Our suspended club President has claimed that the ‘injurygate’ affair at Charlton Athletic on Saturday was nothing to do with him, and Marco Silvestri’s dad has taken to Facebook to insist that it was nothing to do with his son either.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any stranger at Leeds United….sorry, I’ve used that line far too many times already in the last few months. The known facts are that no fewer than six players pulled out of Saturday’s game at short notice…but why? This has inevitably led to accusations that someone had told the six to withdraw as a protest, but Massimo Cellino has denied that he had anything to do with it.
He told the ever-reliable Sun "I am not a coward and not the sort of guy who tells his players to go on strike. I only found out on Friday evening. I admit it looks weird. But if the players were injured, why didn’t the manager inform the chairman? This looks like a fight between manager Neil Redfearn and the ownership of the club, which is not good.”
Officially Cellino is supposed to have nothing to do with the running of the club till the end of the season, so there should be no reason why anyone should have told him about the injuries anyway, and nor should he know anything about a dispute between Redfearn and the current owner. The official word from the club was that all six absentees were genuinely injured.
"Every member of the Leeds United squad receives first-class treatment from the club’s head physio and his team at Thorp Arch. It was the medical team’s view from Thursday onwards that some first-team players would struggle to be fit for Saturday’s game at Charlton. It was declared that the six players were unavailable to travel to London on Friday. The club completely stands by the internal medical recommendations that it receives.”
But this has been contradicted by Claudio Silvestri, who claims that although his son and Antenucci had genuine reasons for missing the game, the same can’t be said for the absent Bellusci, Del Fabro, Doukara and Cani. Silvestri senior said "He [Marco Silvestri] is really sorry the fans have become suspicious, he tried to explain but I’m not sure they understood”
"The others have done, for what I know, a stupid protest. He is furious with those assholes because he took the whole season to make his name through the fans and now he is risking to spoil the relationship with them and with the environment.” This is at least plausible, because the four he named have been fringe players for much of their time at Leeds, and may well be fed up with their lack of involvement.
If those players did pull out as a protest I’d be glad to see the club get rid of all four of them. I don’t think Doukara and Cani have the all round game to make an impact at Championship level, while Bellusci is an absolute liability at the back. I’ve only seen Del Fabro in the FA cup game at Sunderland so it’s hard to judge, but if he was good enough I’m sure we wouldn’t have signed Bamba on loan.
But ultimately this problem has stemmed from Cellino signing the players himself rather than trusting the head coach to make his own judgement. This has led to the squad being full of players Redfearn doesn’t want, as he’d rather play the promising younger players he used to coach when he was in charge of the juniors. The result has been a split dressing room, with most of the overseas players getting frustrated at their lack of opportunities in the first team.
And Steve Morison has admitted to LUTV that the slump in our current form is down to the uncertainty behind the scenes. " That’s the reason why we keep losing, because we’re talking about everything else apart from football every day.All the best teams are focused, all they worry about is going in for training, do their training, go and play matches on a Saturday, get results, go home.”
"But there seems to be a hell of a lot more than that going on that we’ve got to deal with, so it’s hard work and you just try and be as professional as you can.” That’s pretty much what we all suspected, with our record since the mysterious departure of Steve Thompson on April 2 now standing at five straight defeats (and counting).
It now seems likely that the current regime will use these results as an excuse to get rid of Redfearn at the end of the season, even though it all stems from the confusion that they themselves have caused. But with a growing number of Leeds fans wanting to see the back of Cellino, I’m sure we can look forward to some furious protests at Elland Road if he does decide to get rid of a popular head coach.