Even by the standards of our recent history of our club, we lived through a completely bizzare 24 hours from Friday evening to Saturday afternoon, and the latest is that the club have bowed to pressure and restored Brian McDermott to the position of manager. But for how long?
We now know that Brian was informed of his sacking at 6pm on Friday evening by means of a telephone call from a lawyer he’d never heard of, one Chris Farnell, a representative of Cellino. How typical of the man, that he didn’t even have the decency to call McDermott in to tell him face to face.
But in my piece of Friday I asked how Cellino could be in a position to sack the manager when his takeover had yet to be ratified by the Football League, and it turned out that he wasn’t. David Haigh also left the club on Friday night, but reversed his resignation on Saturday morning and came into Elland Road to resume control.
Cellino intended that Gianluca Festa would take charge of the team against Huddersfield, but after Ross McCormack had made the players feelings perfectly clear, Festa backed down from and watched the game from the East Stand. At 12.15 Haigh told McDermott’s assistant Nigel Gibbs that he would be in temporary charge for this match.
And with the game still in progress and the ‘Oh Brian McDermott’ chants ringing round Elland Road’, GFH announced to the world that Cellino’s lawyer had no authority to sack McDermott, and that he was still Leeds United’s manager! A brief statement was posted on the club’s official website.
"The club would like to make it clear that Brian McDermott remains our first team manager. He has not been dismissed from his post as has been suggested and we look forward to him continuing in his role with us in taking Leeds United forwards.” And that was the entire article. There is so much that it doesn’t say.
McDermott is expected to take charge of training again on Monday, but will he want to come back after the way he has been treated? If he does come back it will be entirely down to the support shown to him by the players and by the fans, to whom he has already given his thanks, even before Friday’s shambolic events. But for how long will he survive?
Cellino has made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t rate our present manager and that he is determined to install his own man, if and when he succeeds in getting his grubby hands on our club. So everything now depends on the Football League and whether they decide that he can pass their ‘Fit and Proper Persons’ test.
That is presumably down to the League’s Chief Executive Shaun Harvey, who did of course deem Ken Bates to be a fit and proper person to work for while he performed a similar role at Elland. Like it or not, the fate of Brian McDermott and the club itself are now back in his hands