Beating Hartlepool away next Saturday is, in the greater scheme of things, more important to Leeds United than knocking Tottenham Hotspur out of the FA Cup last night, but no-one who saw this hugely committed and at times frantic cup tie could accuse the United players of harbouring their resources. As at Manchester United in the third round, and 10 days ago at White Hart Lane, the Yorkshire side produced the sort of performance which both belied their status and suggested that if they do not get promoted this season, something will have gone very wrong.

For all their insistence that the pressure was on their opponents, there was still scope for the United players to be nervous in front of an impressively raucous full house of just over 38,000. That much was evident in the first minute, when Andrew Hughes’s attempt to clear Niko Kranjcar’s ambitious diagonal ball simply presented the ball to Jermain Defoe. It was as well for Hughes that the England striker fluffed his shot.

It did not take long for the putative underdogs to settle, however. Picked out by Michael Doyle, Jonny Howson curled a neat shot narrowly over the bar, rather closer to the target than ­Sébastien ­Bassong’s side-footed volley at the other end soon afterwards. On a pitch still greasy after a hour or so of wet snow before ­kick-off, the pace in the opening period was unrelenting.

Defoe was the next to go close, thumping a drive just wide from 18 yards, but again Leeds responded. Leigh Bromby’s looping cross should have been an easy gather for Heurelho Gomes inside his own six-yard box, but Jermaine Beckford’s remarkable spring saw the striker, who already has 24 goals to his name this season, get his forehead above the Spurs goalkeeper’s reaching hands. Somehow the ball came back off the bar.

If Gomes was unconvincing, his opposite number Casper Ankergren was at his best when Defoe beat the offside trap, narrowing the angle and getting enough on the shot to divert it wide. The Danish goalkeeper also had to react quickly when Bromby’s accidental deflection of Gareth Bale’s cross threatened to sneak in at his near post.

So well was Ankergren playing, in fact, that it took what was surely a huge slice of fortune for Spurs to beat him. There was nothing lucky about the run and pull-back with which David Bentley left Defoe free in the penalty area, but a poor first touch meant the subsequent left-foot shot appeared to be badly sliced. With Ankergren hopelessly wrong-footed, the ball drifted over Naylor and inside the angle of post and bar.

Stung by the injustice, for the remainder of the half Leeds flung themselves forward. Moments before the break the pressure finally told, when Beckford’s swivelling volley was saved by Gomes, but Luciano Becchio followed up to turn the ball over the line.

It was nothing less than Leeds deserved after the most hectic 45 minutes of football that Spurs must have been involved with for some time, and the half-time message from Harry Redknapp can only have been to calm down and try and impose their superior passing game. For five minutes after the restart they did exactly that, and should have retaken the lead when Bentley again found Defoe with an intelligent cut-back. Again Defoe failed to connect properly, but the ball came out to Nico Krancjar. The Croatian’s shot was wide, but very nearly turned in by a sliding Peter Crouch.

Again Leeds attempted to up the pace, but the conviction that characterised their first-half efforts was no longer quite so obvious. Sensing the change Spurs began if not to relax, to play with a little more belief, and Ankergren had to save well, first from Michael Dawson and then from a rising Bentley drive. He was finally beaten shortly after the hour, only for Defoe to be ruled offside.

Tottenham were flowing, though, and in the 74th minute Leeds finally broke. It was no great surprise that Bentley, on the right, should be the provider with a low driven cross, nor that Defoe, from close range, should provide the finishing touch.

With the crowd finally quietened, Leeds manager Simon Grayson turned to his bench, but even though Redknapp named three academy players among his substitutes, the gulf in resources was still obvious. With ­Wilson Palacios and Luka Modric remaining on the bench, Redknapp sat back as the tackles, ­hitherto hard but clean, took on a nastier edge. Defoe’s ­hat-trick, completed in stoppage time when he rounded Ankergren who had pushed forward, made the game safe.

FA CupLeeds UnitedTottenham Hotspurguardian.co.uk

With their striker the star of this year’s FA Cup, the Elland Road club have finally shed their traumatic history

Leeds are a club much copied. They built a debt mountain long before Portsmouth, Newcastle or West Ham, pioneering the suicidal wage bill and lunatic transfer budget for others to emulate. After the reckoning has come the rise, as if they exist these days to provide hope for clubs who endure near-death experiences.

