Brian Kidd Profile: Richard Williams on a proud man who has had to take a barracking from his home fans at Elland Road, even though the visiting Manchester United players and fans continue to hold him in high regard.

When Brian Kidd walks out to take his place on the Leeds United bench today for their match against Manchester United, a mixture of emotions are likely to cloud his mind. He knows that affection from the visiting fans of the club where they still respect his achievements as a player and coach are in danger of being polluted by the derision of a section of the Elland Road crowd, his home supporters.

In a Premiership season that has veered between wonderful football and abysmal behaviour on and off the pitch, here is yet another low point. At the beginning of this month, exasperated by the indolent behaviour of certain players as the team went through a post-Christmas slump, a number of Leeds fans decided to put the blame not on those players, not on the manager, but on the head coach, the number two.

The reason, reflected in the wording of their chants, is that the best years of Brian Kidd's career were spent with their hated rivals at Old Trafford. To his own bemusement, Kidd became the momentary focus of that rivalry, one of the most bitter in English football.

"There's a certain section of fans who put the apparent apathy of the players down to the fact that they're not being motivated properly," Eddie Rivlin, a travelling Leeds fan says. "Last season the likes of Lee Bowyer, Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka were playing like men who had something to prove. "Now they've been recognised on the world stage and they seem to feel they don't have to prove anything any more."

The fans could have blamed the manager, David O'Leary. Instead they chose a softer target. "The fans look at Kidd and say, Manchester United didn't win the treble until after he'd left, and Blackburn were a terrible side when he was managing them, so it must be his fault."

Rivlin was present at Goodison Park three weeks ago when a section of Leeds fans punctuated a dreary goalless draw with angry chants aimed at the head coach. They may have been primed by a column in the Yorkshire Evening Post two days earlier by Peter Lorimer, a former Elland Road hero, who criticised the management for their decision a year ago to move aside Eddie Gray, his old team-mate, to make way for Kidd, who had been running the youth academy.

Gray retained the title of assistant manager, but it was clear that Kidd had become the real number two. "If it ain't broke," Lorimer asked, "why fix it?" His argument found a response among fans to whom Gray represents a cherished link with the Revie era.

In the aftermath of the Everton game, two things happened. First, O'Leary announced that he would resume his former habit of taking the training sessions himself. "Brian's sessions are interesting," the manager said, "but if he is one per cent short from being the complete coach, it is that he could be a little bit more confrontational with players. He lets them get away with things that I don't think he should."

A less equivocal expression of support came from the players. Rio Ferdinand, Nigel Martyn and Alan Smith met the media to emphasise their belief in Kidd, speaking on the squad's behalf. "If we could have fitted in, there would have been 30 of us here," said Ferdinand, the club captain.

Since then Leeds have won all their three Premiership matches. By putting themselves back into the Champions League qualifying frame, the players appear to have endorsed O'Leary's decision to return to a more hands-on style of team management.

"The manager's presence on the training field is definitely important," Ferdinand said yesterday at Thorp Arch, the club's training centre. "All the coaches are capable of taking training sessions, but sometimes an extra presence brings a different factor that benefits the team. There were certain things the gaffer wanted to sort out - things he saw that no one else had seen. That's his way of going about it."

Other insiders suggest that, in fact, little has changed. Kidd still gets to Thorp Arch just after eight o'clock, a habit he may have picked up from Alex Ferguson. First he works on the day's routines, measuring out distances on the training pitch.

Then he discusses his ideas with O'Leary, and at 10.15 the squad begin warming up for a session that will last from 10.30 until noon.

Ferdinand refused to discuss Kidd's precise tactical input, but others say that he has been responsible for moving the team's style away from the traditional high-tempo pressing game and towards an approach based more on keeping possession of the ball. This would make them better suited to European competition, and is again influenced by his experience at Old Trafford.

The departure from a familiar style is what may have puzzled and upset the fans, and in that case they would be right to identify Kidd as the agent of cultural change. But they were wrong to make him the butt of their criticism. Comparing the 41 Premiership games the team has played with Kidd as head coach with the 41 immediately preceding his promotion in March last year, it can be seen that Leeds are 17 points better off, having won five games more and suffered seven fewer defeats.

"That's not just down to Kiddo," Ferdinand said. "It's down to the management group - Eddie Gray, Roy Aitken and the gaffer himself have all worked together. But he's brought different ideas, like any coach does, and the boys enjoy going out training with him. He's like one of the lads, which is a good thing to have from a coach."

The last few years have been difficult ones for Kidd. Outstanding success at Old Trafford was followed by abrupt failure with Blackburn Rovers, and it came as a relief when O'Leary offered him the chance of a return to working with an elite club.

Until then he had seemed like a classic victim of that 1960s concept known as the Peter Principle, which says that while employers tend to recognise talented individuals by promoting them, it is inevitable that eventually an individual will find that he or she has been promoted beyond the limits of his or her capacities. And at that point they will suddenly crash and burn, never to be heard of again.

To outsiders, Kidd's seven years as Ferguson's number two, winning four championships and two FA Cups, made him look odds-on to succeed when the ultimate challenge arrived. That is certainly what the late Jack Walker, Blackburn's owner, imagined when he offered Kidd the job. Only those who really knew him recognised the risk.

Not everyone is cut out to be a number one. Being a great number two has its own special demands, the subjugation of ego among them. Whereas Ferguson threw teacups and subjected under-performing stars to the legendary hairdryer treatment, Kidd put an arm around them and rebuilt their morale. In the context of Manchester United during the 1990s, the era in which Beckham, Scholes, Butt and the Nevilles came of age, Brian Kidd was unquestionably a great number two.

But the very elements of his character that qualify him for that role made life impossible when he took the upward step in 1998. "Deep down," Ferguson wrote dismissively in his autobiography, not long after Kidd had departed for Ewood Park, "I would have had serious reservations about Brian ever taking charge of United. I suspect that the constant demand for hard, often unpopular, decisions would have put an intolerable strain on his temperament."

As a player, Kidd had no trouble imposing himself. On his 19th birthday he popped up among the Bests and Charltons to score for Matt Busby's United against Benfica in the 1968 European Cup final. He was a much better centre-forward than Alex Ferguson had ever been - powerful and combative, a leader of the line with agood football brain. But he was also a genuinely nice man, a congenital worrier, a practising Catholic, brought up to display compassion and good manners, and, as his old boss said, not the man for a harsh decision. All these things combined to look like weaknesses when Blackburn Rovers failed to revive under his ministrations.

At Leeds he is back in his element, putting an arm round an out-of-form player, devising routines that will take the team beyond its known limits, telling Alan Smith that he understands his sudden outbursts because he was like that once himself, and here is how you help yourself to grow out of it.

"Kiddo's a proud man," Ferdinand said yesterday. "I'm sure he'd rather let the football do the talking. And I'm sure the fans have seen sense."