Publicity Pete says he is fed up with Ken Bates for blaming him for the club's financial problems, but on close examination his comments don’t hold water.

Ridsdale has previously admitted the club "lived the dream" of chasing Champions League success by signing players for large transfer fees and paying them big wages, but although the club began to run into financial trouble on his watch, he now denies responsibility for what followed. Leeds were £79m in debt when Ridsdale stepped down, but today he told the Independent that "had Leeds retained their Premier League status its debt would have been manageable and would not have caused a problem”.

But he admitted "we were so impressed with our own success that we allowed [too much] spending. We brought players in and agreed that players would go out and they never did. For example the manager [David O'Leary] wanted Robbie Fowler and the deal was Robbie Keane would go out but that didn't happen. We perhaps signed a couple of players too far."

However, he says that the resulting slide into administration was nothing to do with him. "Leeds went into administration four years after I left and I do not believe it was anything substantial to do with my tenure at Leeds United. Everyone seems to forget that I left in 2003 and there were three other chairmen before Ken Bates took over in 2005, and they never get mentioned. The suggestion that Bates inherited a mess and that it was all my fault appears almost more regularly in the club programme than the residents of Leeds."

Sorry Pete, but it just won’t wash. To be fair to Ken Bates (?!) the biggest problem he had when he took over was the generous long-term contracts that Ridsdale had agreed while he was chairman, the last of which didn’t expire until the summer of 2007. The club couldn’t get out of having to make Premieship level payments, in some cases to players who had left the club, while we were trying to survive of Championship level income.

Bates managed to reduce the wage bill to some extent by paying off Seth Johnson and Eirik Bakke, but even that cost £1 million to get rid of Johnson alone, while the club was saddled with having to pay top brass to Gary Kelly until the day he retired. These contracts are the reason that the club continued to haemorrhage money after Bates had taken over, and the cause of his having to put the club into administration in 2007.

None of the above should be taken to mean that I’m a member of the Pappa Smurf fan club, as I think he’s an awful chairman in many ways. But even that’s ultimately Ridsdale’s fault, as if he hadn’t made such a mess of everything, then Bates would never have got his hands on the club in the first place!

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