“WHERE DID IT GO WRONG?” The words hung in the air as Terry Venables, the Leeds United manager, bit his lip and grimaced. In a more candid mood, he might have answered by saying that it was the day he turned off the M1 and Peter Ridsdale, the chairman, force-fed him the sort of spin that has helped to turn the club into a melting-pot of bad blood and bitterness. This FA Cup quarter-final defeat was just another nail in the coffin for Leeds.

The FA Cup has provided some respite for Venables, but the season is rapidly coming to resemble Monty Python’s famed dead parrot sketch. His chairman insists that the club is still alive and well, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, and the whole thing is descending ever further into farce.

Sheffield United sneaked through an appalling match thanks to a solitary goal from Steve Kabba. Leeds, meanwhile, are crying out for significant surgery, a point that Venables admitted. “There’s got to be a reassessment of the whole season to make sure the club improves,” he said. Whether he is there to heal the festering wounds remains to be seen and he might reconsider whether he needs all this anguish. Others might say that his own judgment has been impaired after drinking too heavily from a poisoned chalice.

The Nationwide League first division side deserve credit, not so much for this scrappy performance but for the fact that they have now won four matches against Barclaycard Premiership opposition this season. Neil Warnock, their voluble manager, was in a typically boisterous mood afterwards. “They say I’m a lucky man, but it’s like Gary Player said, the harder you work the luckier you become. This is my finest hour,” he said. Having beaten Leeds in both cup competitions this season while maintaining a promotion push, Warnock might also claim that he manages the best side in Yorkshire. That is how far Leeds’s stock has fallen since they made the European Cup semi-final two years ago.

The anger of the supporters has been deflected from Venables to Ridsdale in recent months and television pictures of the chairman smiling in the home side’s dressing-room afterwards are unlikely to placate the ill-feeling. “Magnanimous,” was Warnock’s description, but it was another spectacular own goal for a man who seems incapable of opening his mouth without planting his foot in it.

Venables, too, is not enhancing his reputation. While the Elland Road cull has undermined his chances, the most obvious weakness is in midfield and that is largely a problem of his own making. He fell out with Olivier Dacourt, deemed David Batty unfit for service and signed Paul Okon. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that sequence of events, the only significant aspect of Okon’s performance yesterday was the fact that he rivalled Ian Harte for lack of pace. Harte and Okon share one gear and that is neutral.

Contrast that with the greater spirit shown by the home side. “Everybody died for the cause,” Warnock said. “You can’t stop them (his players). The attitude is fantastic and it’s infectious. Anybody is beatable in this country and I think people will want to avoid us.”

Venables’s claim that his team were not lacklustre was the most imaginative moment of Leeds’s performance during a torrid afternoon. With most police leave cancelled in South Yorkshire and FA chiefs fearing the worst, both teams and the early kick-off conspired to quash any early-morning bravado. The most penetrative action of the first 20 minutes came when a Tesco carrier bag drifted across the surface. It was desperate stuff that dulled the senses.

Then Leeds conjured up their best move of the match. Mark Viduka cut in from the left, Harry Kewell and Alan Smith combined and the England forward found himself in space just ten yards out. His tepid shot at Paddy Kenny highlighted the flaw in Smith’s game. Forget the aggressive streak, it is the paucity of goals that is the most worrying factor about Smith and he no longer looks like the player who was once the scourge of Europe’s greatest egos.

Ten minutes later Kewell wasted the chance that could have altered the course of the match and the season. Having sprung the offside trap, he delayed his shot and Kenny parried. The rebound fell to Kewell again. Bramall Lane held its breath and, this time, he missed in style.

Kewell did not reappear after the interval and, with Michael Brown impressing in the midfield, the home side moved into the ascendancy. Kabba, relishing the freedom afforded him by Harte, forced a wonderful save from Paul Robinson.

Without Kewell, Leeds looked lost. Viduka and Seth Johnson drew comfortable saves from Kenny, but the lack of self-belief in the Leeds ranks was palpable. With 12 minutes remaining, Kabba added insult to injury by seizing onto a ricochet off Danny Mills’s legs and steering a 12-yard volley into the bottom corner of the net past a motionless Robinson.

Venables sent on James Milner and Nick Barmby but they never looked like saving the game. Steve Bennett, the referee, did liven things up by showing what he thought was a second yellow card to Mills. The full back pointed out that he had not been booked and that Bennett had mistaken him for Johnson. It was a comic cameo that highlighted some anonymous performances in the Leeds ranks.

So Sheffield United’s incredible season goes on while, for Leeds, the misery endures. Where did it go wrong? Take your pick from the court case, David O’Leary’s book deal, his sacking, the sale of Rio Ferdinand, a series of PR blunders and a spending policy evidently honed from Brewster’s Millions. A more pertinent question is how on earth can Leeds put things right?

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