Leeds United Centurions - John Sheridan was a beacon of hope for the beaten generation
In the latest of our series looking at Leeds United's greatest-ever players, Jon Howe remembers the 1980s cult hero
11:00, 29 MAY 2019Updated11:15, 29 MAY 2019
In the latest of our series looking at Leeds United's greatest-ever players, Jon Howe remembers the 1980s cult hero
Elland Road in the 1980s was a microcosm of the widespread hopelessness and austerity that had Thatcher’s Britain in a death grip. Some people might have been making lots of money somewhere, but none of it was here.
There was no money in football full stop, and Elland Road was an arena doused in hostility; emitting only the cold indifference of bare concrete terraces and brutal policing. The ghosts of Revie hid in every nook and cranny of this fading emblem to a glorious past, and our former citadel echoed to the anguished cries of a fanbase still overwhelmed by injustice and now gripped by mediocrity.
But while money was scarce, we would have paid all of the little we had just for a hint of a guiding light. And that came in the form of John Sheridan; a street smart role model for kids who played football until it got dark and a beacon of hope for the beaten generation of Leeds fans; stung by Paris and relegation and struggling to come to terms with different standards and acute financial thrift.
Sheridan signed his professional forms in 1982
John Sheridan’s Leeds United career leaves only a meagre impression in the record books; it spanned the ‘wilderness years’ of the club’s raucous and often deplorable sojourn through the wastelands of the Second Division. There was no deliverance, there was no moment of triumph. This was remorseless graft and slim pickings, but John Sheridan was absolutely essential in offering a fallen fanbase ‘something’ and dragging a fallen football club through the dirt and towards the light on the other side.
If you played football on the streets when you were a kid, John Sheridan was the player who, probably even at five years old, simply had ‘it’; that indefinable gift of swagger, a hint of arrogance and a bucketful of natural ability. It was a combination that would bewitch a Leeds United fanbase desperate for new heroes and ready to cling onto anything that served as a reminder of better times.
Sheridan quickly evolved from a raw youth prospect into a fully-fledged paradigm of what every teenage Leeds fan wanted to be. A casual pin-up who could have stepped straight out of the Lowfields Pen 4, Sheridan was our golden ticket out of here, and he carried that responsibility with the kind of nonchalant disinterest that only endeared him further.
Discarded by Manchester City as a youngster, Sheridan signed professional forms for Eddie Gray’s Leeds United in March 1982, and a year later he was already in the first team. He survived a broken leg at Barnsley in October 1983 to swiftly establish himself as the lynchpin of an evolving side that mixed youthful promise with functional dependability. It was Sheridan’s artful craft that rose above the painfully conventional and offered Leeds fans some aspiration for better things, at a time when all aspiration seemed to be gone.
Sheridan would overcome a broken leg in 1983
Sheridan became the single, biggest individual influence I have ever seen on a football team, becoming the natural leader and the architect of every corner, free-kick or penalty and indeed the source of anything positive you could take from watching Leeds United. Sheridan was the player your dad would insist you watched, simply to further your education, not just on football, but on life and taking responsibility and having the essential personal qualities to take a situation in both hands and recognise that you could control it.
The 1986/87 season was Sheridan’s zenith as a Leeds United player and a nine-month period that he clearly identified as his calling in life. It was a season littered with spectacular goals and images of Sheridan sashaying through beleaguered defences, crunching into unforgiving sliding tackles and dragging his teammates and the awestruck inhabitants of Elland Road along with him.
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For Billy Bremner’s Leeds United, Sheridan was the ultimate icon, and in that season he was central to a play-off surge and FA Cup semi-final run that awoke the club from a decade of deep slumber. That the most striking and powerful image of Sheridan as a Leeds United player – reeling away with a maniacal sense of disbelief having scored the most casually brilliant free-kick to put us 1-0 up in extra-time in the play-off Final replay versus Charlton Athletic – should be indelibly tarnished by the tragic turnaround in the scoreline is so brilliantly Leeds, so brilliantly Sheridan and so brilliantly 1980s. This humdrum existence was a dour venture by design, where nobody won and nobody was meant to. It was a war of attrition that somehow, all these years later, feels like it was absolutely necessary in making us the club we are and the people we are.
Sheridan displayed masterful technique and, like so many similarly gifted players before and since, always seemed to have time and space and the poise to be able to look up and deliver, even with a six foot defender homing in on him like a scene from Jaws 3-D. With an economy of effort, Sheridan could dictate the pace of the game, it was his game and every other player was just making up the numbers. He was a showman, a diamond in the rough, a hint of finesse and delicacy in a workshop full of benchtop vices and lump hammers.
Sheridan celebrates alongside Ian Baird against Plymouth in 1987
But the beautiful quality that Sheridan held above anything else, was that he understood. He knew Leeds, he knew the fans, he knew the culture. He knew when we wanted to see a nasty streak, when the referee needed an earful, when a sly tackle on the opposition’s mullet-haired flash-in-the-pan would rouse an 18,000 crowd into a frenzy of bloodthirsty cheers, foaming mouths and gnashing of teeth. Sheridan was the people’s footballer. He was one of us. He just knew.
Howard Wilkinson swiftly discarded Sheridan and what felt like a seismic shock at the time, in retrospect, feels absolutely right. Sheridan had already bedded David Batty into the first team – a similarly enchanting melting pot of craft and devilment – and it feels now like his work was done. Not for Sheridan the glamour and the plaudits of tangible achievement, just a legacy of illuminating a dark tunnel and being the conduit to lead us through leaner times.
John Sheridan was pivotal to the club’s survival in the 1980s and a timely reminder that football could enrich lives and offer a sense of purpose. Without him, a generation could have walked away forever, and missed the magnetising antidote to our post-Revie despair, missed the nervous fumblings of discovering our first hero, and missed that one second of brilliance that lit up many a cold and cheerless Saturday afternoon, usually in Oldham.