OK, it is probably too late to be making a fuss now. More than 40 years too late, in fact. Yet I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, that when Billy Bremner had his punch-up with Kevin Keegan in the 1974 Charity Shield, the Football Association thought it perfectly normal to ask Sir Matt Busby, legend of Manchester United, to be part of its three-man disciplinary panel.

Unless, of course, you could imagine the modern-day equivalent and Sir Alex Ferguson being invited to pass judgment when, say, the football authorities get round to deciding what punishment, if any, Leeds should face for the spying missions launched by Marcelo Bielsa’s operatives on opposition training grounds this season.

Fergie, one imagines, might fancy that gig bearing his mind his personal history with Leeds and all those fond reminiscences of a stadium that would dearly like to be hosting Premier League opponents again next season. The time, for example, a pitch invader jumped into the away dugout at Elland Road and took a swing at Eric Harrison, perhaps mistaking him for the Manchester United manager. Or the day Ferguson got caught at traffic lights outside the ground and a story that, for full effect, always ought to be told in a sweary Govan accent. “This bunch of supporters, skinheads, 20 or 30 of them, they see me and ‘Ferguson!’ and they start running across the road. The lights are still red. I’m almost shitting myself. They’re getting nearer, then the light goes to amber and [imitation of a tyre squeal] I’m away.”

Over time, you come to realise that a lot of football people have stories about wanting to make a quick exit from Elland Road. Keegan’s goes back to Norman Hunter’s testimonial, when he accepted an invitation to turn out for a Don Revie XI. This was the same season that Keegan and Bremner had traded punches at Wembley and his welcome to Leeds came in the form of Hunter harpooning him with an early challenge.

Hunter did at least apologise when Keegan asked whether it was acceptable to crock someone that way in a benefit match. He was even decent enough to pick Keegan off the floor. The next time Hunter poleaxed his opponent, he looked down and smiled again. “You don’t think I’m going to change for a testimonial, do you?” he asked. After the game, Hunter gave Keegan a clock to thank him for his contribution and the Liverpool player limped away to count his bruises, as he often did after games against Leeds.

That, in a nutshell, probably encapsulates what a lot of people think about the team who were battling against Norwich on Saturday to see who would finish the weekend at the top of the Championship: dirty Leeds, cynical and hard‑faced, storing up their grudges, permanently aggrieved that they did not think of the “No one likes us” chant before Millwall. The team that should have chucked away their medals, according to Brian Clough, because they won them all by cheating, “the Nazis in Umbro”, as the broadcaster and author Stuart Maconie once wrote. “Daleks dressed in Gola, a crack squad of inhuman automata with one purpose in mind, the ruthless subjugation of other life forms … a team of 11 JR Ewings, duplicitous, untrustworthy, conniving and, as in when they taunted a beaten Southampton with those 32 passes on Match of the Day, heartlessly smug.” Maconie, to clarify, was an avid Leeds fan.

Even when Leeds played football that warranted praise and popularity, most notably in the years of Peter Ridsdale’s overspending, they managed to find a way to make it difficult for outsiders to embrace them properly. Just think back to the time David O’Leary’s team played Valencia in the 2001 Champions League semi-final and someone clearly decided it would be a good idea for all the players to shave their heads, prison-style, for the first leg in Spain. “Leeds reminded me of the poor Englishmen who invented football 15 centuries ago when they cut off a Viking’s head, put it in a bag and started to kick it around,” Julián Ruíz, Marca’s correspondent, paid tribute. Though a personal favourite was the letter to the Daily Mail after the criminal trial involving two of the club’s players later that year. “Leeds footballers wearing gloves isn’t a fashion statement,” it read. “It’s so they don’t leave any fingerprints.”

The mention of “the integrity and honesty which are the foundations Leeds is built on” was an unexpected twist of humour

Unfortunately for Leeds, the boy of nine or 10 who cried on television when the chilly fingers of relegation closed round the club’s neck in 2004 might be drawing his pension by the time that perception ever changes. In football, it has always been easier to get a bad name than to lose one. The die is set now for Leeds. It goes back five decades and that was a belter of a line when the club apologised for all that unfortunate business outside Derby County’s training ground recently. The club, a statement read, intended to remind Bielsa of “the integrity and honesty which are the foundations that Leeds United is built on”. Which was an unexpected twist of humour, intentional or not.

At the same time, I have to confess that I would like to see Leeds recover from Saturday’s 3-1 defeat to return to the Premier League next season. Bielsa has created one of the more watchable sides in the country, albeit one that will be feeling badly demoralised today, and who could possibly argue that a club their size would not be a better fit in the top division? Or that it would not be fascinating to see whether their Argentinian manager can flourish at the higher level?

