First of all there's no better place to start than today and the Leeds players are currently in Slovenia getting ready to play their second pre season friendly tomorrow. The whites will be playing against a Slovenian Xl kick off at 5pm GMT. Most of the players have made it over including the new signings in Hunt, Murphy and Smith, also Byram will make it after injury, however this time last year no one was aware of him and he only came because we had no choice but we don't look back. Sadly I can't be in Slovenia for the tour due to school but I will try my hardest to bring as much insight into what happened on my upcoming blogs which will be confirmed on Twitter @LUFCWorld.
Looking at transfer news there seems to be one person who seems to keep getting rumoured to be joining the whites. If you we're to believe other news sources then the Tommy Rowe deal has gone but I should be talking about this at a later date. The one major one however that keeps popping up (If you haven't guessed by the title) is Manchester City's Reece Wabara. Even tweeting out earlier in the week that it was time to make some movements which is making fans (including me) believe that he is on his way to join Leeds. I'll talk about him more in a later blog but this I just wanted to get out now.
Last but not least is that it's now been 9 days since Ken Bates was last chairman of Leeds United, the day after he left we signed our first £1 million player since 2005 in Luke Murphy, but what impact did Bates himself have on the club. Lets go back to the beginning in 2005 when he brought out debt stricken club. New times of optimism where expected, I was excited for a new dawn and a hopeful return to the Premier League and it looked like he would deliver when we reached the play off final, but Watford spoilt our party and took the place on the Premier League. This brought more debt problems and the year after brought the opposite of the year before and we were relegated to League 1 for the first time in the club's history. We rebuilt over the League 1 years with some close shaves in the play offs and in 2010 regained our Championship status. At this point I think we had our strongest squad in the Bates regime with players like Beckford, Becchio, Johnson, Howson, Snodgrass, Naylor etc. We were a force and we looked unstoppable at stages. But we started to sell them and bring in players like Brown and O'Brian. The last signing of the regime was a good one in Matt Smith. So to sum it up, the relationship was rocky, spending more on corporate and less on the team and the Premier League dream didn't help and even lead to protests. But to round it up for them Bates haters, if Ken Bates didn't buy Leeds in 2005 (even though he says heh didn't and it was a group from Switzerland) then the chances are that there would be no Leeds United. As much as there would have been a new would we have wanted that over our old Leeds United?
That ends this blog, the next confirmed one is on the 2nd August (but could be as soon as the 31st July) and is Leeds vs Brighton preview. Any more blogs will be confirmed on twitter @LUFCWorld and on Google+ at Alex Woodward. You can also follow me on twitter @AJWoodward29
