LockerRoom: In times of darkness and distress I turn like many of my brethren to the good(-ish) book: Forward with Leeds by Johnny Giles (with Jason Tomas), the 1970 classic whose highly relevant modern-day message is that there is nothing new on heaven on earth.

Take, for instance, the chapter where Johnny muses on playing for his country. Entitled , succinctly, "Playing for My Country", the chapter is Keanoesque not just in its intent but in its terse angry style.

It begins with the mandatory, great honour, always my dream, raised on the backstreets sort of stuff but by paragraph three there is trouble which reflects the turbulence of the times.

"Yet in May 1969 I vowed never to play for them again. I had been dropped from the side for their World Cup qualifying tie against Denmark at Lansdowne Road and I was annoyed about it. But this was not the reason I wanted to quit the international scene. For some time I had been unhappy with the way the Republic's squad was run, and I could no longer bear to see our potential being ruined."

So there. Keano wasn't the first Irish midfielder to consider going non-scene.

Forward with Leeds is, however, a book about Leeds. And, well, going forward with them. The international stuff seeps in by way of digression. Still, who wouldn't like to know more about Fionan Fagan, the winger who made his debut in 1954 and got his second cap five years later. Then, in 1960, he scored the winner against West Germany away - the start of a run of five goals in four games. He was then dropped. He played just one more game. Bet he was unhappy too.

The Leeds which Giles joined in the early 1960s wasn't that unlike the Leeds which will probably slide down a division this summer. Cash strapped, dowdy, confused.

There's a picture in Forward with Leeds of the young Giles celebrating on the Wembley pitch after Manchester United beat Leicester in the 1963 FA Cup final. The caption reads left to right: Charlton, Cantwell, Crerand, Quixall, Herd and Giles.

Charlton and Crerand won European cup medals with United just a few years later. In August of 1963, after Everton trounced Manchester United in the Charity Shield, Quixall, Herd (who scored two goals against Leicester) and Giles were dropped for the opening league games. A couple of weeks later Giles moved to Leeds. He asked for the transfer. United agreed. One of the rare occasions upon which Leeds have come out the better of business dealings with Manchester United.

In Forward with Leeds the chapter dealing with Giles's departure from United is the most frank and interesting. He talks about the corrosive influence at United of big-money signings and the declining morale in the dressing-room as well as the morale-sapping routine of being constantly singled out for criticism by Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy.

And yet. There must be times when Johnny is in vacant mood and lies upon his couch and wonders what might have been had he stuck it out at United. He went on to become one of the greatest midfielders of his generation. He had a steeliness and a character which Busby had yet to discover existed. There is no doubt he would have made it at United would have been a further adornment on the sacred European Cup team.

Instead, he joined a brassy second division side. Leeds. All fur coat and no knickers. The Lily Savages of the modern game.

After that in the book the talk is always of resilience and single-mindedness and phrases like "don't get me wrong, Leeds were no angels" become common. There are accounts of top-of-the-table clashes with Sunderland and Preston which produced "numerous explosive incidents". Johnny even quotes Sunderland players as taunting Leeds with comments like "you're all a bunch of scrubbers!"

All those attributes - the spikiness, the paranoia, the brass - they all went into making Leeds what they were.

Part of being a Leeds fan was knowing that nobody liked you and you didn't care, feeling that long before it became a terrace dirge. It was the relish of the gatecrasher. Part of being a Leeds fan was knowing that Leeds were reared to two star but staying in five star. There was something loveably defiant about the hardness, about Leeds' refusal to get back to where they really belonged.

Well, it's all over now now, baby blue. In the time of plenty Leeds forgot themselves. Forgot the principles of tightfistedness and cussedness which made them what they were. They stand now like a unique northern morality tale. On the cusp of relegation and facing the reality that even if the side produces some extraordinary heroics and saves itself, it is doing so only for one year. The wage bill at Elland Road is such that anyone who can get into double figures playing keepy-uppy will be appearing in Buy and Sell columns over the summer. Next season is going to be horrible.

Of course it's not just the football which has decayed. Almost the entire club is rotten. The various arrests for a whole series of extraordinarily unsavoury incidents haven't just been shocking in themselves but have placed Leeds at the vanguard of the movement to remove professional players from the morals and duties which once informed an entire soccer culture and kept it in touch with the community that financed it.

This column has followed Leeds since long before it knew it would grow up to be a column. Since the 1969/'70 season in fact. These past few years have been hard. The eyes have rolled. The eyes have wandered. The eyes have been screwed shut. The eyes have watered.

The odd thing is that I find now that I'm rooting for Leeds to be relegated. I'm hoping for the abasement of Division One football. By going down, by stripping itself of its shiny baubles and brassy adornments perhaps the entire system will be purged. Penance. Redemption. All that sort of stuff. A season or two worth. Then, perhaps, a young side built on something more than optimistic accounting and leasing deals.

Because it's about romance. And hopefulness. Has to be or else it's just about shareholders. Johnny Giles could have won the European Cup with Manchester United but he appreciated the dark romance of Leeds climbing, claw by bloodied claw up the rock face. All those heartbreaks were leavened not just by good days but by the knowledge that Leeds were somehow more than they should be. Runners-up was a tough position to occupy all those times but when you'd come from where Leeds had come from and didn't forget it, well you knew there were worse things in the world.

Then Leeds forgot. It ended with the debacle of the 1975 European Cup final. With Revie's disgrace. With Cloughie. With a series of desperately mediocre, desperately tight-lipped managers.

Even the so-called good days under Dave O'Leary didn't have that heroic, two fingers to tradition, feel for Leeds. It was a castles in the air, don't look down, sort of dizziness. You always felt that the bailiffs were two steps behind.

It's often said of a club like Manchester United that it needs success. That's the difference. I reckon Johnny Giles knew it too. Leeds United is a club which needs failure every now and then. Failure and humility and the chance to gather the energy of driven outsiders once more.

Hopefully, next year the club will be back in football's ante room. Run by tight-fisted, ruddy-faced locals. The cars in the car-park will be smaller and every time they drive out of Thorp Arch and gaze at the prison across the road players won't shudder and say there but for the grace of good lawyering go I. They'll visit all the hard places, the Prestons and the Grimsbys and so on. They won't be a spectacle but it will be interesting to watch.