From Duncan McKenzie, the former player, hurdling a pitchside Mini Cooper to Peter Ridsdale’s attempts to underpin his title assault by renting goldfish, Elland Road has been home to plenty of ambitious plans. Perhaps the boldest of all, however, is Gary McAllister’s desire to make Leeds United loved.

The widespread jubilation that greeted the descent of Leeds into administration and this month’s failed appeal against a 15-point penalty, was no surprise. Few clubs are as reviled as the one who imploded and then looked less like a sleeping giant than a comatose dwarf. But now they are on the way back, lining up against Carlisle United in the first leg of the Coca-Cola League One play-offs tonight and McAllister is hoping to kick-start a revival and a love-in.

“A siege mentality can be a good thing, but you can’t live like that for ever,” the manager said. “I don’t want people to stop saying ‘Jesus, it’s horrible to play against Leeds’, but it would be nice to have some respect. If we get promoted it will be one of the biggest things this club has ever achieved. The players have been through a hell of a lot this season and it would be nice to have people like us.”

In the first step towards this aim, McAllister has attempted to get Leeds playing a passing game, befitting a multiskilled midfield player who was the grace to David Batty’s grist in the team who won the last first-division title in 1992. “I’m not going to coach football in a way I don’t see it,” McAllister said. “But the top six in this division all try to play football. That was a bit of a shock for me. You’d think it would be more hurry-scurry, but my emphasis is on keeping the ball, not tippy-tappy stuff. It has to be effective, too.”

The jury was out on McAllister when he returned to Leeds at the end of January after Dennis Wise’s surprise move to Newcastle United. He had one mixed spell behind him as Coventry City manager and previous Leeds legends such as Allan Clarke, Billy Bremner and Eddie Gray had been sacked after taking the job. In addition, some Leeds fans remembered him not as a lustrous midfield talent, but a man who left for Coventry in 1996 under a cloud. He wants to set that record straight.

“The fact is Leeds accepted an offer for me,” McAllister said. “I’d turned down a couple of moves, went back to Leeds and asked for half the salary Coventry had offered. They said no. They wanted the money. There comes a time when you have to move on. I loved Leeds and played my best football here. They booed me when I came back, but I took it as a compliment. If they don’t boo you, you can’t hurt them.”

The fans are behind him now and McAllister is loving it. He had been out of the game for four years after resigning from Coventry to look after his wife, Denise, who was suffering from breast cancer. She died two years ago, leaving McAllister and two young sons to move on. It means that he has a rare perspective for a football manager. “Defeat should affect you badly, but there are times, when I’m on my own, when I reflect on things and think, ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world.’ It’s what I do professionally, but there are more important things.”

The perspective is why he did not bother himself with Leeds’s ill-fated appeal against their 15-point penalty. Where other managers were happy to stick a steel toe-capped boot in, McAllister said that he does not know the intricacies of the case. “I never got embroiled in it,” he said. “I didn’t go and do any research to find out whether we were in the right or wrong. It was a handicap and if we’d got the points back then that would have been wonderful, but I was not holding my breath.”

It is an attitude that recalls how Gordon Strachan, a friend and former teammate, marked Leeds’s title success by going swimming at the Holiday Inn rather than watching Manchester United concede the title against Liverpool. The pair are close and McAllister says that Strachan was the architect of that success. “You know, I see a lot of the old players from the Seventies around and that Leeds team was the greatest the club’s had, but I don’t think our side got the credit it deserved,” he said.

Nor has this one. Starting on minus 15 points, Leeds lost Gustavo Poyet, their coach, to Tottenham Hotspur, in October and their manager, Wise, soon after. McAllister believes that they were a good double act, but “there was a dip, stemming from Gus leaving, and I got the feeling Dennis was unsettled”.

McAllister has made one signing, Dougie Freedman, on loan from Crystal Palace. “I don’t think we’d be in the play-offs without him,” he said. Freedman is a McAllister player. The legs are not what they once were, but he has the nous, just as McAllister had when he moved to Liverpool at the age of 35, helped himself to a treble and scored a 45-yard free kick in the Merseyside derby.

New Leeds, he thinks, are in good shape. They have finished strongly, “the academy is on a par with any Premiership set-up” and McAllister’s initial four-month contract has been extended by a year. Love may be too much to ask for, but something is in the West Yorkshire air.

Carlisle United have warned Leeds United that they will be on the attack at Elland Road tonight. “We beat them 3-1 at Brunton Park and they beat us 3-2 at Elland Road,” John Ward, the manager, said. “We’ll be going all out to win.”

Leeds United (possible; 4-4-2): C Ankergren – S Gardner, L Michalik, P Huntington, B Johnson – D Prutton, J Douglas, A Hughes, P Sweeney – T Kandol, A Elding.

Carlisle United (possible; 4-4-2): K Westwood – P Arnison, D Campion, P Murphy, E Horwood – S Dobie, C Lumsdon, G Smith, S Hackney – D Graham, G Madine.

Referee: A Bates.

Television: Live on Sky Sports 1 from 7.30pm (kick-off 7.45pm).