It’s quite possible that one of Ross McCormack’s greatest moments in a Leeds United shirt exists only in my imagination. Leeds’ League Cup defeat at Newcastle in 2013 has been understandably forgotten; a Championship side losing 2-0 away to a Premier League club in the early rounds isn’t memorable. Even finding highlights of the goals online isn’t easy, let alone footage from the rest of the match. But it’s always stuck in my mind, because I remember watching a painfully fuzzy stream on my laptop at university, and rubbing my eyes questioning whether I really had just witnessed Ross McCormack getting the ball near the halfway line, nutmegging a Newcastle defender, then hitting the bar after chipping the goalkeeper.

McCormack himself isn’t so sure. “I do remember hitting the bar,” he says in between sips of an iced americano in the lobby of a Leeds hotel. “But I can’t remember where it was from or what happened before it.” If McCormack can’t tell me I’m wrong, then I’m happy to continue trusting my imagination that it was the greatest goal never scored. Plus, it’s exactly the sort of thing Ross McCormack would attempt. McCormack always tried chipping whichever chump was in the opposition’s goal, because he could.

There are two sides to being a flair player. First is the skill, the touch of magic that gets spellbound fans out of their seats, purring in appreciation like Phil Hay’s tweet archiving that lost moment in Newcastle: ‘Ooooo, McCormack chip hits the bar. Five minutes in.’ But every professional footballer has talent — think of the best player in your school playground who nobody could get the ball off and had ability you could only dream of; even they were only good enough for a trial somewhere down the leagues. What sets a flair player apart is having the bravado to push their shoulders back and their chest out in front of their teammates, the opposition, and thousands watching, and try to make the impossible seem possible. They’re brilliant, essentially, and they don’t give a fuck who knows it.

“I wouldn’t necessarily try and entertain,” McCormack says, “but I believe there’s a lot of players in the world who can do things that certainly I couldn’t do, but sometimes they won’t do it because it’s sort of out of the ordinary. I always backed myself. I was strong enough that, yeah, maybe nine times out of ten it won’t come off, but then that one time that it does come off might change a game. It might take you from a draw to a win or a defeat to a draw, so it’s probably worth taking that chance. So I always backed myself to do it, it was just there were times when I did it probably a little bit more than I should have.

“I’ve said it for years and years and years, and I’m glad you brought it up, because a lot of people don’t get what I’m saying: it takes a special character to play for Leeds United. How many players have you seen over the years, better than me, better than a lot of players, but they just can’t do it. And it’s the pressure of Leeds United, because the fans expect success. It’s obviously a one-club city so in and around the city you get a lot of recognition, whether that’s good or bad. My first year was bad — ’You’re shit, we’ve signed you from Cardiff and you’re not playing.’

“But I was quite lucky that first season because I sort of got to experience it from the outside while being on the inside. I didn’t play much. I couldn’t get in the team because Luciano [Becchio] was doing well and then in behind him we had Jonny Howson. That’s the two positions that I would realistically play, so I’d absolutely know I had no reason to question Simon Grayson’s decisions not to play me. I wouldn’t have played myself, I’d have kept them two in. It meant I saw everything that the fans were doing from the side before the game, after the game, from a different perspective. That helped me going into my second year, but you definitely feel it. I think social media is big as well. Leeds have got a big fan base. You see it now when they sign any players, their Instagram following will jump up thousands. You know you’re coming to a big club, the expectation is that you hit the ground running, and you’ve got to be a strong character to be able to do that.”

McCormack didn’t hit the ground running after joining Leeds from Cardiff in 2010. Instead, he had to be patient, watching from the bench as Becchio, Howson, Robert Snodgrass and Max Gradel spearheaded an attack that fired Simon Grayson’s Leeds to the edge of the play-offs in their first season after promotion from League One. It took McCormack until the penultimate game that season to score his first goal for the club, by which point Leeds’ promotion challenge had fallen short, when he netted in the final two matches of the campaign against Burnley and QPR. Reflecting on his entire four years at Leeds, he chooses his opener against Burnley as his most important goal.

“It was getting to that point where I was thinking, ‘Is this ever going to come?’ Bradley Johnson whipped it around the corner first time and I was through. Sometimes people say it’s hard for a striker when you’ve got a lot of time to think about what you’re doing, but I looked at it differently. I thought, no, it gives you time to send the ‘keeper where you want him to go. I remember going through and I worked it into the near corner but shaped to go the other way. Just seeing that going in, I thought, not that I’ve arrived, but I’ve got that monkey off the back so to speak. I got one again in the last game of the season at QPR. It was a bit of a deflection, but getting those two goals was big, and so was having a good relationship with Simon. He said to me, listen, forget this season now. He said it’s about next season and you will be playing next season and just make sure you have a good summer, come back ready to go, and you’ll be playing. And to be fair he stuck to his word.”

