Soccer: O'Leary will be happy to avoid glamour tie

Leeds boss David O’Leary is hoping for the luck of the draw when Leeds are pulled out of the UEFA Cup third-round hat later today given the fears surrounding his squad.

O’Leary is guaranteed to be without Mark Viduka and Harry Kewell for the first leg on November 22 as the Australian internationals are on World Cup play-off duty.

If Leeds are also drawn away from home first then Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate will be ruled out given the re-trial at Hull Crown Court is certain to be ongoing by that date.

So the last thing O’Leary needs is to face a credible opponent in the last 32 but at least Leeds are again seeded, ensuring they avoid facing any of the eight teams to drop out of the Champions League and into this stage of the UEFA Cup.

‘‘I fancy somebody easy in the next round - that would be great,’’ said O’Leary as he looked ahead to the draw in Geneva.

‘‘We don’t have the Australian lads and on top of that there’s the court case going on which means we could be without Lee and Woody.

‘‘I will have a very depleted squad, and that’s providing I’ve no injuries by then. So it’s already going to be very hard.’’

Leeds certainly made hard work of disposing of Troyes, the French minnows who made sure the biggest game in their short history lived up to its billing.

The small town club, whose remarkable ‘Wimbledon-esque’ rise through the French League system over the past few seasons has been a fairytale, so nearly embarrassed O’Leary’s multi-million pound team.

Although O’Leary was without influential skipper Rio Ferdinand, Bowyer, Woodgate, Michael Bridges and Lucas Radebe, Leeds should not have come so precariously close to bowing out of the competition.

United almost paid the price for their devil-may-care attitude when leading 4-1 in the first leg at Elland Road and when they were up against 10 men, so it is no wonder Troyes coach Alain Perrin described his unbeaten Premier League opponents as ‘‘lucky’’.

After Mark Viduka’s sixth goal of the season and his fifth in the last six games had cancelled out Gharib Amzine’s stunning eighth-minute opener, Leeds were staring at the exit signs when David Hamed and Jerome Rothen made it 3-1.

Patrice Loko’s 63rd-minute miss with only Nigel Martyn to beat will haunt him for a long time to come, and proved the turning point as Robbie Keane spared Leeds’ blushes 13 minutes from time by heading home his seventh goal of the season.

It is a good job Eirik Bakke told the Republic of Ireland international Leeds needed another to go through otherwise it would have been a case of au revoir for United.

Midfielder Bakke, who passed a fitness test on a knee injury just before kick-off, revealed: ‘‘Robbie scored a priceless goal.

‘‘But the fact is he had only asked me a few minutes beforehand ‘do we need another?’ I told him ‘yes’ and then thankfully he pops up and scores one.’’

O’Leary conceded to being a worried man before Keane’s strike, the most important goal the 21-year-old has scored since his arrival from Inter Milan last December.

Keane admits the heat was on. He said: ‘‘We knew at 4-2 up they were going to come at us, and with the crowd behind them there was a lot of pressure.

‘‘I certainly thought they were the better team on the night and that we were under the cosh for most of the game. We were obviously very worried at 3-1. At that stage we were out of the UEFA Cup.

‘‘But lucky enough, we got the second goal. I looked at the linesman straight away to make sure I wasn’t offside, and luckily the flag stayed down.

‘‘We know we didn’t play as well as we can do, but the most important thing is we are through to the next round.’’