Leeds might be flying but there’s one crucial thing missing in their Premier League promotion charge – and if they don’t fix it this week, they’ll be coming straight back down, writes IAN HERBERT

I watched it rain right into Burnley’s Barnfield Construction Stand where the Leeds fans were standing on Monday night, as if that bone-chilling spot up on the Pennines was determined to do its damnedest. They lingered there, drenched through, to deliver a last ovation to a team who wandered over at the end and who look for all the world like they’re going back up as champions.

I watched those Leeds fans heading away into the night, fortified and sustained by Jayden Bogle, the summer signing from Sheffield United, imposing himself down the right, socks around his calves. By the Japanese Ao Tanaka – a steal at £3million from Fortuna Dusseldorf, it’s turned out – asserting himself in a challenging midfield battle. Had they lost, Leeds would have seen Burnley draw level with them at the top of the Championship. The point kept them two points clear.

But this was a top-of-the-table game. First v third. An occasion that drew you to Turf Moor to catch a glimpse of what, eight months from now, might very well be two promoted clubs back at the top of the football world, full of belief that they can prevent a three-year sequence of promoted Championship clubs heading straight back down again.

And viewed through that lens, Monday was not such an encouraging sight. Long gone from Leeds is the youthful stardust of Archie Gray and Crysencio Summerville, sold when the shot at immediate promotion back to the Premier League ended in a sixth unsuccessful play-off campaign last summer. There was solidity, nous and teamwork from the Championship’s best team – who have comfortably enough for automatic promotion. But that finesse, vision and physicality required to survive in the Premier League? No. Leeds looked a very long way off that.

For now, they only need the promotion that would create the means to spend more. That they top the Championship, despite being constrained by profit and sustainability rules (PSR), is testament to executives Adam Underwood and Alex Davies and consultant Nick Hammond, a respected unit, who lead the club’s player recruitment work.

They badly want a striker – Monday night revealed why – and also seek a left back, centre back, central midfielder and winger. If they had to put it all on one, it would be a striker, but PSR means they could end up with none. Aston Villa’s Emi Buendia didn’t want to go to Leeds, preferring Bayer Leverkusen on loan. Brighton’s Julio Enciso preferred a loan move to Ipswich. Jack Harrison, shot on confidence after a torrid period on loan at Everton, may be the once heading to Leeds.

Youthful talents like Archie Gray (left) and Crysencio Summerville (centre) are long departed

While Daniel Farke (centre) is the right manager to lead them back to the top division, he has a boom and bust sequence to break, having been promoted and then relegated several times

But it is the vision for a squad beyond this season that which will dictate whether the club can again become the force in British football that their fanbase tells us they should be.

The San Francisco 49ers, their owners, have ambition, with architects’ plans to overhaul Elland Road, increasing capacity from 37,890 to 55,000, and billionaire Australian co-investor Peter Lowy advocating a rail link to that stadium. That’s all contingent on a return to the top-flight.

Farke is an extremely good horse for such a course. His last three Championship campaigns have yielded 94, 97 and 90 points and at their current rate of progress, Leeds will get 95. But he has a boom and bust sequence to break. He took Norwich up as champions twice, relegated on the first occasion and sacked by early November on the second.

The competition from the aspiring Premier Leaguers is also intensifying by the year. Leicester and Ipswich may bring four or five players in before the transfer window closes next week, as they seek survival. League One leaders Birmingham City’s impressive American owner, Tom Wagner says he wants the club back in the Premier League for a ‘long period of time.’ All of which tells Leeds’ owners that they must prepare to dig very deep for a squad to survive if, as seems likely, they get there.

Special things happen after Leeds win promotions to the top-flight. Two of the three they have experienced were under managers, in Don Revie and Howard Wilkinson, who would go on to make them champions. The other was under the iconoclastic, utterly unforgettable Marcelo Bielsa. Something modest and long-lasting this time would be cherished no less.

‘Premier League class!’ a Leeds fan at a service station on the fringe of the Pennine moors said of Bogle, as midnight approached on Monday. The club will need a lot more where that came from.

Coote’s interview highlights ‘hell on earth’ homophobia

There were better ways for referee David Coote to have revealed to the world that his outburst against Jurgen Klopp came against the backdrop of a cocaine habit which was his way of dealing with the struggle to make it publicly known that he is gay.

Coote has riled up Liverpool fans even more by relating this in an interview with The Sun and the timing has given rise to delusional claims of a PGMOL diversion strategy, designed to deflect from the storm of abuse heading Michael Oliver’s way. The Sun had gone hard after Coote. Why make such sensitive disclosures to them? It’s unclear.

David Coote’s interview with the Sun shone a light on the challenges being openly gay and officiating in the top flight would pose – given the homophobia, it sounds like hell on earth

But being an openly gay British football referee sounds like hell on earth, given the homophobia – foul, graphic, relentless – that was drenching Twitter/X in the early hours of yesterday after the Coote interview was published. 

These ‘fans’ abused him with impunity because referees are deemed off limits, pantomime figures of hate, beyond the normal parameters of humanity and civil society.

When I met the rugby union referee Nigel Owens eight years ago, he related to me what, in many ways, was a similar story to the one Coote tells now. The drug-taking to block things out, extending to a failed attempt to take his own life. 

The struggle to maintain professional standards during two games in 2005 which saw him dropped. And finally, his disclosure, in an interview with the Wales on Sunday, of the secret he had harboured for so long. Owens need not have feared what the world of rugby would think of him. The sport embraced him.

The search for new forms of personal abuse in football tell us that it would be open season on a referee in that sport who made such an ‘admission.’ 

Amal Fashanu, niece of Justin, said on Tuesday that Coote, as an openly gay referee, would have suffered less abuse than an openly gay player like her late uncle, because it’s ‘not the same level of fame.’ I would respectfully disagree with her. Where officials are concerned, the hate is on another level.

A hard lesson learnt from the spot 

A breathtaking 5-5 draw for my grandson’s under-9s team on Saturday morning was followed by a penalty shoot-out – the team gathering on the half-way line, arms around each other’s shoulders as their heroes do. 

A scene to melt your heart. Our boy, still mastering the art of kicking the ball well, missed his penalty. ‘I was trying an “Ivan Toney,’” he told me. It didn’t seem the moment to say ‘just put your foot through.’

Last week’s column drew attention to the careworn nature of the World Cup Statue near the old Boleyn Park site – and thankfully those wonderful heroes have been restored to former glories

World Cup Statue shines once again

My thanks to London’s Newham Council whose team leapt in action after last week’s column highlighted the careworn state of the famous World Cup Statue near West Ham’s old Boleyn Park. 

Those wonderful heroes are restored to old glories.