The attack was sudden, brief and ferocious, like a pack of wild dogs unleashed, a metaphor which dominated 18 weeks of argument in two trials costing more than £15m.
One minute two gangs of youths, one tanked up on alcohol, the other foolishly provocative, were swapping insults and a couple of ineffective clouts. The next, a young student was slumped half-dead on a Leeds street, kicked, beaten and left with six fractures and a face scarred by bitemarks for life.
As Sarfraz Najeib, 21, lay in intensive care in Leeds general infirmary the following day, January 12 last year, there was scant public interest. But six days later Leeds United's chairman, Peter Ridsdale, was called to the phone in Hong Kong to confirm a leak that star players were being questioned by West Yorkshire police and that the attack was being treated as racist. The world turned upside down.
Yesterday saw the denouement: 100 hours' community service for former England international Jonathan Woodgate, convicted of affray (using or threatening serious violence) but cleared of causing grievous bodily harm. His co-star Lee Bowyer was acquitted of both charges. Woodgate's friends from primary school in Middlesbrough, Paul Clifford and Neale Caveney, were also convicted of affray and Clifford received six years for grievous bodily harm.
It had all started innocuously enough. A group of the Premier League side's players were getting plastered in honour of midfield star Bowyer's 23rd birthday. Woodgate had also invited his "Middlesbrough groupies", intensely loyal friends like Caveney, who is now his chauffeur, to come and see Leeds nightspots at his expense.
Already an England cap at 21, the talented Leeds defender had a crucial weakness; with only a solitary GCSE, he had a notoriously short fuse where students were concerned. In April 1999 he was arrested by Cleveland police for allegedly head-butting a student after a pub quarrel in Middlesbrough, and only released when his victim decided not to press charges. He had earlier been banned from Teesside university's student union after threats and rows.
On January 11 Woodgate's buddies drank far too much, too quickly. The group, including Paul Clifford, Neale Caveney and James Hewison, 21, nicknamed the Gorilla, were warned three times at The Square On The Lane pub alone for upsetting other customers - mostly students. Meanwhile Bowyer, older at 23, was tanking up separately with other team-mates. He joined the Woodgate party only at the end of the evening.
Gods
Gods to some, the players considered the VIP lounge of the cavernous Majestyk club to be their territory. On the night of the vicious assault on the Najeibs, it was the obvious place for them to end their drunken evening, but disastrously, it was the regular student night at the club.
There had already been trouble when at midnight Najeib, his older brother Shazad and three Asian friends left the club. A couple of the incidents involved older clubbers, the Leeds United players and their hangers-on.
The Gorilla was the trigger for the evening's final event. After four hours of pub-crawling, Hewison was hopelessly and aggressively drunk. Thrown out of the Majestyk by bouncers, he was prowling resentfully around the club's entrance when the Najeibs and their friends came out. As Muslims, the students had not had any alcohol, and with that sobriety disastrous in a world of drunks, they stared and allegedly made comments about Hewison being unable to take his drink. At that moment, most of the rest of Woodgate's drinking chums came out.
They found the Gorilla swiping ineffectively at the mocking Asians, and then catching Sarfraz on the back of his head. The slight, 21-year-old student shrieked and instinctively lashed back. It was merely having "the temerity to defend himself," said Mr Justice Poole in the first trial.
Someone - but not one of the defendants - shouted: "Do you want some, Paki?" Sarfraz told police, although this solitary example of racism was not given as evidence in court. The Najeibs and their friends ran in panic towards their car at the end of a side-street 200 yards away called Mill Hill. A gang of youths went after them like hounds.
Accounts of the chase in court were muddled and contradictory; in sum, everyone blamed someone else.
There would have to be a "virtual Woodgate", a doppelganger of the real one, for midfield star Lee Bowyer's description to make sense, said prosecutor Nicholas Campbell QC. Claims that Bowyer knelt and bit the fallen Sarfraz "like a dog", concealed the actual biter, Paul Clifford, he added.
Bowyer's QC, Desmond de Silva, meanwhile suggested that drops of Shazad Najeib's blood on Bowyer's Prada leather jacket might have rubbed off from Tony Hackworth, another Leeds player acquitted four weeks into the first trial because of useless identification evidence. It came down to that familiar quandary for juries: who is telling the truth?
Battered
But no one denied that Woodgate and Bowyer were at some stage among the drunken youths careering about near Mill Hill where Sarfraz was caught, hurled against an office dustbin and then brutally battered as he lay on the ground.
Already, however, passers-by were on their mobile phones to police. Mobile phone records of calls after the attack tripped the three convicted defendants' explanations, but it was CCTV cameras which gave the crucial lie to Woodgate and his friends' original claim to have left central Leeds by taxi. A tape showed that instead they were given a lift by another Leeds player, Michael Duberry, who dramatically and unexpectedly became the prosecution's star witness.
Hesitantly but clearly, Duberry insisted that Woodgate had told him on the night of the attack that "he had been in a fight with Asian lads," and that the "Middlesbrough gang" had been shocked when another Leeds player, Michael Bridges, rang Duberry's home in the small hours to say that Sarfraz was "half-dead" and police were swarming over Mill Hill. Duberry added that "my best mate Woody" had begged him not to go into the box.
Crucially, his evidence did not implicate Bowyer, whose dressing habits gave a surreal tone to the players' explanations of why and how they were "there but not there" when the attack took place. The bantam-like player always attended court without socks - "a London thing," he claimed, when dressed in a designer suit and expensive black shoes. His pallid ankles were crucial to his defence against claims that he had destroyed a pair of shoes with buckles which were allegedly used to kick Mr Najeib. What looked like a buckle on CCTV, he said, was actually his naked shin.
Such challenges over visual evidence and identification were the kernel of both trials. The celebrity of the two leading defendants likewise affected almost every exchange in court. Mr de Silva used any opportunity to hint at the disaster for English football if his brilliant client was locked away. Mr Campbell ackowledged, in his summing up at both trials, how "a few moments of misjudgment" would be especially catastrophic for two precociously talented young sportsmen.