People now know that I can work under pressure.”If my role has just been to save this football club and someone feels it needs someone else to move the club forward then I’ll have done the job that was maybe more important than anything else. If the expectations now are to get promoted then it is pressure that bares no resemblance to trying to save a club of this stature.”I felt guilty last season. I had brought people in from good clubs with guaranteed wages to a situation where in January we received an e-mail saying wages would not be paid to certain people That’s pressure. This time last year the burden on me was to save this football club. I felt the strain at times and it was a pressure I don’t want to experience again. It is a chance the former Scarborough goalkeeper might never had received but for the predicament of his employers, and the heightened expectation that surrounds him this season is a reflection of his solid start.He explains: “I welcome it.

Scott Carson was sold to pay December’s wages.”We were third favourites to go down and I don’t think we could have survived another relegation We had to halt the slide last year. We did that quite early – we even had a sniff of the play-offs – and I was able to start this season’s building process by the end of March. Now we have a squad that I believe can challenge for a top-six place.”The apprenticeship Blackwell served as assistant to Neil Warnock at Sheffield United and Peter Reid, who initially brought him to Leeds in 2003, provided the grounding to handle such a fraught managerial debut. He was never in the equation to go, but a black hole arose and we needed to get cash in quickly. On the Monday the photographers were taking pictures of James at the training ground; on the Friday he went to Newcastle for £3.8m. The classic was when James Milner was going to be on the front of the Leeds, Leeds, Leeds magazine as the new face of the club in place of Alan Smith. This summer I have been able to sign players of vastly superior quality.”It was a day-to-day existence last season.

“The whole place is so different to 12 months ago, thankfully. I kept thinking, ‘This cannot be right.’ We’ve got state-of-the-art facilities at Leeds and yet we cannot get any players in.”With Blackwell and Ken Bates, who bought 50 per cent of the club for £4.9m three days before a winding-up order was due to be served and now has complete control, blood-letting has given way to an anticipated rebirth “Our starting point now is so different,” the manager says. When was the last time Leeds had £500-a-week players? Probably the early 1980s.”I had 28 debuts last season, which I think is a professional record, 64 trialists, including a Dutch winger who lasted 10 minutes at Macclesfield because I realised he must have been a waiter, and to go through all that was just incredible. A club that could have been sleeping with the goldfishes in January has settled with its creditors, and it illustrates the strides made by Blackwell in 12 months that instead of searching for a squad he now awaits the photograph of a promising one.”This time last year we didn’t even have a bench for the first game against Derby,” he recalls; “So on the Friday at 12.30pm I signed Brian Deane, Craig Hignett and Steve Guppy At times last season I had four players on £500 a week. On it will be £800,000 Robbie Blake, who swapped the Premiership with Birmingham for the expected Elland Road ascent, the England Under-21 left-back Dan Harding, a target for several leading clubs, Steve Stone, United States international Eddie Lewis plus the core of a side that promised more than the eventual 14th place finish of last season. “The picture had to go because all of the players on the top two rows and half of the bottom row are not here any more,” explains the Leeds manager.

“To be honest, we didn’t have enough players to fill the picture at the time so I brought a few kids over from the Academy to make it look a bit better.”
Along with the club’s defiant support, the 47-year-old awaits its replacement with optimism. The official team photograph that once hung above his desk at Thorp Arch, the club’s striking training complex, has gone, though its removal was purely a consequence of progress and not the asset-stripping that accompanied Leeds’ dramatic descent from grace. There is an empty space on Kevin Blackwell’s office wall that reveals all about the changing times at Leeds United. Everton are also set to make a £750,000 offer for the Preston midfielder Dickson Etuhu, who Moyes worked with at Deepdale.. These talks will continue and we remain very optimistic about the outcome.”Everton also hope that Carsley, a former Republic of Ireland international, will extend a contract that currently has only one year remaining, and expect the 17-year-old striker James Vaughan to follow suit with a new three-year deal.