But there is more to them than that, as they demonstrated by confronting Tottenham’s aristocratic pretensions face on and earning a replay through Jermaine Beckford’s penalty in added time, his second contribution in a thrilling tie. Their fans are as truculent as ever and the old fighting spirit of the 1970s has returned to erase the gauchness of the Peter Ridsdale years. The League One promotion race is their real battleground, but the FA Cup has quickened the pace of self-recovery. Beckford, who has scored against Manchester United and Spurs in successive rounds, has used the competition as a personal finishing school.

The third-round victory over United at Old Trafford was the real attention-grabber, but this is close behind. Those who occasionally look farther down the list of 92 professional clubs than the Premier League’s top four already knew Leeds were calling the shots in League One. But the victory over England’s champions altered the dynamic in a partly unhelpful way. Until Beckford outran Wes Brown to hustle United out, Leeds could play the Phoenix role, plotting a way back up through the divisions. By the time they reached north London, though, Norwich were on their tails at the top of the table and the nation was tuning in expecting another prime-time upset.

That was seldom on the cards here, but how Spurs will dread the rematch at Elland Road. Two of the top six defences in the English game have now failed to cope with Beckford, a former Chelsea trainee who dropped all the way to Wealdstone to restart a stalled career. In modern football no one expects a young striker to be able to fall so far off the chart and still make a name for himself as Beckford has. This is a big torch to carry. It lights the way for hundreds of other youngsters discarded by Premier League academies. If he carries on this way, he can look higher than Newcastle United, his most likely destination in this transfer window before he elected to stick with Leeds for the rest of this campaign.

Beckford is the individual billboard star of this year’s FA Cup and Leeds are the big romantic tale in a competition that squeals for our attention in a schedule crammed with Premier League and Champions League drama.

The Yorkshire revival is back on course. A draw and two defeats since the Old Trafford ram-raid had broken a sequence of 17 games unbeaten. Coincidence? A fair extrapolation is that the third-round win interfered with the team’s ascent. Cup runs often work as a distraction for clubs bent on promotion. Mischievously, some of us wondered whether Simon Grayson’s men motored to White Hart Lane thinking the best result would be a hiding.

If so they hid it well, as an early Tottenham onslaught subsided, and the 4,500 travelling fans proclaimed a first-half counter-surge after a torrid opening chapter. “We’re not famous any more,” sang the Leeds throng, subverting a chant many opposing crowds have tried to tickle them with since they plunged from a Champions League semi-final in 2001 to a league housing Yeovil and Leyton Orient.

Unlike United, Spurs saw the upstarts coming. Forewarned, by the Manchester miracle, Tottenham were in threat-elimination mode. Leeds assumed the Alamo pose. Grace under pressure was impossible. Patrick Kisnorbo’s head, bandaged from the start, was emblematic of their defiance.

After 25 minutes of north London bullying, though, Leeds decided it was time to explore the other half of the pitch, and Beckford twice forced gymnastic reactions from Heurelho Gomes. No longer in command, Tottenham’s millionaires knew they would have to grapple. Premier League players are meant to be softer nowadays, but they all carry memories of when football was always feisty (in their pre-professional years) and Harry Redknapp’s team welcomed the chance to play old-school Cup football. Jermaine Jenas might as well have been reading a book when Leeds first equalised, but otherwise Spurs applied themselves valiantly. Even Roman Pavlyuchenko, he of the languid air, recognised the urgency of Tottenham’s position, restoring his team’s lead. But still to come was Beckford’s meatily executed penalty.

In an interview with the Yorkshire Post last week, Ken Bates recalled being wheeled out as the new chairman five years ago by Gerald Krasner, who asked: “Do you want to shake hands for the photographers?” Bates replied: “Not now I’ve seen the books.”

Leeds were losing £120,000 a week and were practically wearing the taxman like a rash. “The finances were completely out of control,” Bates recalled on Friday. Now, the average gate is 25,000 and the club filed a £4.5million profit last season.

The assumption that Leeds will glide straight through the Championship next season is flawed, because they have achieved the current rebirth without risking a repeat of the luxury goldfish years. Run prudently, they will encounter one of football’s deepest mysteries: how do teams escape a division where a kind of communism applies? Most teams are equal, and most can beat any other on any Saturday.

But that’s another mission. First Leeds needed to regain their self-respect, their identity. The twinkly team of the David O’Leary years has retreated into a kind of infamy. This one is an older diagram of machismo, with touches of prettiness. You look at Leeds now and no longer see a history of trauma. You see a replay and Beckford writing his name across the sky.

FA CupTottenham HotspurLeeds UnitedPaul Haywardguardian.co.uk