If Grayson held up his side of the bargain, so did McCormack. Thirteen games into his second season with Leeds, he had already reached double figures, culminating in a 3-0 win at Doncaster in which McCormack controlled a pass, flicked the ball into the air, and scored with an overhead kick that epitomised his instinctive swagger.

“You know what, that goal was actually down to quite a bad first touch,” he says. “I was stretching for the pass and tried to kill the ball. But because it hit the top of my foot and went up in the air, there was only one thing to do. The start of the season gave me a lot of confidence. One, I was in the team. Two, I had a half decent pre-season. And three, I knew that I still had good players around me. Snods was still there. Jonny was still there. Adam Clayton came into the team as well, who was brilliant for me that season. Every time he got the ball he’d look to give it to me.”

The momentum didn’t last. Club captain Howson was sold to Norwich in the January transfer window, at the end of which Grayson was sacked despite Leeds being just three points outside the play-offs. Leeds ended the season in the bottom half, fourteen points behind the top six, with McCormack scoring just three times following the appointment of Neil Warnock as Grayson’s replacement.

“There was a little bit of excitement there [when Warnock was appointed],” he says. “Everyone knew he was a bit of a headcase and what have you, but Neil’s big thing, he wasn’t the best coach that I ever had in my career, he wasn’t the best tactician, but he had the boys working hard for him and he rewarded them for it with days off and what have you. So I thought, ‘Yeah, we’re not a million miles away from the play-offs here. Maybe he’ll come in and he’ll get that initial bounce and we’ll go from there.’ But it didn’t happen.”

The following season, McCormack provided one of the few highlights of Warnock’s time in charge, finding the top corner to knock a Tottenham team featuring Gareth Bale out of the FA Cup at Elland Road. But Warnock never seemed keen to find space for McCormack’s talent in his team, either playing him on the wing or not at all. Despite his frustrations, Ross insists he didn’t have a problem with Warnock — ”I didn’t not get on with him. I respected him. It was just a working relationship” — at least until the build up to what became Warnock’s final game in charge of Leeds. Hosting Derby on April Fools’ Day, 2013, McCormack came off the bench to hit another top corner, only for United to collapse to a 2-1 defeat a couple of days after a 3-0 loss at Ipswich.

“On the Saturday we were away to Ipswich, and [El Hadji] Diouf got rested, left in the house. He didn’t look after himself properly that weekend. I didn’t play down in Ipswich, I think I maybe got the last few minutes, and then on the Sunday we came into training. Dioufy didn’t do the recovery, but Neil Warnock told us the team and Dioufy was starting. And that’s the only disagreement I had with him. I was like, that’s really not fair. Not just on me, but the rest of the squad. The rest of the squad are getting taken down there. I’ve gone all the way down there, played a few minutes, others didn’t even come on. You’ve given a guy the weekend off and he’s come back in the way he’s come back in and now you’re gonna put him straight into the team for us, I’m not having that.

“I’m sure Warnock said in his book that I said to him, I don’t want to play for Leeds United again, or something like that. It wasn’t that, it was him. I said I basically lost a little bit of respect for him and I don’t want to play for you again. I regret saying it, but it was in the heat of the moment. He put me on and straight away the ball fell to me and I’ve just bent it in the top corner. I think everyone knows the celebration after that, and where it was aimed at.”

In case you don’t know: McCormack celebrated by running to the Kop, before turning towards the dugouts and channelling the feeling on the terraces, uppercutting the air and yelling, “FUCK OFF!” It was brilliant. And it was made all the sweeter by the fact Warnock was told, in no doubt more professional terms by the club, to fuck off as manager once the game was over.

A change of manager brought a change of fortunes for McCormack. Under Brian McDermott, he was back in the team, back up front, and back scoring goals. By this point, Becchio and Snodgrass had been added to the list of departures, leaving McCormack on his own as the last remaining star player at Leeds. If he wasn’t scoring goals, he was creating them. Sometimes, he was doing both, salvaging a point against Sheffield Wednesday by knocking the ball past a defender and running around his outside as if latching on to his own through ball before finishing past the goalkeeper. “I don’t know what happened to the defender,” he laughs. “He was usually quick and I ain’t got no pace.”

Leeds were in the play-offs at Christmas, and McCormack was in the form of his life. A run of fourteen goals between October and the New Year included all four in a 4-2 win at Charlton. It didn’t matter what kind of chances he was getting — left foot, right foot, header, free-kick, penalty — the end result was always the same.

