Bowyer back to give Ridsdale the day off

High-profile defector returns to a chorus of disapproval

There has been trouble at home for months. The family has been riven by rifts. You've had to sell the silver. And just when you start to patch up the marriage, who should roll up on the doorstep? Not a counsellor but a prodigal son, a black sheep in West Ham clothing.

Lee Bowyer was back at Elland Road yesterday. It might have been the first of two potentially unhappy returns for Leeds United, if only they had not made it a condition of Jonathan Wood-gate's transfer to Newcastle that he would not be fit to play against his old club here a week on Saturday. The next Premiership match after that for Terry Venables and his depleted side, though, just happens to be at Old Trafford: a chance to catch up with the most expensive of the cashed-in crown jewels, the £30m Rio Ferdinand.

Bowyer, of course, would have been the first to go but his proposed £9m move to Liverpool last summer fell through at the eleventh hour and a month ago he went to West Ham for £100,000. That's a discount of 98.9 per cent compared to the 20 per cent offered on goods in the club shop's sale.

Even at such a knockdown price, the Leeds old boy has been struggling to prove his worth for West Ham. Tomorrow he gets an injection to ease the ankle problem that has been troubling him since his move. Yesterday he got the needle with a vengeance from the Leeds faithful. There were signs, though, of the Bowyer of old.

He didn't quite stamp himself on proceedings as emphatically as he did on his last appearance at Elland Road, when the spot of flamenco he performed on the head of the Malaga defender Gerardo prompted a six-match European ban. But in the cause of resuscitating his new club's battle for survival, the new Hammer provided much of the hope yesterday, with his probing runs and prompting passes on the right of midfield. He might have opened the scoring in the fourth minute had Michael Duberry, of all people, not scythed the ball from his feet on the left edge of the Leeds penalty area.

Bowyer also opened up the Leeds defence with a brilliant crossfield ball that very nearly led to a Joe Cole equaliser early in the second half. He then proceeded to talk his way into referee Dermot Gallagher's book, to the audible delight of the supporters who twice voted him their player of the season.

Like Ferdinand, Venables and Peter Ridsdale before him, the man from Poplar became the latest figure to complete a full-circle gamut of public estimation at Elland Road. A hero when he was on trial, accused of assaulting an Asian student, the West Ham No 5 was given the full vilification treatment for his act of "betrayal" in spurning a £40,000-a-week, five-year deal.

From the first whistle to the last, Bowyer's every touch was accompanied by a loud hail of boos. There was a melody of homecoming ditties, too, ranging from "You're just a shit Cockney bastard" to "Bowyer's going down". The latter refrain was once a familiar one to Bowyer's ears, though not sung with a West Yorkshire venom. Still, it must have been music to Ridsdale's ears, the Leeds chairman having been temporarily eclipsed as public enemy number one on his home turf.

There is always someone getting a hard time at Leeds, it seems. Was it not Dickens who called it the beastliest place on earth? Charles Dickens, that is. Not to be confused with Alan Dickens, the one-time West Ham midfielder.