McDermott Following in Revie's Footsteps at Leeds

How fickle are football fans? A month back Friar Brian was the dog's bollocks at Elland Road, with fans falling over themselves to sing his praises. But three disappointing league results and a reality check exit from the FA Cup has stirred up the impatient natives.

Whilst travelling West Ham fans sang "We're shit and we know it" through the humiliating thumping at Forest, the Leeds United travelling "vile animals" turned on the Bald Controller at the end of the Rochdale game, and like a pack of dogs snarled and snapped and howled and foamed at the mouth, venting their bile in the direction of the man who is doing his level crossing best to steer the Leeds United McFeelgood Factor Sleeper Express to the Premiership, Europe, Infinity and Beyond.

But the Now Now Now generation of shallow grave fans might like to look back to the reign of the late great Don Revie - and I'm not just talking about that unforgettable Crawford cream crackering at Colchester United. It took the Don three seasons to get Leeds into the Prem, and poor McDermott is a little over six months into his project.

Bloody hell, even Noruddychance dismissed talk of promotion back in October; now, all of a sudden,  McDermott's Merry Men are expected to win every time they take to the pitch. Yes, of course, the defeat at Rochdale was embarrassing, but so what? These things happen. Even to that great Revie side. If Lorimer, Giles, Bremner, Charlton and company can lose to a team in the bottom division of the league, why is it such a disaster when a team featuring Peltier, Pugh, Podgy and Pearce do the same?

And look at the other games. After Forest's hammering of West Ham's kids, the narrow defeat at the City Ground doesn't look so bad does it? And whilst the less knowledgeable Leeds fans expected a victory at home to Blackburn, the fact that the Whites had failed to overcome their Lancashire rivals in any of the last four meetings suggested differently. And anyway, what's so bad about losing to a team who, in their next fixture, drew with Unreal City? The draw at Blackpool was a decent result, so it was only the 0-0 draw against 10 man Barnsley that would constitute a shocker in the league. And as West Ham's 3-0 victory at Spurs shows, anything can happen in a local derby.

Look at the table and even after this little hiccup, Leeds sit in 8th place, just one point off the playoffs. What's so disastrous about that exactly? Ipswich and Brighton are only just above them in the table and that's on the back of their best run of results of the season. And as this Championship repeatedly shows, a run of victories is invariably followed by a run of defeats.

Did the fans turn on Revie when success didn't come immediately? Or when Colchester dumped the immortals out of the Cup? Did they hell as like! But fans had more about them in those days and accepted that you stick with your team through thick and thin.

Poor McDermott, he's done nothing wrong from what I can see, and he deserves better from the fans that he is working so hard to keep happy. Saturday was McDermott's worst day in football apparently, so he felt the humiliation even more keenly than he did his own cruel dismissal from Reading. That's not a man the fans should be turning on after one freak result is it?

How the rest of the English football wishes that today's Leeds United fans were on the terraces in Revie's first couple of seasons in charge!