Michael Bridges on Leeds United expectations, Mark Jackson and remarkable Australian fanbase

Michael Bridges has one of the best jobs in world football this summer as a member of Leeds United’s touring party in Australia. The former striker has been retired since 2015, hanging up his boots after spells with New South Wales outfits Newcastle Jets and Lambton Jaffas, but he has been invited on the Whites' pre-season tour as a club ambassador.

Together, him and Australian-born Tony Dorigo, have stayed with the first-team squad Down Under, making a number of appearances around both Gold Coast and Brisbane and they’ll make the journey over to Perth this week, too, for the club’s final tour game against Crystal Palace. Bridges has lived in Australia for some time, working as a coach in the A-League and as an analyst for Optus Sport, the channel with the rights to the Premier League, in recent years.

As such, he knows all about the sheer amount of support Leeds have in the Southern Hemisphere and he won’t have been quite as surprised to see more than 40,000 fans, divided evenly between Leeds and Aston Villa, turn up to watch the clash at the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane on Sunday.

“It goes back a long time,” Bridges told Leeds Live when asked about the club’s remarkable fanbase Down Under. “I’ve been asking people why there’s so many Leeds fans over here and you get some interesting comments.

“The strangest one I ever heard was when the black and white TVs were around, Leeds United’s white shirt stood out immaculately on TV. The other side is when I was at Leeds, I signed in 1999-00, it’s incredible to think I was there with Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka, Jacob Burns, Danny Milosevic, Jamie McMaster, Paul Okon, there’s so many Aussies that have played for Leeds United.

“The fanbase is huge and I was very, very surprised