergo a phase or a period like this it’s impossible to ascertain that, especially not for the people that are ill, but there’ll be some extent within the future, a flash within the future once we reminisce and hopefully then we will see it like this. Because that’s the answer for it – we all need to be disciplined, we all need to work together, we all need to lookout of every other and that’s the answer for this problem.”