Chairman’s words out of context

QUOTES from Town chairman Phil Hodgkinson’s appearance on fan podcast ‘And He Takes That Chance’ have caused much mirth from Leeds United fans and outrage from Terriers fans after he said he felt Town had ‘better players in most positions’ than their local rivals.

This was not helped by some media outlets’ reporting of the quotes, which stripped Hodgkinson’s comments of their true context.

The Town chairman was not being boastful or having a pop at Leeds’ players, but rather was making a point about how not everything about achieving success in the Championship is about money.

Town themselves know that having achieved promotion on a comparatively meagre wage budget in 2016/17 – or in his own words: “When we got promoted we got promoted because we had a manager [David Wagner] who had a system that was better than the players we had, which is what is happening at Leeds. Bielsa’s way of playing [is better than that squad].”

It is no slight on Leeds

United to suggest that their brilliant manager – a man who Danny Cowley has hailed as a genius – has got his players to play in a way that is more than the sum of their parts.

If anything, Hodgkinson was acknowledging that Town are not (yet) at a point where their talented players are performing at the levels they could reach if they were fully au fait with a system that maximises their strengths.

Given where they have come from, that’s OK – even David Wagner took time to drill his gegenpressing style into his players, helped along by some extremely canny recruitment.

Town have underperformed this season for numerous reasons that we have started to see fixed by the Cowleys.

As it is, Hodgkinson has given an honest assessment of where his club currently stand and acknowledged that there is a long way to go to get to the levels at which Leeds are currently performing – but that it is possible to do without spending tens of millions.

You can disagree with Hodgkinson’s assessment that Town have better players than Leeds, but to mistake it for a boast is to ignore the context in which those words were spoken.