2018-19, Free, Issue 03 2018-19, Leeds United, Subscribers

Victorious

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Back in March an image was circulated in a regional newspaper that threatened to define Victor Orta’s time at Leeds. Yorkshire Post cartoonist Graeme Bandeira, who occasionally finds time to do a little drawing when he’s not baiting and blocking Leeds fans on Twitter, depicted Orta as Oliver Hardy, chubby hands gripping the wheel of a rattling automobile, a Stan Laurel-esque Radrizzani beside him. It’s an excellent picture, with every detail from the expression of owlish anxiety on Orta’s face to the careful rendering of the ‘salute’ crest on the car bonnet beautifully conveying the artist’s desperation to extract as much outrage from Leeds fans as possible. In many ways it could only have been created by a Middlesbrough fan.

Something about Orta’s appearance lends itself to comedy. He’s got the po-faced look of the buffoonish sidekick that makes him the Penfold to Radrizzani’s Dangermouse. You can’t even blame it on the beard; when he briefly dispensed with it last autumn one observant Twitter commentator chimed in to say he looked like a slim Peter Griffin. As last season wore down to its inevitable conclusion, he began to increasingly resemble Alan from The Hangover, waking up to his own trail of devastation. “Oh man, my head. What are all these contracts doing here? I signed Ouasim who? Angus, what’s that on your face? Is it permanent? Is Ouasim whatsisface permanent? Four years??? Oh GOD…”

Behind that wraparound facial hair lurks a fiercely competitive personality

This is rather unfair. Behind that sullen expression and wraparound facial hair lurks a meticulous and fiercely competitive personality. Orta’s famed ‘mental database’ of players dates back to his childhood, when he would memorise Panini sticker albums for pleasure. Later, he taught himself Italian in an effort to absorb every morsel of information about Serie A. He’s a qualified coach and has worked as an agent and a journalist in a career that has taken him as far afield as Russia and Qatar. Thomas Christiansen described him as the ‘Wikipedia of football’ (yeah, I know, but he probably meant it as a compliment. It’s Thomas Christiansen. Thomas Christiansen is lovely).

All of which makes last season’s transfer activity all the more puzzling. Orta ignored the many instances of ‘citation needed’ dotted liberally over the credentials of Felix Wiedwald, Jay-Roy Grot and Caleb Ekuban and signed them anyway, at no little expense. His first transfer window gave the impression of being conducted with an atlas and a nail gun; his second kept our medical staff so busy that he might as well have been using the nail gun on the players.

This, coupled with a short, tortured spell at Middlesbrough that left deep divisions behind the scenes and ended in relegation, has left Orta’s reputation among UK fans in tatters. Perhaps what will sting the most, at least as far as the man himself is concerned, is that it calls into question his encyclopedic knowledge of players and scrupulous planning. These are the foundations upon which he has built his reputation, that survives outside this country and prompted Deportivo La Coruna to offer him a lifeline while he endured his darkest hours in Leeds. Orta turned down the job, to much consternation among Leeds fans, in order to remain in Yorkshire and see his plans through. It may yet prove to be this, rather than the Bandeira cartoon, that determines how Victor Orta is remembered here in years to come.

We’ll never sing Orta’s name

You can say what you like about Orta’s transfer record (and there’s plenty to say) but you have to respect the guts he has shown in staying and attempting to make things right. Death threats, chants, the ubiquitous #OrtaOut hashtag — all could have been consigned to the past in one fell swoop had he signed that contract with Deportivo. Whatever toll these things waged upon him in private is unknown, but Orta weighed them up and decided they were a price worth paying in order to continue this project.

Of course, Orta’s impact will ultimately be judged by whether or not his signings take us up, something that clearly wasn’t going to be possible without a significant shift in transfer policy. But that’s exactly what he’s delivered — instead of scouring the Swedish, Dutch and Albanian bargain buckets, we’ve brought in a £7m striker and the division’s best left-back, together with a host of rising stars. Orta’s last eight signings for the senior squad have been British, and all except Tyler Roberts have Championship experience. And that’s to say nothing of his groundwork to bring in the architect of our recent success, Marcelo Bielsa, something that seemed impossible in June and even more impossible now.

Right now no-one’s talking about Victor Orta any more, and that’s probably his best case scenario. He doesn’t go out of his way to be popular, nor should he. When we go up this year and Steven Spielberg buys the rights to the movie, Orta won’t be a leading man. He’ll be skulking in the background, gloomily played by Zach Galfianakis, while Bradley Cooper grins it up as Radrizzani. We’ll never sing Orta’s name at Elland Road, at least not in any manner that could be printed in a family-friendly publication such as this. But that’s okay; not all heroes wear capes, or even fashionable glasses.

Something is building here, and one day Victor Orta may look back on it with considerable pride. And who knows, he might even crack a smile. ◉

(artwork by Remy Walker)

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