Meeting your nemesis

The rigorous leather folder that binds together the innumerable rules of the Authorised Professional Practice guidebook in the UK Police Force could come with its own pair of handcuffs and a chain to wrap around your chest. There is no room for manoeuvre in The Force, it’s a strict set of non-negotiables that every officer must follow to the letter in order to properly carry out an investigation.

And so, after weeks of planning, I’m here. Visual on target, twenty metres and moving closer. Ten metres. Five metres. We’re in, baby, I’ve got him.

This is it, the cover worked. I’ve got Gaizka Mendieta cornered in an interview room and the sweat is rightly dripping. It’s from my head, but who cares? It’s time to get to work on him.
However, despite the guidelines, the planning and the fake moustache, I am no Poirot, and the bastard found me out right away.

“You’re a Leeds fan, aren’t you?”

What could have possibly given it away? Come to think of it, when asked about his memories of the Champions League, he mentioned Juan Sánchez’s offside goal in a 25-year-old semi-final and I may have let out a humpback whale of a sigh, a Mexican wave of an eye roll, and mouthed “stupid cunt”, but we’ll let the tape decide later.

Eyes down, I sigh the words, “Yes I am,” and throw my hands in the air, knocking over a mug of my own freshly boiled piss onto the tiled floor of Interview Room B.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter: he’s here, and we’re talking about those games.

“Playing at Elland Road was amazing,” he says, immediately going for the power move, reeling me back into loving his cheeky smile and gorgeous locks that are still as fresh as they were when he was one of the world’s best midfielders.

The Spaniard was captain in both fixtures of our Champions League semi-final games against Los Che, scoring the third goal at Valencia’s Mestalla stadium in the second leg that saw Leeds’ European dream end in justifiably salty tears.

Just six days earlier, back in LS11, the Peacocks were in the driving seat, knocking about a side that contained Kily González, Ruben Baraja and John Carew.

While it’s true that O’Leary’s babies were let off the hook as Nigel Martyn could only watch Mendieta’s header spank the crossbar, Alan Smith had his own chance to score in the first half, instead flashing it wide from a few yards out. After the break, Dominic Matteo sent his headed effort on target but it found the one of the two wok pans on the end of Santi Cañizares’ arms. Lee Bowyer then struck the woodwork and Smith, again, put a header off target.

Despite the groans from the shopping list of missed chances, Elland Road sent a message to its Spanish counterpart: we’re in the elite now, give it what you’ve got; the noise that night in Yorkshire would echo on through the decades as a reference to what made that Leeds side so special.

“The atmosphere at Elland Road was amazing,” Mendieta says of the 39,940 fans who watched the Whites put Valencia’s best ever team to the sword for the majority of the match. “I remember it being cold, but again, the atmosphere…” Raised eyebrows, eyes searching for the middle distance and a shake of the head tell me everything I need to know. Once more for the tape please, Gaizka: “It was amazing.”

The experience was clearly so harrowing that there’s actually a slight discrepancy in his story: it was 2 May when Mendieta led Valencia out of the tunnel in Beeston — not cold at all — and local reports at the time don’t mention any pissing rain. That’s what trauma — and later going on to playing over eighty games for Middlesbrough — does to a man. The reports do mention that ‘Real Madrid would swap places with Leeds for a start, not to mention Manchester United and Arsenal.’

Paul Wilson of The Guardian was one of many who gushed over what unfolded that night: ‘At Elland Road everybody works, everybody fights, yet Leeds are not cynical or dirty and have some of the most skilful players in the league.’

Mendieta still feels the same. “Leeds were one of the best teams in the Premier League. You look at the players they had at the time. Unfortunately for them, they obviously left the next season, most of them.”

The first leg finished goalless, somehow, and the focus shifted to Spain’s even balmier east coast, where Mestalla awaited. As the Elland Road crowd had confidently challenged just days before, Mestalla stepped up to the occasion. While apathy and empty seats are the main takeaways at the modern-era Mestalla due to careless owners, the stadium remains one of Spain’s vintage football colosseums, with an atmosphere to rival anywhere in the Western region of the Milky Way.

Eleven Leeds buzz cuts were the most poetically Yorkshire way Leeds could represent themselves ahead of the game; the already edgy atmosphere was whipping itself up from the so-ugly-its-beautiful concrete structure that appeared to be on the edge of tipping the fans onto the pitch. The dingy prison corridor from Silence of the Lambs has fewer barking wrong ‘uns per square foot than Valencia on a good night – and this was one of those nights.

Los Che lined up strongly for their second Champions League semi-final in two years, now sporting a white and black version of the famous Strongbow yellow strip associated with this Leeds team today. Mendieta was deployed on the right side of a diamond midfield, just in behind Pablo Aimar, who had been drafted into the starting line-up by manager Héctor Cúper to give them more attacking spunk in front of goal.

Being honest, and having subjected myself to the harrowing VHS footage of the full-match as part of the interview process, Mendieta ran the game from the off. In insultingly smooth movements, he slid like a Dalek in and out of the spaces left behind by sloppy movements from the yellow shirts. After a few seconds a gap had been breached on the right that saw a dangerous cross fly towards the soon-to-be Eternal Villain Juan Sánchez and out behind Martyn’s goal. Kily González was directed into the stands by Danny Mills’ wayward studs, and not long afterwards Mendieta decided to give the home crowd a typical treat, forcing Martyn into a fine save following a harrowing sequence inside the Leeds box.

The breakthrough on the scoreboard came from his blonde mop: Harte’s very 2000s headed clearance amid no danger was taken down by David Albelda, forty yards from goal, who sliced a cross-field ball to Mendieta on the right wing, exactly where Harte should have been standing. One touch is all he needed to steady himself before the cross was delivered, arcing round as though on string to wind up behind Leeds’ defensive line.

Being annoyed at brilliance is futile: we’re all here to watch talented footballers, and if they play for Leeds then all the better. Gaizka Mendieta was one of those talents, just not for Leeds. What’s not talented is fucking cheating. And that’s exactly what Juan Sánchez did.

A clear contact with his arm sent the cross past Martyn, and the yellow shirts rightly burst into a furore at the refereeing team who must have assumed it was his head; cries from the bald XI were simply left to melt in with the crackles of thunder coming from the stands.

Before Mendieta’s goal, the third in an eventual 3-0 nightmare for Leeds, the aforementioned Sánchez edged past a clumsy Rio Ferdinand challenge on the edge of the box and swiped a low, left-footed brushstroke across goal that hit the inside of Martyn’s side-netting to make it 2-0 and push the final further out of Leeds’ reach. Alan Smith’s red card in the 90th minute summed it up: the story was over.

“That’s what you dream of as a kid,” Mendieta says through a glinting smile. “That’s what you want as a professional. The kind of games you want to play, semi-final Champions League, top teams, top players, having to win, scoring goals.

“Obviously, we went through. We played the final, but didn’t win it. That’s another conversation. But at that moment in time, it was like a dream come true.”

I’ve had enough of this, so I note down the time on my watch and begin to reshuffle the papers I may or may not have thrown to the floor as he had walked me through what happened on that fateful night.
Before cuffing him again, Mendieta turns to me, one final comment for the Leeds fans on his lips. “I meet and find a lot of Leeds fans around the world in many places,” he says, “and they’re still obviously not happy. But they all remember it as a special moment. And I think it was not only for Leeds and Valencia, it was a special game for football fans in general.”

Yeah, okay. Whatever. Off you go, son. ⬢

This article is free to read from issue six of The Square Ball magazine. Get your copy here.