57: Lars Leese, Barnsley, Merlin’s Premier League 98 Official Sticker Collection

It’s been over seventeen years since my GCSE English Literature exam and I have to confess I have little to no memory of it. I do remember the weighty poetry anthology that accompanied me into my school’s fairly knackered sports hall and several lessons spent trying to find parallels between the miserable dirges of Simon Armitage and the established epics of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley. Somehow this didn’t convince me to pick something else for my A Levels but there we go. Today’s students don’t have the luxury of bringing their anthologies in with them and thus miss out on the attempted annotations and classmates’ penis drawings when faced with questions like this:

Write about both poems and their effect on you. Show how they are similar and how they are different.

Sadly the likelihood of coming across the work of Ian McMillan in a GCSE exam is fairly low but, for the sake of it, let’s consider one of his poems’ effect on us:

Lars Leese, tall as trees

that grown in Wombwell Wood.

Lars Leese, listen please:

We think you’re very good.

Clearly Lars Leese was an impressively tall bloke (6’ 5”) who was quite talented at something (goalkeeping) and perhaps had earned the love and admiration of some people who lived in an area near Wombwell Wood (Barnsley). The fact that McMillan penned this verse having only seen a picture of the German shot stopper suggests that he must have been even more impressive than we first thought. Perhaps it’s not a bad idea to ignore the fact that his name was actually pronounced ‘Layz-eh’ and therefore didn’t actually rhyme with trees. Maybe it’s also worth skipping over the fact that he only played twenty games for Barnsley across a two-year spell. Clearly though, when he arrived in Yorkshire, there was a lot of promise and expectation surrounding him.

Having walked out on his youth career with FC Koln Lars Leese had impressed in the lower leagues in his native Germany becoming something of a local legend with SPFR Neitersen and VfB Wissen working all the while for a computer company. After Wissen were relegated at the end of the 1994/95 season he moved to Viktoria Koln where his strong performances attracted the attention of the Bundesliga big boys. A trial at Borussia Dortmund was followed by another at Bayer Leverkusen who took the then 26-year-old to the Rhineland ahead of the 1996/97 campaign. Leese, and his soon to be teammates, breathed a sigh of relief when the club avoided relegation on the final day of the 1995/96 season but improved drastically the following year to finish second in the Bundesliga just two points behind Bayern Munich. Signed as the club’s third choice goalkeeper the closest Leese came to first team action was substantial spells on the substitutes’ bench so it came as a shock when he was informed of the £250,000 bid made for his services by newly promoted Barnsley of the English Premier League in June 1997.

Barnsley’s first team squad was somewhat lacking ahead of the club’s first ever season in the top flight but the sense of optimism throughout the town ahead of the 1997/98 campaign was palpable. Leese was shocked when over a hundred excited fans turned out to see him open the new branch of a travel agents a few weeks before the start of the season and, despite a somewhat frosty welcome from their predominantly British teammates, his presence alongside Macedonian striker Georgi Hristov, Slovenian Ales Krizan and South African Eric Tinkler was heralded by an excited local fan base. Two wins in their first four games suggested that Barnsley might be able to compete at the top level but a run of six straight defeats provided a more accurate assessment of the team’s capabilities. Leese and David Watson rotated the goalkeeping duties as manager Danny Wilson aimed to keep the pair on their toes but, although both men were hardly to blame for the club’s poor performances, the lack of stability between the sticks hardly helped the side’s cause. Having fallen into the relegation zone after defeat to Wimbledon in September Barnsley never recovered and, besides a famous victory against Liverpool at Anfield in which Leese was named man of the match, they were relegated with a game to spare thanks to a Theo Zagorakis’ goal in a 1-0 loss away to Leicester City.

The shock departure of manager Danny Wilson to Yorkshire rivals Sheffield Wednesday ahead of the 1998/99 campaign elevated veteran striker John Hendrie to the role of player-manager and significantly restricted Leese’s game time at Oakwell. Scotsman Hendrie had been one of the least taken by the increasingly international flavour in the Barnsley dressing room and the ringleader for pranks and ‘banter’ which often went over the heads of the new arrivals. Although Leese performed well he never felt assured of his place and, after a defensive mix up with Matty Appleby during a 2-0 defeat to Port Vale, found himself in Hendrie’s office for a dressing down. Although the German kept his place in the side for the next game he was soon replaced by the inexperienced Tony Bullock and at the turn of the year was informed by Hendrie that his contract would not be renewed. Although Leese never played for The Tykes again he outlasted his manager who was sacked in April with Barnsley mired in mid-table mediocrity. However, the German keeper was not to know that he had played his last professional game when the season came to its close.

After a year of struggling to find a club Lars Leese decided he had had enough of professional football and found employment working as a salesman for a pencil company. Thankfully the draw of the game was too much to keep him completely away from the goalmouth and he returned to amateur action with his former club Viktoria Koln for the 2000/01 season before heading to Borussia Monchengladbach’s reserves. Two years later he headed to FC Koln where he spent a further two seasons captaining their reserves and making the occasional appearance on the first team’s bench. After retirement in 2005 Leese moved straight into management with SV Bergisch Gladbach 09 and, after two spells with SSVg Velbert, took up the reins at DSK Koln in 2015 where he remains to this day.  His meteoric rise to the Premier League has all of the ‘Roy of the Rovers’ glamour of the likes of Jamie Vardy but his sudden disappearance back  into relative obscurity provides a far more interesting story. Much like my English Literature GCSE I remember very little about Leese’s time in the Premier League but, thanks to Emlyn’s excellent choice of birthday present and the writing of Ronald Reng, I got a great insight into some of the brutal realities of professional football. If you’re looking for a good read look no further than Reng’s ‘The Keeper of Dreams’ which documents Leese’s life and career brilliantly.

Lars Leese, decent keeper and definitely a massive geezer.