February 2, 2004. The transfer window is slamming shut. It is deadline day, and, in the northeast, a day of deals and wheels. On the A1, Mark Viduka is speeding towards the turnoff for Teesside in a desperate attempt to reach the Riverside and complete a medical for Middlesbrough before close of business at 5pm. If ever haste is indecent, it is now. Leeds United are out of hope, yet the Australian’ s only worry is that he will be out of time. There he goes. Tara, teammates, g’day signing-on fee. A rat racing away from a sinking ship in a silver Mercedes-Benz.

Nice story, except for one detail. None of it happened. Although Viduka’s dash was reported in newspapers and radio bulletins, the truth was different. The only travelling he did was on an aircraft returning to the UK from Melbourne, where he had just left his father strapped to a life-support machine, recovering from a brain haemorrhage. He spent three weeks at his dad’s bedside, and only left to help save Leeds from relegation.

“Middlesbrough made a late bid, but to be honest, I wasn’t in a position to give them a decision. I had a lot to think about with my dad, and I want to see if I can put things right with Leeds,” he says. “I don’t want to see Leeds go down and I didn’t want to just leave them like that.”

Viduka is more resigned to the press coverage than hurt. “I hope Leeds fans know me, but a lot of people get led by the press. They influence people.”

We have been here before, me and Mark. Or rather me and Marko, as he was called in December 1998, when Celtic signed him from Croatia Zagreb. He lasted two days in Glasgow before disappearing back to Melbourne via Zagreb. His old and new clubs rowed about the transfer, and having bottled up the pressures of three years playing in what was still a warzone in Croatia, he suddenly found it all too much.

Three months later, having finally returned to Celtic, Viduka explained himself to The Sunday Times. Then, as now, there was a record to put straight. The stories were wild. Some papers claimed he left Scotland because of a drug test, others that the issue was money, others that he had been sent to a mental institution. There were even hints about Aids. Viduka can laugh now, but at the time it caused him great distress.

“Do you remember that other story? When I ‘walked out’ before a game when Kenny Dalglish was manager?” he says with a shake of the head. “I was sent home by the Celtic doctor with a high temperature and a virus, but they wrote that I’d chucked in a transfer request.”

Viduka has found that, like a virus, misinformation spreads. To this day, the media give him a rough deal.

“Mark’s more shy and sensitive than he looks, but he’s basically a down-to-earth, straightforward guy,” confided one of his friends. “So why the bad rep?”

JANUARY 1, 2002. Viduka scores twice as Leeds defeat West Ham 3-0. As the team knocks passes about, the crowd at Elland Road shout: “Ole!” With this victory, Leeds move top of the Premiership. Five days later, they go out of the FA Cup to Cardiff. Five months later, David O’Leary is out of work. Since then, the crises have not stopped. “If I could explain exactly when things started to go wrong,” Viduka says with a smile, “I’d be doing your job, mate.”

We are on a balcony overlooking an indoor pitch at Leeds’s training ground at Thorp Arch. Viduka, in shorts and club top, is relaxed and open to any questions. But although he joins in politely as I trawl through the glories that have gone (“three seasons ago we were in the Champions League semi-final and on cloud nine — amazing”) and the colleagues who have departed (“I could understand selling Rio because of the money, but letting Ollie (Olivier Dacourt) go so cheaply was a disgrace”) he is not really interested in looking back. “What’s the point?” he asks. “You can’t change the past. What this team needs to change is the future.”

In midweek, Viduka, playing for the second time since returning from Australia, spearheaded a 4-1 victory over Wolves. Leeds leapt off the bottom of the table and suddenly are just four points away from escaping the relegation zone.

“If we’d lost to Wolves we’d have been six points adrift at the bottom and would have found it very difficult to come back. But the win’s given us confidence again. As we came off, I thought, ‘We haven’t played a game like that all season’. We went one up, they pulled one back, but we didn’t stop going. It was like the old Leeds was back. All week, you felt a change. Training ’s been very, very fiery. Everybody’s up for it. The situation we’ve been in is difficult, but the key now is to shut all that out. Ultimately what happens between now and the end of the season is up to the players — us. If you look at the whole picture, how are we going to get out of this shit? It’s us.”