“At that point in time I just felt, ‘I’m going to score every game here.’ You don’t get it many times and it just comes from sort of repetition. A lot of people might say a few things about me now, about being a bad egg or whatever. But a lot of things went into achieving what I did. I couldn’t tell you how many extra hours I spent on the training field doing finishing and it paid off. A lot of people don’t see that. That season I felt that any time the ball came around about the box, if I was just where I had to be, it was going to somehow fall, and it did.”

All the players we appreciated during the wilderness years eventually learned the good times weren’t going to last. The season under McDermott fell apart after an FA Cup defeat at Rochdale and 6-0 hammering at Hillsborough. In the wake of those results, McCormack became captain, as Rudy Austin passed on the armband.

“I didn’t actually want to do it because I believe Rudy was the driving force with the tackles he flew into and all that. I thought he was brilliant, but he wasn’t coping with that added responsibility. When the three of us got pulled into the office — me, Rudy and Brian — at first I was a bit like, ‘Nah, you’re the captain. We look up to you.’ He was struggling a little bit, Rudy, and I was like, ‘Right, okay.’ It didn’t change how I played or how I viewed the squad or how I viewed my role within the team and stuff.”

It was no coincidence the downturn in results coincided with turmoil off the pitch, as Massimo Cellino was engineering a takeover from GFH. Mad Friday went down in Leeds infamy as Cellino sacked McDermott without having officially completed his buyout of the club. He was chased around in a taxi and barricaded inside Elland Road by angry supporters, all while McCormack was live on Sky Sports talking openly about his future at Leeds being uncertain, with only a few hours remaining of transfer deadline day.

“I didn’t know what was happening,” he says. “I was told that day that if they get a certain bid, and it had to be from the Premier League, then you can go. Cardiff made that bid, they had sent a helicopter up to Leeds Bradford Airport, so I thought I was going. Then nobody could get hold of anyone at the club and then they said I’m not going. They sack the manager, and I was like, ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ I was actually in Noel Hunt’s house and I got the phone call from Sky and just said what I said.

“There were way worse things than what you saw on Sky Sports News that night happening at the club. Some players weren’t getting paid, some staff hadn’t been paid, and it was just a disaster really. Everything that I said in the interview to Sky Sports News, I think the fans echoed that by the chants that they were singing the next day for Brian McDermott. Because we were 4th at Christmas, we weren’t a bad team. All of a sudden this new guy comes in and things deteriorate bad. It don’t take a rocket scientist to work out what happened.”

The most remarkable thing about Mad Friday is what happened on Saturday. Without a win in seven matches and without a clue who was going to be in the dugout, Leeds beat Huddersfield 5-1 at Elland Road thanks to a hat-trick from their captain, who less than 24 hours earlier thought he was going to be joining Cardiff.

“About twenty minutes in I actually sat down in the middle of the pitch and the physios were wanting to take me off, because up above my head — I don’t know how to explain it, like see if you look at a TV and it’s not tuned in, that’s what I could see up above my eyes when I looked up. I think it was just because I was so tired from the night before, I didn’t get much sleep. We were 1-0 down at the time and I had Huddersfield fans singing, ‘He doesn’t want to play for you’, or that kind of thing. I said, ‘No chance, I’m not fucking coming off now, are you mad?’ I came back on and scored the hat-trick, it worked out well. But yeah, it was a strange day.”

As the season collapsed, Leeds games began to feel more like Ross McCormack vs the rest of the Championship. Leeds dropped down the league, but he kept scoring, ending the season with 29 in all competitions. His last goal for Leeds came courtesy of another audacious flick and spin when he scored the winner at Oakwell.

“I didn’t know at the time that was going to be my last goal. I didn’t actually think I was going to go. I thought, well, if they didn’t let me go in January, I think I’ve still got three years or something left in my contract, he’s not going to let me go.”

Cellino was going to let McCormack go, to Fulham in an £11m deal, but not easily. Cellino admitted later that he dragged the transfer out in public, trying to call it off and telling the fans McCormack had refused to train, “to show [McCormack] I was stronger than him.”

“Cellino said I didn’t turn up for pre-season training,” says McCormack. “I’d already been sold. I turned up the first day pre-season and I had my boots in my hand and had my trainers on. [Dave] Hockaday came up to me and says, ‘You’ll not be needing them today.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He says, ‘Oh, you’re not allowed to train. I think the deal’s nearly been agreed, so I’ve been told you have not to train.’ Which was obviously just the club protecting the money that they were going to get. I think in the end it got that bad that I had to go because there was no money there. I don’t know what the club would look like today or where it would be if I didn’t get sold. I’ve been told it didn’t look too rosy, but yeah, it was done and I had to go.

