Locker Room:Bah humbug and so on! Into your cup, brimful of punchy festive cheer no doubt, let me add a wee drop of laudanum, a tincture to be taken in the form of a column about Leeds United.

Laudanum (the wine of opium as we used to call it when we were adding it to flagons of cider down by the railway tracks) is said to allay irritation and check excessive secretions. If the usual postbag concerning Leeds United columns is anything to go by you will soon be needing to allay your irritations and check your secretions, so drink up.

In truth, we were inclined to leave the already-overdue Leeds United column over till the new year, but writing about Leeds United is such an efficacious treatment of high spirits and good cheer among the general populace that now, the wake of Saturday's away draw with Walsall, feels like the time. Good for the soul and all that.

We were heartened, see, to have our glib prejudices about Dennis Wise turned on their heads by his perceptive and influential endorsement of Fabio Capello the other day. One imagines Fabio gleefully texting his mother with news of Wisey's (The Cockney Wenger) cerebral praise.

"The top coaches," said Wisey, graciously leaving it to others to include him in that category, "are very professional and think very deeply about the game. And I think the Italians, and the Spanish in particular, know what they want and understand things well."

It's true but also so very perceptive. The Italians, and the Spanish in particular (Manuel in Fawlty Towers was but a crude caricature), do actually understand things well. This is just an unfair genetic advantage bestowed on the Italians, and the Spanish in particular, by a god who has forsaken west Yorkshire.

And, by the way, how very nimble-witted of Wisey to protect himself, with that little sideswerve, against the eventuality of Capello transpiring to be Spanish.

Leeds United don't do "foreign" managers. The 15 managers the club have employed since Don Revie danced so light-heartedly out the gates of Elland Road have collectively been the last 15 people in the history of the world that you would like to be stuck in a lift with.

Revie was famously replaced by Cloughie (Just finished a belated reading of David Peace's The Damned United, by the way. Enjoyed it in a guilty, furtive way. Knowing that a man as likeable and decent as Johnny Giles has problems with a book tends to limit one's pleasure. Kept looking over the shoulder waiting for lightning or Dunphy to strike me dead).

Cloughie's madness is a thing which divides normal people. Lots of folk with otherwise rational and sensible views of the world claim now to have been charmed silly by Cloughie, and some of his epigrams have been recorded, inflated and polished to make it seem as if he was Wilde reincarnated in a goalie's green jersey. While there is no doubt that he was a genius of a bainisteoir and an energetically erratic character, his hectoring voice and bullying manner certainly wouldn't have got the best out of me in a dressingroom (and that will always be Leeds United's loss and regret).

After Cloughie the roll call is divided principally between the dour and the spivvy. The slapstick charms of men like Howard Wilkinson, Kevin Blackwell and Sniffer Clarke are balanced by Wisey, Venables and George Graham (who in a Venn diagram would occupy that shaded area where both camps overlap).

There have of course been some cheeky chappies like Davo and Peter Reid thrown in, but that's the limit of Leeds United's view of the aptitudes needed to run the club.

All of which leaves us in Division One (okay, okay, Division Three in the real world) and managed by a man, Wisey, who would represent all that was dislikeable about the pre-Russki Chelsea were it not for the fact Leeds are now owned by Ken Bates.

Personally I find this hard to swallow but a series of full or almost-full houses as Leeds entertain the lesser spotted minnows of Division One suggests that football fans will tolerate absolutely anything just so long as their team is winning. And I find myself reluctantly willing to go along with it all, even when Gus Poyet (Wisey's erstwhile assistant whom I had romanced myself into believing was the brains behind the Leeds renaissance and the future of the club) skipped off to Spurs and was replaced by Dave Bassett, who could give cheeky-chappy tutorials to Dennis Wise.

I am told (pathetic attempt to convey an image of incessant busyness there with scraps of necessary information being fed to me through an earpiece as I multitask - I actually read this when Googling idly) that David Peace's book about Cloughie's 44-day reign is to be made into a movie, which is fine and dandy (if unfair on Gilesie), but no rollercoaster epic of a disaster movie could come close to describing the story of Leeds United in the last few years.

I wonder why a cheeky little jackanapes like Dennis Wise can manage the club and draw the approval that comes with full houses against woeful teams, but you forget that the Leeds faithful endured the painful sundering of Davo's team of babies, lived through the oily cynicism of El Tel, soldiered on through the embarrassments visited on the club by Messrs Woodgate and Bowyer, watched the unravelling of the Ridsdale administration, suffered the cold tease of getting to the championship play-offs one year and being relegated the next and finally upon relegation saw the club attempt to pull a fast one by going into administration, a piece of hocus-pocus that cost them 15 points at the start of this season.

Leeds supporters can look around the various leagues and draw up a team of players the club have paid the (usually exorbitant) wages of in the last decade and feel they might be top four in the Premiership material had they kept them all.

Yet the fall seems purgative. Leeds are still threatening high-court action about the 15-point reduction the club took into Division One with them but honestly they should suck it up and leave it.

It's not quite Christmas and Leeds, dragging the handicap of their points reduction, are in the play-off spots and just four points off the leaders, Swansea. This after Saturday's draw with the mighty Walsall. Leeds have scored more than anyone in the division, have easily the best goal difference and, if goal celebrations are to count for anything, have the best of quality up front, where the basketball style exuberance of Kandol and Beckford is pure class. Kandol and Beckford are rethreads, incidentally, from Thurrock and Wealdstone respectively, the former having done a stretch inside for drink-driving offences.

There is a romance about Leeds this season and if Bates would just keep his fat face out of the high court there could be a certain nobility attached to taking the punishment on the chin and going out and winning the league anyway.

It's time Leeds changed the karma around Elland Road. Too many decades have been spent being the Damned United. Even the good years we old-timers romance about weren't so full of romance.

A Leeds United who have been to hell's kitchen and survived to come back stronger would be good for the game. You don't have to be Italian, or in particular Spanish, to understand that.