Leeds United: Galatasary anniversary should not be allowed to be forgotten

It was in 2000 on April 5 that they went to watch Leeds v Galatasary and, unfortunately, those boys didn’t return and were killed out there. It’s something that everybody has got to remember.

Football is one thing, but these were two young men who had their lives in front of them and everything that we do between now and the end of the week should be in remembrance of the two boys that didn’t come back from Istanbul. It’s very important that we remember our fans, the ones that went to support our team and didn’t come back.

Our thoughts and wishes should be with the families of these two men who went to watch a game of football and didn’t return. That shouldn’t be the case, they had children and it’s them and the families and everybody concerned that we should be thinking about at this time.

Going back to the Rotherham game on Saturday, I was expecting a real kind of scrappy affair but it wasn’t the case. There were two teams going there looking to play football and the ball was on the deck the majority of the time which was nice to see. But unfortunately we go back to errors again and it was a massive, massive error, a schoolboy error from Giuseppe Bellusci.

The game was in our hands to go and win but a moment of madness, a lapse in concentration and a bad choice of how to clear a ball and bad defending has not only gifted them a goal but it’s cost Marco Silvestri a one-game ban as well.

This is the second time that Bellusci has actually tried to make the same clearance and, if I remember correctly, at Nottingham Forest he tried to do the same thing, over the shoulder with an overhead volley. The best players in the world couldn’t do that, to be honest; it’s a very difficult technique.

For someone like Bellusci, we were just looking for a little bit of professionalism to see the game out, to keep ourselves in control of the game. But he does something ridiculous and something as difficult as that in our own box is absolutely criminal. To put it bluntly, he cost us.

But I still think we are safe from relegation now. Yes, it’s not really until it’s mathematically proven that we can’t be in this relegation battle but with MK Dons losing I think the gap between us and the bottom three now is too great for them to come back from or to reach us where we are.

But there’s still improvements that need to be made. Yes, we had a lot of possession against Rotherham and that’s great, but we are not troubling teams and we are playing in front of them which is exactly where they want to be.

If I was Neil Warnock and I had five shots from outside the area against me and that’s all I had, I would be over the moon and I would think we have done our job correctly. We are not troubling them inside the box.

When it’s outside the box, yes, we had a couple of shots but neither of them were between the penalty spot and the byline. We are not causing any problems around that penalty box or six-yard area. We are struggling once again to create chances to win games.

We can play forward, we can pass side to side, we can take our time on the ball, that’s great, that’s lovely to watch. But it’s not hurting anyone.

People go on about changing managers and this, that and the other but it’s the players who aren’t doing it for us unfortunately. I like the way they play sometimes and keeping control of the game by keeping control of possession is great. But you’ve got to hurt teams with it and there’s no point having all that possession if you can’t hurt a team and create chances and we are not doing that. As a team, I would have been more than happy with Leeds being in possession of the ball in front of us.

It was below what we expect, it was poor. There were no decent balls into the box for a striker to feed on and we didn’t really trouble them in the six-yard box whatsoever throughout the whole game.

Shots were from outside the box and one in a blue moon is going to go in. We are talking 27-28 yard shots at the goalkeeper and as a defensive unit you would be over the moon if you are restricting a team to that.