Sooner or later Thomas Christiansen was going to speak to a Danish or Spanish newspaper about his time at Leeds United and if anything it’s a surprise it didn’t come earlier.
Having experienced extreme highs and lows with the Championship club, Christiansen certainly had an eventful time at Elland Road. Whilst many fans agreed with the decision to sack the manager, there was clearly a lot of goodwill and a feeling Christiansen is a nice guy who tried his best in difficult circumstances.
Danish newspaper BT say Christiansen was both a ‘saviour’ and a ‘scapegoat’ at Leeds United, which is a reasonable way of putting things.
The manager himself suggests that a good start may have made things more difficult when it all began to go wrong: “It’s a big club, who really dreams of moving back to the Premier League, where they believe they belong. Every single season, both the club and its fans believe that now they’re there. The club’s fans said the team had not played so well for over a decade. With our good start, expectations grew a little more.”
There’s also a suggestion he wanted support brought in during January to help cover Saiz’s absence, but it wasn’t possible: “Our best player, Spaniard Samuel Saiz, got a red card for spitting at an opponent in the face as we went out of the FA Cup against Newport. He got six matches out, and some of the others also got long suspensions.
“Samuel Saiz was our most important player in the offensive part of the game and we couldn’t afford to buy a new one. Suspensions and injuries piled up. The squad just wasn’t big enough for us to replace those players.”
The Danish newspaper made a point of saying that, unlike what they believe usually happens at English clubs, Christiansen only had responsibility for training and the day to day running of Leeds United, with transfer matters out of his hands.