That is written with the understanding that many people will be hoping for some sort of karmic comeuppance when the club in question often leave the impression they take some form of pleasure from being the bad guys in this pantomime (hence the “Dirty Leeds” scarves on sale outside Elland Road). And, yes, it is certainly true that, as a club, they do not help themselves sometimes, as we have seen lately.

For more evidence, just consider some of the more wretched content from the Massimo Cellino era. Or the recent revelation that when Dennis Wise was managing the club, with Ken Bates as chairman, they offered a youth-team player professional terms even though, privately, they knew the boy was nowhere near good enough to make the grade. The method to the madness, according to Wise, being that the teenager’s father had offered to sponsor the club in return for them going through with this pretence. Even ignoring, for one moment, the spying controversy, there are plenty of stains in the Leeds back catalogue that will be hard to wash out.

Even so, there is also plenty to admire about this stout old club, the history that is attached to that greying stadium beside the M621 and the way, despite everything, they have retained a tremendous backing during their 15 years outside the top division, always guaranteed to fill your away end. The average crowd at Leeds this season is higher than those of Leicester, Cardiff, Wolves, Brighton, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Fulham, Huddersfield, Burnley, Watford and Bournemouth; more than half the Premier League.

Even during their years in League One, Leeds were regularly getting bigger crowds than half a dozen top-division clubs. As for “Dirty Leeds”, I tend to agree with Howard Wilkinson, one of Bielsa’s predecessors, when he called it a “tired cliche” – and that was in 1991.

Mud sticks, of course, and it would be a lot easier to make this argument before all the spying lark came out (I mean, of all the clubs in the world, it just had to be Leeds, didn’t it?) and if they had not just lost their place at the top of the table. But the point remains that there are plenty of other adjectives – stylish, vibrant, exciting – that could be applied to the modern team during long parts of the current season.

As a club, they might still have a few behavioural flaws. They still possess a difficult streak, they still have a tendency to stick their middle finger up at the rest of football and it is all a bit baffling why their supporters persist on singing about being champions of Europe. But nobody could ever accuse Leeds United of not being interesting and, if they do manage to go up, the Premier League will be better for it.

Scholes must hope Oldham is on the road to somewhere

John Cooper-Clarke, AKA the Bard of Salford, has a poem in his collection that is dedicated to the town of Oldham and introduced during his live appearances by a rather entertaining preamble in which he notes how, according to his information, this satellite town to the east of Manchester isn’t officially twinned with anywhere but has a suicide pact with Gdansk.

Interestingly, he also confesses that he has never been there because, where he was from, Oldham was in the wrong direction to everywhere. But he is clearly intrigued by what he has heard and finds himself wondering whether the town has a motto. “Reversing into the future together,” being his suggestion.

Maybe not the town, but that would certainly work for the football club, currently 15th in League Two, and living on the memories of happier times judging by the discovery, on my last visit to Boundary Park, of a note on the dressing-room door prohibiting the players from swapping shirts with opponents “due to a severe shortage” of first‑team kit.

Since then, there has been a takeover by Abdallah Lemsagam, a former agent, but the reports have not been hugely encouraging, including tales of wages not being paid, all sorts of fallings-out behind the scenes and the story of Frankie Bunn, a club legend, being sacked as manager on Boxing Day via an email. If, as expected, Paul Scholes is to replace Bunn – with José Mourinho no doubt taking a keen interest in how one of his more outspoken television critics does in the dugout – nobody could ever accuse him of taking the easy route into management.

County’s Big Alan cut down to size in alarming fashion

It is fair to say that events at Notts County escalated far more quickly than I had anticipated when I wrote about their ownership under Alan Hardy for last week’s column and some of the reasons why they had been marooned at the foot of League Two, in grave danger of losing their title as the oldest club in the Football League.

Presumably you might be aware why Hardy issued an apology later that day, then hastily announced he was putting the club up for sale and closing down his Twitter account in a sequence of events that also saw him making his debut in a David Squires cartoon for the Guardian.

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Hardy has had a difficult week, to say the least, and it remains to be seen what his departure will mean for the kids’ zone at Meadow Lane, where the club’s youngest fans are invited to measure themselves against wall diagrams of popular children’s characters: Pikachu (1ft 4in); Yoda (2ft 2in), Elsa (5ft 4in) and, rather unexpectedly, “Big Alan” himself, giving his height at a very precise 6ft 4.5 inches. That extra half an inch, always worth counting.

In the meantime, at least there now appears to be a thaw in relations with Nottingham Forest, leading to the Championship club loaning their neighbours a young striker by the name of Virgil Gomis to try to help them clamber out of trouble. No sympathy, however, from the Lincoln City fans, judging by some of the inflatables in the away end during yesterday’s 1-1 draw at Meadow Lane.