David Parkin on the Leeds United farce and remembering two sporting greats

WITH the end of the traditional panto season, the Leeds United saga has turned into a full blown farce that Ray Cooney or Brian Rix would be proud of.
The news this week that Leeds’ president Massimo Cellino had lost his appeal against disqualification as owner of the club again provides more questions than answers.
If he’s been said to be running the Championship club rather eccentrically then the Football League don’t appear to be any better organised.
According to the latest ruling, the Football League has found that the Italian businessman was subject to a disqualifying condition of its owners and directors’ test following his conviction for tax evasion in an Italian court. 
That means that he will have to relinquish his role until April 10 when, apparently, his conviction becomes spent under UK law.
So he can’t have anything to do with the running of the club for the next two-and-a-half months.
This episode raises one or two questions.
So who will run Leeds in Cellino’s absence? 
And I gather he will continue to fund the loss-making club during that period. So he can fund it but not run it?
Does this weird situation actually benefit anyone?
Has the Football League put one of its largest club’s into limbo with this decision?
Perhaps the League’s gormless chief executive, Shaun Harvey – whose last job was gopher for former Leeds chairman and owner Ken Bates – feels better about things now.
I wonder if his former employer would have passed the owner and director’s test? And his previous employer before that, Geoffrey Richmond at Bradford City?
Would FIFA supremo Sepp Blatter get through such a test? 
Well given the league appears to apply such a test with varying rigour then perhaps old Sepp would squeak through.
A bit like Run for Your Wife, this farce is set to run and run.
Except no one is laughing.
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THE passing of two great sportsmen this week may not have crossed your radar, but brought memories back for me.
Louis Martin, Britain’s most successful weightlifter, died at the age of 78.
The Jamaican-born athlete, who represented his birth country at the 1958 Commonwealth Games, before moving to the UK and winning medals for Great Britain in the 90 kilograms class at two Olympic Games – bronze at Rome 1960 and silver at Tokyo 1964.

Martin also won the World Weight Lifting Championships four times between 1959 and 1965, was a double world record holder, four-time European champion and a three-time Commonwealth Games gold medallist.

And while winning all his weightlifting titles he worked as an electrician at British Rail in Derby.

He married a local girl and their mixed-race relationship was unusual at the time and the couple were featured in a supplement produced by the Sunday Times in which top photographer Lord Snowdon took the pictures.
After he retired having received the MBE, Louis opened a gym in a back street near his home, passing on his knowledge to generations of youngsters over the next four decades.

As a teenager growing up in Derby I used to go to his gym which had no running water or heating but was packed every evening with burly figures grunting and groaning and the sound of clanging weights was regularly punctuated by Louis’ booming laugh echoing through the tatty brick building.
I have Louis to thank for transforming me from a nine stone weakling into a 10 stone Charles Atlas look-a-like.
As well as the exercise, it was the confidence gained that was equally as valuable. Louis treated everybody with respect and intelligence, asked questions and gave advice about life. 
He would quote poetry and philosophy while showing his gym members the correct way to do a bent over row with a barbell.
He was a great man – a unique combination of strength, intelligence, humility and kindness.
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Another man lost from the world of sport this week was Ken Furphy, who died at the age of 83.
He was one of the first Brits to head across the Atlantic and help to establish football in North America, managing the New York Cosmos when Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto played for the team.
That was more than 30 years before David Beckham and Thierry Henry went to ply their trade in the States on lucrative multi-million pound contracts.
After a relatively undistinguished playing career for Darlington, Workington and Watford, Ken Furphy made his name as a manager at Watford, Blackburn and Sheffield United.
Joining Watford in 1964 he guided them to the old Second Division, now the Championship, for the first time in their history and led the club to an FA Cup semi-final in 1970, beating Liverpool and Stoke of the First Division along the way before eventually losing to Chelsea.
Furphy’s approach was refreshingly different, he was the first football manager to allow his pre-match team talk to be broadcast on television, prompting BBC presenter David Coleman to describe him as “one of the best young managers in the game today” when he introduced Furphy’s Watford team talk live on Grandstand before their FA Cup fourth-round tie with Manchester United in 1969.
He later moved on to Blackburn and Sheffield United before the opportunity to manage the New York Cosmos in the fledgling North American Soccer League.
“He went from Stockton-on-Tees to the top of the Rockefeller Plaza, coaching Pele,” reflected his son Keith this week.
His spell in the Big Apple saw the Cosmos finish second in the NASL’s regular season and were knocked out in the play-off quarter-finals by Tampa Bay Rowdies.

However, they had created enough of a wave to move to Yankee Stadium and recruit the likes of World Cup-winning captains Carlos Alberto and Franz Beckenbauer. 

But a quarter-final defeat was not what the owners had in mind after signing Pele that year and Furphy left the club. 

Someone once joked he’d got the bullet because he’d told Pele to track back more often.

He moved on to roles at the Miami Toros, Detroit Express and Washington Diplomats before retiring to Devon where he became a regular match summariser for BBC Radio Devon, mainly on Torquay matches.

I only met him once. 
When a team from the BBC in Plymouth decided to play a friendly football match against their counterparts in Cardiff it was all arranged to take place at the home of Welsh sport at Sofia Gardens, next to the Cardiff Castle.
The only problem was the BBC South West team, managed by Ken Furphy, were a player short.
A former colleague I’d worked with on a newspaper, who worked at the Beeb, knowing I then lived in Cardiff, phoned me up and asked me to fill in.
Now I’ve never been a good footballer, not even an ok one.
I asked him how desperate they were. He said: “I’ve called everyone I know in South Wales and they can’t play and I even asked a bloke in North Wales but it will take him too long to drive down to Cardiff so you are our last chance.”
Manager Furphy assigned positions to the team and last in line was me. So a poor, right-footed player was given the role of left full back.
By half-time we were 3-0 down but all I was bothered about was that all three goals had come down our right hand side and so I couldn’t be blamed for them.
We went into the changing rooms where Ken Furphy attempted to lift spirits and commented positively to every player.
“Where’s our left-back?” he shouted.
I put my hand up, expecting a rocket for lack of skill or effort or a combination of the two.
“You’re having a good little game son, keep it up,” said Furphy.
I turned to the bloke sitting on the bench next to me.
“He probably said that to Pele,” I beamed.
Have a great weekend.

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