David O’Leary sat down with Balls.ie and Livescore recently as part of our UCL Memories Series, to look back on his heady days as Leeds manager and his ventures in Europe as a player with Arsenal.
A Leeds Side Full Of Youth And Irish
What now seems like an ‘age old adage’, Alan Hansen’s “you can’t win anything with kids” line was unfortunately true for David O’Leary’s early 2000’s Leeds team.
However, these kids played above themselves and exceeded expectations, in Europe in particular, and proved right another ‘age old adage’ that “if you’re good enough you’re old enough.”
Combined with the energy of youth was a strong Irish element in O’Leary’s squad, made up of Gary Kelly, Stephen McPhail, Ian Harte, and Alan Maybury.
They were heady days for this Leeds team, the majority of whom would go onto greater things with other clubs, before it all came spectacularly crashing down a just few years later.
Despite Leeds eventually doing a Leeds on it, we should remember and appreciate the good times, and especially their 2001 peak when they reached the semi-finals of the Champions League.
O’Leary details how he always believed in the youth of the Leeds reserves and how his own experiences at Arsenal helped him trust this youth to deliver for the first team.
“I’d been nagging him (his former boss George Graham) about players in the reserves that I’d been watching. People like Stephen McPhail, Jonathan Woodgate, Alan Smith.
"I just felt I remember at Arsenal being put in at 17, and sometimes young kids you can’t put them in until they’re 20 or 21, but if they’re good enough forget about their age.”
“But if you put them in there you don’t know. And I felt that when I got the job I’d been nagging George for so long that I thought to myself I’ve got to follow up what I was saying and do this and that’s how I introduced these young players. And none of them let me down, they were all fantastic.”
The 2000-01 Champions League Campaign
And so Leeds went into the 2000-01 Champions League drawn in a ridiculously tough group with European powerhouses Barcelona and AC Milan, as well as Besiktas.
If the odds were low on them reaching the semi-finals at that stage, they were even lower after they lost their first game 4-0 to Barcelona away at the Nou Camp.
O’Leary explains that “on the night we got a complete chasing, and not because the lads played badly, we just played against a world class better team.
“You could have been there playing for the rest of your life and you still wouldn’t have got a result.”
It was Leeds’ second group game that singled them out as a force to be reckoned with, and their performance would typify the style of this Leeds side.
Milan came to an electric and wet Elland Road, and as O’Leary puts it, “I think the Milan players didn’t know what hit them.
“Our strength in Europe was that way of not giving people time and space on the ball, and particularly the teams we were playing. When you’ve all those great players, you give them time and space and they’ll absolutely kill you.
“We wanted to impose from the time they got it off their goalkeeper at the back.
“In their leagues they were always used to been given time and space until they got into the last third of the field.
“And we hounded people and we hustled people and when we got it we expressed ourselves.”
It was this ‘hustle’ and ‘expression’ that would see Leeds get a 1-0 win over Milan, and eventually make it through to the second group stage.
Despite two losses to Real Madrid, they beat Anderlecht twice and bagged a draw and a win over Lazio to see them to the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
The first leg against Deportivo La Coruna is one that will live long in the memory of David O’Leary due to the magnificent and complete performance from his side, where his team played, as he puts it, “cosmic football”.
“The first leg was at home and I would say of all the campaigns, of all of the games, this game everybody played as best as they could, we just played, I don’t know what the word would be, cosmic football or God knows what.”
They won 3-0 at home, with the first goal coming courtesy of an Ian Harte free-kick. And despite losing 2-0 in the second leg they were through to a semi-final against a Valencia side who had reached the final the year previously.
The two sides cancelled each other out with a 0-0 draw at Elland Road, before Leeds succumbed to a 3-0 loss at the Mestella. O’Leary put the loss down to the superior ‘experience’ of the Valencia side. Valencia would then go onto lose to Bayern Munich on penalties in the final.
While O’Leary’s kids couldn’t get the job done, their manager speaks of these times with a smile on his face and warmth in his voice. Yes it would all come crashing down, but we will always have the 2001 Champions League campaign.
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