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.
