Here's a prediction. Not a very brave prediction but one which we're loath to make anyway. Last Wednesday night in Istanbul will be the high-tide mark of Leeds United's season. Probably that's as it should be. It might even have been the zenith of David O' Leary's management career.

Not that he deserves that to be the case, it's just that the weather ahead looks real bad. If you enjoy watching Dave O'Leary the next few months are going to be like a series of Big Brother with only Dave in the house.

Leeds went to Turkey last Wednesday, scored a point off Besiktas and finished the night needing only a win from one of their last two group games to qualify for the second group stage of the interminable but lucrative Champions League.

They were as we say in football "flying high" in the Premier League. They have a young team, young manager and just announced record profits. David O'Leary had just starred in a pleasant documentary about four young men with bad hair who went to Highbury in the 1970s.

If Leeds United were pop stars the best career move available at that point would have been to die young and leave a heartbreakingly handsome corpse. Instead they'll unravel slowly and none of it will be pretty. Most interesting to watch will be David O'Leary. Will he steer the ship through? Will he trample on women and children to get to the lifeboats? Will he keep whistling as if nothing is happening? Leeds are about to become the best show in sport. Being Irish and being a Leeds fan it feels like an occasion of sin whenever you sit down to write anything vaguely thoughtful about David O'Leary. You cower, expecting lightning to strike you. Then, during the following week you wait for the letters to come in, demanding that you lay off the big lad, he's one of our own, martyred by the saxon interloper Big Jack, great servant, yadda yadda yadda . . .

All true, but having the cowardice of your convictions you have sympathy with both sides of the Dave O'Leary argument. He's done some things a man ought not to do, yet in the Premiership Babylon where venial sins are no sins at all he is a saint. His team plays good football, he gives young players their chance, he lives with the woman he married many years ago and although he moans from nine to five one suspects that beneath it all he's happy and his life is full of certainties.

Most of his sins are brought on by footballer's myopia, a condition which prevents sufferers from seeing the big picture and which can often be accompanied by a form of digestive ailment wherein eaten bread is soon forgotten but sufferers demand to have their cake and eat it. Dave is a bad case.

Recently Dave was to be heard complaining about England's failure to pick Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer while the pair await trial for the assault of an Asian student Sarfraz Najeib after an incident outside the Majestyk night club in Leeds last January. England, of course, have a right not to pick players against whom such serious charges are pending. No guilt is inferred in their absence from England's team sheets just a reasonable desire that until the matter of guilt or innocence is sorted out neither player should represent the people of England on the people's soccer team.

Even more recently Dave's ire was provoked by the decision of the judiciary to bring the trial of the Bowyer and Woodgate (and reserve striker Tony Hackworth) forward by six months. Instead of taking place in Sheffield next summer the gig is to go ahead in Hull in January. In yesterday's Sunday Times Dave noted the perfidy of the men in wigs.

"When I was told the news of the trial being brought forward," said O'Leary, "I was absolutely gutted. I wondered `How can you run a premiership campaign in these circumstances?' "

That's right. The Asian community and the English judiciary are acting in a concerted pincer movement to screw up Leeds United's season. The media are bringing up the rear and soon there shall be a bloody reckoning. Dave O'Leary believes all this. As a human being that makes him suspect.

As a footballer manager? Well it's the sort of thing that Alex Ferguson would believe too.

Is O'Leary cut from that cloth or has he just been given the same bundle of paranoias?

Just watch and see. Leeds have just had one of those weeks which are borrowed from a horror movie. Starts well, gets better, everyone cruising and happy and then la-de-da LOOK OUT! Right into the propellers of something vicious and ugly. Blood everywhere. Manchester United took Leeds apart for fun on Saturday morning. Barcelona might do the same tomorrow night. Pretty soon they won't be able to open a door without screaming. With 11 of the first-team squad injured at present that's pretty much the situation anyway. By January when Our Learned Friends XI limber up Leeds United could be anyone's for the taking.

It will take a miracle of management to get them through it all. David O'Leary isn't a lucky manager, just a manager who has skilfully used up a good run of luck and is about to be confettied with bad luck. Remember Leeds scarcely won their Champions League placing, rather Liverpool offered it up, perhaps sensing some bad voodoo from it. Dave didn't create Leeds's young players, he liberated them. He wasn't first choice for the job he's in, events at Tottenham and Leicester changed his life.

Yet you play the hand your dealt and O'Leary has proven skilful when the runs are going his way. How he deals with a hand of cards that stinks so bad you can only pick it up with tongs will determine how he is remembered as a manager. The bad luck is coming steadily now. If he can find a way through the blizzard he will have packed 10 years experience into a season.

O'Leary is a strange cove himself. Beyond Highbury opinions about him are divided. His enemies point out that Dave O'Leary played 722 top-class games for Arsenal in his 18-year career and scored just 14 goals. Given that he must have made the journey upfield for about 5,000 corners, they reckon that we are dealing with a man who doesn't like to put his head where he shouldn't. I just don't know.

The next few months will show more about David O'Leary than the last 20 years have. For us Dave watchers it'll be compulsive viewing.