Ian Harte was ten days into pre-season training with Leeds when the call came. It was his agent. How did he fancy a move to Spain?
It wasn’t Barcelona, Madrid, Deportivo or Valencia. It wasn’t even Bilbao, Sevilla or Betis. It was Levante UD, the second team in the city of Valencia and they’d just returned to La Liga after more than four decades outside the top flight.
So he came to Spain, liked what he saw, signed a four-year deal and while his former friends at Leeds are suffering the onset of winter in gloomy East Yorkshire, we’re sitting in a hotel lobby while the warm Mediterranean sun shines outside.
It’s been a good start for Harte at Levante. Fans forums on the Internet have hailed him as the best signing the club made in a summer when they brought in Johan Mjallby from Celtic, Fabio Celestini from UEFA Cup winning Marseille and the talented Bulgarian Vladimir Manchev from Lille. His debut couldn’t have gone any better, scoring Levante’s first La Liga goal in 41 years as they drew 1-1 away to Real Sociedad.
Since then results have been excellent, at the time of writing Levante lie 5th in La Liga with only a point separating them from champions, and city rivals, Valencia. Harte isn’t surprised though, this season isn’t just about survival for Levante. They want more than that. He speaks quietly but with confidence.
“When I came to look around I liked the ambition of the club. The owner spent a lot of money bringing certain players into the squad and he’s very ambitious. He’s looking for us to finish in the top 6.”
It’s a tough league but he’s convinced there’s the quality in the team not only to stay up but to firmly establish themselves in the top flight.
“When you look at some of the players in training technically they’re unbelievable. The top 10 is certainly in reach. We’ve got to be pleased with what we’ve done so far but we have to keep it up. It’s a long season and there’s no point starting well then fading off in the second half of the season.”
He’s also impressed with the style of football they play and with former German international Bernd Schuster at the helm they have an experienced and wily manager who knows La Liga well from his eight years as a player for Barcelona.
“The manager loves the ball on the floor. In England you’re running full out for 90 minutes but here it’s slower, more patient, passing the ball across the defence and taking your chances when they come.”
When foreign players come to England they often need a period of acclimatisation, but Ian Harte has been ever-present since his arrival in Spain. He’s learning the language with the help of a teacher and with all the training in Spanish he’s learning fast, even if his team-mates had a bit of fun by teaching him all the swear words first.
This season sees the most British and Irish players ever to start a season in La Liga. As well as Harte there’s the Madrid trio of Beckham, Owen and the injury-prone Woodgate. But why don’t more players come to Spain? It is a money thing?
“Not at all. I think it’s such a big change that a lot of players are afraid of settling in, learning a new language, and that’s it. It’s easier to stay in England.”
It couldn’t be any more different from his final season at Leeds, which saw the club he’d been at since the age of 15 relegated from the Premiership. In what was one of the most spectacular falls from grace in football history the Champions League semi-finalists of 2001 and Premiership leaders of January 2002 plummeted from the top flight and look certain to stay away for some time.
“It was sad because I was there 12 years and I loved every minute of it and made so many friends. Four years ago we got to the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup and the following season the semis of the Champions League.”
It’s impossible to miss the enthusiasm and fondness with which he talks about that period, even though after their first Champions League game everybody was writing them off. There’s a smile as he recalls the opening game.
“We got hammered 4-0 by Barcelona and everyone thought ‘Oh-oh! Welcome to the Champions League but in the next game we won 6-0 against Besiktas and we built on that. We got through the first phase and thought ‘This is amazing!’ Then the second phase thinking ‘This isn’t right!’ AC Milan, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Lazio, we played them all and got great results.”
“We had Deportivo in the quarter finals and won 3-0 at home. In the second leg they scored early. When they got a second we just had to hang on, it was backs to the wall stuff.”
Then came the semi-final against Valencia and a 0-0 draw at Elland Road did them no favours. 3-0 in the second leg The Mestalla put an end to what was the most unlikely of European runs. Tellingly though, their first league defeat since January, 2-1 away at Arsenal, came in the middle of the two semi-finals, and that season they finished in fourth place, one point outside the qualification for the next season’s tournament. The financial implications of that failure would come back to haunt the club.
Still, they had a squad full of quality players and in January 2002 they were topping the table. But then things started to go wrong. There were rumours of manager David O’Leary losing the dressing room after his misguided book ‘Leeds United on trial’ – in which he talked about the Bowyer/Woodgate affair. So was there any truth to that?
His answer, “I never read the book,” is diplomatic. At the end of that season they finished fifth in the Premiership in a season when the top 4 in England qualified for the Champions League.
