James Lawton: Perfect chance for Venables to fulfil his own prophecy

Leeds - in debt and in turmoil after infamous trial - and true football man brought back from the TV studio look made for each other

Many years ago Terry Venables had a vision of the role of a top football man. Utterly revolutionary, it was a concept that made it hard to know where to start and finish the list of ground-breaking ideas.

One of them was that a leading manager of proven success, who knew the game inside out, no longer had to stand patiently while the boss of a funeral parlour or a chain of laundrettes advised him on the intricacies of zonal defence or why he should spend half a million on a player notorious for having the thirst of Oliver Reed and the sex drive of Hugh Hefner.

Venables argued that the great men of the game, the Busbys, the Cullises, the Shanklys and the Steins, were ultimately on a hiding to nothing, dependent as they were on the whims of the directors. The football man was undervalued, underpaid and about as disposable as a used napkin.

Because he achieved such little headway in the making of these startling points, he tended to drift away from his destiny as a sure-fire candidate for the big league of football management.

He had his moments – winning the Spanish League for Barcelona, and reaching the European Cup final, which he lost on penalties, delivering the FA Cup for Spurs under the shadow of the liquidator, rescuing Middlesbrough from the jaws of the Nationwide League, not to mention taking an England team, which two years earlier had failed to qualify for the World Cup, into the semi-finals of the 1996 European Championship.

But Venables acquired other baggage. He tried his hand at business, with some damaging results, wrote a novel entitled They Used to Play on Grass, and on the way to apparently settling for the rewards of a top television analyst for some reason, not always clearly logical, inspired the enmity of a dedicated group of critics led by the legendary sage of the game, Richard Littlejohn.

However, it may just be that Venables' time has finally come. His appointment as manager of Leeds United, a club with a group of young players talented enough to storm into the semi-finals of the European Cup last year, but utterly ravaged by the effects of the Bowyer-Woodgate trial, gives him a superb opportunity to re-state his gifts as a football man of high intelligence and, vitally, the knack of easily communicating with players of a new generation and – inevitably – a new value system.

Possibly because he represented his country at every level of the game and felt its loss cruelly when he was obliged to give it up through injury, Venables' strongest suit has always been his ability to work with the players, to exploit their strengths and understand their fears. He has been described as a compromise choice, but the more you examine his credentials the more you see that Leeds may have been manoeuvred by circumstances into an inspired selection.

It is as though the game has moved relentlessly towards that place which Venables so prophetically envisaged so long ago. He could see that the football man's role could only become increasingly marginal with the march of business interests. So he tried to get his hands on the power. What he got was an uneasy alliance with Sir Alan Sugar which soon enough threatened to break his reputation if not his life.

The knock on Venables has long been that while he had the talent he did not have the stamina and the single-mindedness to do the kind of job of a Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford. Venables might say, reasonably, that the story of Ferguson in many ways confirmed all those old reservations of his about the point, from a personal perspective, of building the fortunes of one club and, now, one set of shareholders. Certainly it is true that Ferguson's astonishing transformation of United did not remove his need to prosecute like a street-fighter his battle for something like an appropriate reward.

Venables' contract at Elland Road is said to be worth more than £2m over two years, which will be the merest buttons if he indeed turns around a club which is heavily in debt but also – it needs to be said in defence of the former manager David O'Leary – impressively stocked with the most valuable asset of all, young players capable of hitting those peaks of the game where the red ink dwindles and the directors reach down for their fattest cigars.

How many of these assets, including, most vitally, Rio Ferdinand, will remain under his charge is something that will be decided by the plc over the next few weeks. But whatever his resources, the record says that Venables has the touch and the knowledge to make the most of them. He has survived ostracism by the Football Association, a decision which might just have provoked a little second guessing in Shizuoka the other day when Sven Goran Eriksson and Steve McClaren looked on blankly as England charged over the cliff edge against Brazil, and heavy ridicule from his critics. He has been brought back from a TV studio to the heart of a game where his strongest talents always lay.

It is good for Leeds and good for Terry Venables. He has fought many battles without guarantees. This is one that he can wage on his own terms, and they are of the kind about which Sir Matt Busby, for one, could only have dreamed. It is not the least of the victories of a football man who had the courage – and the wit – to go his own way.

Falling foul of sport's Oregon Trail

Long-time victims of the Silverstone Gulag are surely forgiven if they chortle a little at the distress of the Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone.

He raged when his helicopter was mislaid in the scenes of chaos which, for some of us, have simply become a cornerstone of the sporting calender. Of all the miseries heaped on the British sports fan, Silverstone has always been the persecutor in chief. Arriving and departing Silverstone is not just an ordeal. It is a profound test of stoicism. If you can survive it, you have to believe you might have had a chance on the Oregon Trail or the Eastern Front.

By comparison, covering the World Cup in the Far East was a mystical, almost out-of-body experience. Trains and buses arrived on time. There was a surreal suspicion that the needs of the fans had been considered. Meanwhile, Ecclestone discovers the price motor racing fans have long paid for his enrichment. "There are people wandering about there who do not know where they are going," he said. "There aren't enough signs and they are not clear enough."

However, Rob Bain, head of the organisers before his resignation yesterday, claimed that they had received only a handful of complaints from a crowd of 65,000. But then where do you make a complaint at Silverstone? It is just too arduous. You just inch away, like a whipped cur. Dreaming of home.

Unvarnished scepticism

There is a persistent rumour that David Beckham is in receipt of regular advice from top public relations operators.

Frankly, I'm sceptical. Just two weeks or so after jumping over the ball which within seconds was planted in the back of England's net in that critical game against Brazil, he was said to have attended the christening of Liz Hurley's baby after varnishing his fingernails pink. Maybe I've got this completely wrong, but pink fingernails do not strike me as quite the ticket for an England captain. But then nor does jumping over the ball at a vital moment while two games away from a World Cup final.