Cellino experience sets Leeds off course
BACK in 2001, a Crossair commuter plane plane crashed into a wooded hill on approach to Zurich airport, killing 24 of its 33 passengers. When the investigators turned up, they were baffled. The plane had no problems. The captain, Hans Ulrich Lutz, was 57 years old and vastly experienced. Nothing made sense.
Until, that is, they dug through Lutz’s training history, and discovered that this ostensibly safe pair of hands was actually a disaster waiting to happen.
Exams had been flunked. Applications to fly more complex aircraft denied because he couldn’t understand computer navigational systems.
Once, on a sightseeing flight over the Alps, Lutz announced the plane was circling over Sion in Switzerland, only for his passengers to spot road signs and inform him they were actually above Italy.
Later, he wrote off a multimillion dollar jetliner when he accidentally retracted the landing gear whilst sitting on the runway.
Incredibly, on the night of the disaster, Lutz had lost track of his distance from the airport and his proximity to the ground, hardly distant considerations.
The point is this: both the pilot and his employers believed experience equated to ability. In fact, it simply gave Lutz false confidence and masked his complete ineptitude.
Which brings us to Massimo Cellino. The Leeds owner is no stranger to football. Before pitching up at Elland Road in a blaze of bedlam, he spent 22 years at the helm of Italian side Cagliari.
And when he walked through the gates at Thorp Arch in early 2014, he naturally believed that what had worked before would work again.
So he shut down the training ground and laid off swathes of staff, presumably reasoning that Cagliari got by perfectly well with a skeleton crew running the show.
Tin-pot
He signed hordes of cheap Italian players because that’s what had kept him (most seasons) in Serie A. He sacked managers every 20 minutes because that’s what he’d always done whenever a defeat upset him too much and, well, everybody else in Italy was at it, too.
But did it work? Did it hell. Because Cagliari were – and are – a tin-pot outfit, run from a single office above the club shop. The wage bill is League Two standard, the stadium near derelict. Their average gate in 2013-14 was 4,773, roughly the same as Northampton Town. They have no real history, no European pedigree. Bar the local Press, nobody cared if they bounced between Serie A and Serie B, or if their chairman pulled the odd crazy stunt.
Swapping that for Leeds United was like swapping a market stall for the manager’s chair at Walmart. Cellino was way out of his depth.
Week after week, some fresh turmoil befalls the Whites; the orders to manager Neil Redfearn not to play Mirco Antenucci, the as-yet unexplained sacking of assistant Steve Thompson, last week’s mysterious withdrawal of six players through injury.
And every time we say ‘Why? What is the plan? ’Well, I’d bet my last quid that there isn’t one.
Cellino thought he could walk into Leeds, cut costs, act with impunity and somehow escape scrutiny or protest. It hasn’t worked and, like Lutz,
he’s now just clinging to the controls, unsure which direction to take. Though currently banned by the Football League and rumoured to be in talks with Red Bull over a possible sale, Cellino has pledged to return.
“The fans are going to enjoy next season so much,” he said.“It will be a beautiful season, I promise to them.”
Sound good. But if Cellino has failed to learn from his myriad mistakes – and his announcement that he will “have to decide” on the future of Redfearn suggests he’s stil wedded to old ideals – nothing will change. And if he keeps running Yorkshire’s biggest cub like a gimcrack outfit from Italy, it will be only a matter of time before they, too, slam into that mountain.