In June O’Leary was sacked by free spending chairman Peter Ridsdale and from that point on Leeds were on a slide from which they wouldn’t recover. Hefty transfer fees, mortgaging the club’s future income to buy players and failure to qualify for the lucrative Champions League income meant corners had to be cut.
Terry Venables was brought in, but out went Robbie Fowler, Robbie Keane, Harry Kewell, Rio Ferdinand, Lee Bowyer, Olivier Dacourt and Jonathan Woodgate. “That’s more than half your best team,” says Harte, “without them…” he trails off. There’s no need to finish.
Asked for his views on Venables there’s a silence, a raise of the eyebrows, then he says “He didn’t stay long, did he?”
In came Peter Reid who brought in “..six French players, who were brilliant lads, to be fair, but the club couldn’t afford them.”
He saved Leeds from the drop, but in November 2003 Reid was sacked after a 6-1 drubbing by Portsmouth and taking just eight points from their opening twelve games. Eddie Gray – “an absolute gentleman” – was put in charge but there just weren’t enough games nor enough quality in the squad to make up the points.
The Venables and Reid eras haven’t given him any additions to his Christmas card list, but for Eddie Gray there’s a respect that’s shared by all the players and fans of Leeds United.
“You knew where you stood with him. If you weren’t playing well, he’d tell you. If you did something well, he’d tell you that too. Certain other managers (Venables) would come in and tell you that you were doing well, but as players we knew we weren’t. Sometimes it would be up to Eddie to come in and give us a rollicking.
He shrugs. “There’s no point someone going home thinking they’ve done well when they haven’t.”
Even with the relegation to the First Division and the opportunity to play in La Liga it was still a wrench to leave.
“I moved over when I was 15, so Leeds is like a home away from home. I had to really think if it was the right move but I didn’t want to look back and think ‘Why didn’t I?’ I had to try because this kind of chance might not come around again.”
In Spain the players have Christmas off so he’ll be flying back and if there’s a game at Elland Road he’ll be going. With Uncle Gary Kelly still at the club he reckons he’ll have no problem getting tickets.
However, not everything in the garden is rosy. Despite being only the third Irish international to play in Spain (Kevin Moran and John Aldridge had spells at Sporting Gijon and Real Sociedad respectively) it’s his Ireland career that seems to have come off the tracks.
When we start to talk about Ireland and the latest qualifying games for Germany 2006 (the draw against France and the 2-0 win over the Faroe Islands) the conversation is matter of fact. He talks about the performances, the excellent point away in Paris and he singles out Israel as the dark horses in the group. The problem is that he hasn’t been selected for the last three squads. Does it hurt?
The answer is to the point. “What do you think?”
“It’s disappointing because I played in recent games. Against Australia I was on the bench, came on, created the two goals and we won 2-1. In the Croatia game I scored so I think that when I’ve been in I’ve done well but all of a sudden I’ve been forced out with no explanation.”
It’s the lack of communication from Brian Kerr that’s most frustrating for him. In the summer he had to have a series of injections for a foot injury that he’d carried since the World Cup in Japan and Korea. It meant he missed the friendly games in England and Holland but without it he’d have faced an operation and 6-8 weeks out the game, so he expected some understanding from the Ireland boss.
“I spoke to Brian to ask why I wasn’t in the squad and said the players who came on the trip in the summertime did well and that was it. There were other players that didn’t travel that are in the squads now so I asked why there was one rule for me and one for the others but he just said ‘It’s my decision’.
“I understand when players have come in and done well, that’s part of football, but what I don’t understand is that there are eight defenders in the squad and not one of them is left footed. I could have stayed at Leeds, maybe I’d be in his radar more, but I thought moving to Spain would improve me. I’m playing week in, week out, in the top Spanish league, against some of the best players in the world and there are two right-footed players (Man United’s John O’Shea and Hearts right-back Alan Maybury) contending the left back position.”
“I’m baffled,” he says. And he is.
There’s never been any disagreement or falling out with Kerr, his describes his relationship with him as ‘fine’ but he seems resigned to being out in the cold, in football terms, for the near future. “I know before the squad even comes out now. I’m just disappointed.”
That’s not to say he’s given up on being part of the World Cup squad but for now his focus is on his new club. “It’s my first season in Spain, I want to do well, but for the team to do well is most important.”
His wife Laura and baby daughter Kaia, who he misses ‘like mad’, will be arriving to move into the newly rented house near the training ground and he can’t wait. “I feel brilliant. It’s the best I’ve felt in about four or five years. My legs, my fitness, my body, life in general.”
Being part of the Ireland squad for the game against Israel in March would top it all off.
Ian Harte is represented by SEM. This was originally posted on blogfc.com after appearing in Ireland’s Sunday Independent
