My Leeds United - Making Vinnie Jones sing, announcing opposition goals and being thrown around the Kop

Rich Williams is a Leeds United TV and Virgin Radio presenter.

I’m standing at the side of the pitch in front of the West Stand, the sunshine beating down and my six-year-old son is watching as I interview Eddie Gray for LUTV.

It’s Seth’s first match and my mind is instantly catapulted back to the first game I went to with my dad who, on this occasion, is on grandpa duties.

The club has always been a constant in my life.

My dad was at Wembley in ’72 and ’73, as well as Paris in ’75 so, like many fans, Leeds United was as much a rite of passage as starting primary school, losing your first tooth or having your first kiss [my success at the latter was not dissimilar to most recent Championship seasons before Marcelo Bielsa arrived].

I can close my eyes and picture that first match in HD-quality: walking to the top of the stairwell of the West Stand to be greeted by the overwhelmingly bright floodlights; Marching On Together; the homemade chocolate truffles my grandma had given me; the eruption following the majesty of McAllister’s free kick, only for it to be disallowed, and the frustration that followed when the retake hit the woodwork.

As if in one 90-second stretch of the match, the footballing gods were trying to tell me something... “Rich, there’s gonna be a lot of times when you think they’ve done it, only for your hopes to be dashed”.

Close my eyes for longer and the images flash further on.

The 14-year-old slumped in the back of a car enduring the never-ending drive home from Wembley in 1996.

The world had ended.

A feeling that would become all too familiar in later years from both Wembley and The Millennium Stadium. My friend and I being picked up like two small children and thrown around by some Hulk of a fan in The Kop during wild goal celebrations against 1860 Munich.

That was my last Leeds game before taking a gap year ahead of university. Yep, I was abroad for our Champions League campaign.

‘No bother’, I assumed. ‘We’ll be back in the competition soon…’

Going to the open-air toilet at Tranmere, looking to the sky and wondering how we ended up in League One. Aren’t we meant to be back in the Champions League soon?

The phone call I received out of the blue one morning after finishing the Breakfast Show on Radio Aire in 2013: “Rich, we’re looking for a new pitch announcer and we’d like you to do it.”

The almost-paralysing nerves when picking up the microphone at Elland Road to announce the team for the first time. Leeds beat Bournemouth 2-1 in a mundane game that nobody will remember apart from me. ‘Good job tonight on the mic’, a tweet to me read after the game… ‘but you might want to sound a bit less enthusiastic when the opposition score next time’.

Noted! The personal excitement of the night had got the better of me.

Being told I’d be interviewing Vinnie Jones at half-time and deciding I was going to ask him to lead the Kop in a chorus of Marching On Together seemed like a brilliant idea, until I was actually face to face with the man himself, poised to make the request.

Fortunately, he humoured me and sang it with more gusto than I could have ever hoped for (possibly as much to save my embarrassment as anything else).

Then, in 2017, being asked to host what would be a re-launched LUTV. Doing that and hosting events for the club is a real privilege. Speaking to players past and present, the ones my dad watched, the ones I cheered on growing up and the ones we all watch now is beyond a thrill.

Lastly, I’m standing at the top of that same West Stand stairwell I climbed for my first game with my dad, but this time next to the incredible Norman Hunter in the 91st minute. I watched on in awe as he passionately motioned to head away every ball that was launched into our penalty box as we clung on to a slender one-goal lead earlier this season, before witnessing him erupt into celebrations at the final whistle. We headed down to the Norman Hunter Suite to host some full-time analysis.

What a wonderful man.

And finally, I’m full circle.

Hoping, like you, and everyone else reading this, that our centenary year will go down in history as the year we did it... for Norman.