Sergeant Wilko’s Defending Champions by Rocco Dean – Review
By Matt Callard
Rocco Dean, author of this game-by-game account of Leeds United’s 1992-93 season, could hardly have handpicked a more dramatic campaign for his first ever season ticket.
Leeds were champions of England and seemingly on the verge of another long-awaited golden era. Manager Howard Wilkinson looked every inch the England manager of the future, and remains the last Englishman to win the league championship. World-class performers such as Gordon Strachan, Gary McAllister and a certain maverick Frenchman called Eric Cantona appeared primed to take the club to further glories.
The season even began with another piece of silverware, Leeds beating Liverpool 4-3 in the Charity Shield, with Cantona scoring a hat-trick. A week later, English football stepped through the Sky Sports looking glass and into the inaugural Premier League era. For Leeds, however, the brave new world quickly became an ordeal.
As has so often happened at Elland Road since the club’s 1970s heyday, the promised dynasty never arrived. What transpired instead was one of the strangest title defences in modern English football: turmoil inside the club, idols leaving for arch rivals, European frustration, tactical uncertainty, the new back-pass rule bamboozling defenders, and a mystifying inability to win a single league match away from home.
Dean documents this troubled but oddly magnetic season in a match-by-match style, combining his own memories of falling properly in love with Leeds United with reports that, to older readers, carry an echo of the Yorkshire Evening Post’s revered football writer Don Warters. The result is a footballing time capsule: Bovril, floodlights, Ceefax and that uniquely Leeds mixture of grandeur and impending calamity.
“Pressure of expectation”
The book works best when it captures the emotional absurdity of the campaign. Here was a side good enough to make Elland Road a fortress, yet fragile enough to spook the moment the team coach crossed the city boundary. Dean understands that the fascination of 1992-93 lies in that contradiction. Leeds were not simply poor. They were bafflingly poor, in ways that still feel hard to explain three decades later.
Interspersed with Dean’s own writing are pull quotes from Wilkinson and key players, but it is the recollections of Jon Newsome that will particularly appeal to diehards. Newsome played 38 times for Leeds that season, and his memories of the dressing room, the pressure of expectation, struggles with the backpass ruuling and the “monkey on our back” of the away form add texture. He gives the story a player’s-eye view – and it is telling that he is as baffled as the fans by that season’s away form.
Dean doesn’t overstate the significance of Cantona’s sale to Manchester United, knowing Leeds supporters have been doing that perfectly reasonably since November 1992. The move helped transform United’s greatest rivals and left Leeds wondering how a title-winning side had managed to mislay its future so quickly. Oh, how Leeds fans want to know the inside truth of that particular episode.
Every football fan has their own book, because every supporter has a season that explains the peculiar madness of devotion. For some, it is glory. For others, survival. For Rocco Dean, it is the year Leeds United defended a title astonishingly poorly.
For Leeds fans with a sentimental streak, Sergeant Wilko’s Defending Champions will make compelling reading. For those who want to know a little more about life behind the scenes, this account of a season veering close to disaster has plenty to reveal too.
‘Sergeant Wilko’s Defending Champions’ by Rocco Dean is published by Pitch Publishing
