Blogger Dave Guile gives us his take on the controversy surrounding Leeds' first league loss this season.
FanZoner Dave Guile blogs about the Leeds-Milwall 'rivalry'
The image I will take away from our first league defeat of the season is of some balding bloke in a Galatasaray shirt wobbling and gleefully stabbing the air in what he probably thought was an appropriately witty way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the murders of two Leeds fans in Istanbul.
Now, I'm pretty certain Galatasaray shirts aren't the sort of thing you find being given away on every street corner so I'm presuming this particular 'fan' went to the trouble of seeking out a shirt on the net and actually spending his hard-earned money on this insult to the memory of Kevin Speight and Christopher Loftus. One can only presume that there's not enough going on in Bermondsey to engage the few brain cells he possesses.
I'm not going to follow the lead of countless lazy tabloid journalists and condemn all Millwall fans as violent thugs. As a Leeds fan I've had the same stereotype directed at me and I don't want to tar decent fans with the same brush as the troublemakers.
But, that said, there does seem to be something fundamentally defensive in the psyche of Millwall fans, as though they are constantly seeking to justify their support for their team. And, call it jealousy, call it pack mentality, call it short-man syndrome from being roughly the ninth best team in their city (soon to be 10th behind AFC Wimbledon) but something seems to make even their decent fans start foaming at the mouth when they play Leeds. They get a strange excitement from sharing a pitch with us that we, sadly, do not share or understand.
Counterpart
My Millwall counterpart
Ant isn't the only one to dedicate a disproportionate amount of column space to my club.
Columnist Rod Liddle, also a Millwall fan, spent so long banging on about the Beckford elbowing incident last year that I ended up setting up a Facebook group called 'Leeds Fans Against Rod Liddle' to petition him to give it a rest. Rod certainly became aware of the group - in fact, he even joined it - and he seems to have toned it down since.
I advise him (or, indeed, Ant) to get whatever is bugging them out of their system by building a big bonfire on November 5th and burning an effigy of Jermaine Beckford on it. And then, please stop harping on about us,
FanZone already has a Leeds United correspondent.
Anyway, the lads do not appear to have been knocked out of their stride by the defeat and recorded a fine 4-0 win at Bristol Rovers to keep us four points clear at the top.
I'm just starting to wonder how Luciano Becchio is going to fit back into the team while Beckford, Vokes and Kandol all make such strong cases for inclusion.
With our rivals faltering, my eyes were drawn to the bottom of the table where something seems to be stirring at St Mary's. I'm sure I'm not the only fan that wishes that we'd got Southampton out of the way while they were still reeling from their points deduction. All we can do is keep setting the pace, and invite everyone else to catch us if they can.
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