“[Playing against Leeds] was tough. The first time I came back to Elland Road, the ball got played over the top and I was sprinting. It was at the Kop end and I had to keep it in but I’d nowhere to go, so I jumped over the advertising railings, and I think I ended up about four or five rows up in the Kop. There was some guy screaming, ‘You money grabbing bastard!’ I just laughed at him and said, ‘What the fuck do you want me to do?’ But to be fair, the fans were always good. I always come back around the area and I’ve got a lot of friends here. I think they knew, I think they knew looking at it, if I didn’t go then the club was maybe in a little bit of bother.”

At Fulham, the goals and assists kept coming — across his final season at Leeds and two at Craven Cottage, McCormack scored 66 goals and 26 assists in the Championship, figures no other player came close to matching in that same period. But in that time he never finished above 15th, and when he left Fulham in another big money move, it was to a recently-relegated Aston Villa team that swiftly sacked the manager, Roberto Di Matteo, who signed him.

McCormack says his winner for Leeds against Tottenham convinced him he “could actually do a little bit against Premier League standard players”, but did there come a point after three seasons of individual excellence when he accepted the chance to play in the Premier League wasn’t going to arrive?

“When I moved from Motherwell to Cardiff I was 21, and in my first season I scored 23 goals in the Championship. From that moment all I said was I wanted to play in the Premier League, and there were a few chances but the clubs never let me go. Cardiff didn’t let me go to Hull, they didn’t let me go to Birmingham. Leeds didn’t let me go a few times. Same with Fulham, I could have gone to probably Middlesbrough in the Premier League, a couple of other clubs. But yeah, you don’t sit there and think, ‘This ain’t going to happen.’ You’re just enjoying the ride that you’re on. I was enjoying playing well, scoring goals. I had that feeling for probably the best part of them three years that I was going to score every game, or affect every game. So I was just enjoying it really.”

Does playing in the Premier League even matter when he’s still fondly remembered alongside players like Snodgrass and Howson, even if they weren’t able to take Leeds into the top flight?

“I don’t like that one, because at the end of the day, regardless of how well you play, you’re still part of something bigger than you. I would never take myself away from what the team’s done because I’ve scored goals. People say, ‘Yeah, but you’ve done your job.’ No, I didn’t do my job because I was still part of what happened. I was part of the problem because the problem was that we weren’t good enough, and I was part of that team, so I don’t look at it that way. And sometimes I probably think maybe I should have, because I would have given myself an easier time. I always believed that I was part of the team and if the team’s not doing well then I’ve got to do better.

“It was a good four years. A lot went into that. For a certain period in that time I would have stayed at the club for — I think I said I would have retired here. I’ve retired and I moved back here to live, I just didn’t retire at the club. I thought that one owner was going to get it right and get the investment in the squad and we’d have a right good chance. It didn’t happen until I left, which is the same with Fulham and when I went to Aston Villa.

“How many years was it Leeds were out of the Premier League? Regardless of what you think of, every single player in that period of that time played some sort of part in getting them back. Obviously the ones that got them promoted get all the glory and that’s fair enough, but there were other people involved to make sure that they didn’t go back down to the third tier, because there were a couple of times when it didn’t look too good. I think the boys that I played with, everyone dug in and kept them in that division to then give them a chance to go again.”

After living back and forth between Leeds and Glasgow for the last year, McCormack is preparing to move to Leeds permanently this summer. He still goes to Elland Road, “sitting with the punters for the atmosphere,” and wants Leeds to be the home of the first of a series of soccer schools he is planning to open. Moving to England makes it easier for him to see his two sons, who live in London. His youngest is a budding goalkeeper, sharpening his skills by trying to save his dad’s shots at goal. “I’ve spent years saying goalkeepers are lunatics,” McCormack laughs,“and I’ve told him he fits right in.” His eldest plays in Crystal Palace’s academy, and shares the distinction with his dad of being able to say he’s scored at Elland Road.

“My eldest was born here. Both of them love Leeds. My best moment at Leeds isn’t really to do with me playing. After the last home game of Brian’s season, when we did a lap of honour, the little man was on the pitch and the Leeds fans stayed and they cheered him as he was running. I don’t even think he was two at the time. They had a full size five ball that we played with, they put it down at the halfway line and he was dribbling with it all the way to about a yard from the line. He stopped and he looked up at the fans, and all the fans were like ‘ohhhhhhhh’. He kicked it over and all the fans went mad. That for me was a lot more pleasing than anything I ever did.” ⬢

This article was originally published in our 2023 Summer Special, which also features an interview with former Leeds United Women striker Abbie Brown, Mateusz Klich’s greatest moments, and a celebration of the best flair players to grace Elland Road. The last few copies are available to buy for half price here.