"This was proof that we do have what it takes. We have had a sing song and a cabaret in the hotel to put us all in good heart. I said we would win the World Cup and I do not take a word of that back."
Football has no solution. It's an imperfect game about failure, and about emotions that can be bad as well as good and validate the fans either way. That's why I don't think Bielsa wants to be done with it just yet.
-ista | a specialist, enthusiast or advocate of a belief or principle
"I was so excited I knocked the glass of water I had been drinking right across the room," Allan's mother Alice told the Walsall Observer.
From Ao Tanaka labouring morning to night to Gabriel Gudmundsson shouting out the wife: it's not a normal World Cup, so it's made for Erling Haaland.
It might have drifted across the goal, it might have drifted into the goal, it might have dropped to one of the forwards rushing in, and Big Jack Charlton had only a split second to decide. He reached up, and punched the ball away from the goalmouth.
Football has no solution. It's an imperfect game about failure, and about emotions that can be bad as well as good and validate the fans either way. That's why I don't think Bielsa wants to be done with it just yet.
Too often in football nobody is happy, or only the worst people are happy, so if Pascal Struijk is happy and Leeds and Brighton and Georginio Rutter, let's just be happy too.
Three former Leeds managers went to the World Cup, one remains. And obviously that's the irritating one. But at least Thomas Christiansen has plenty to feel proud of.
A Swedish fan suggested Northern Ireland get themselves ready for West Germany in training: 'To prepare yourselves for it you should collect many small boys with cow bells, cow horns and other instruments to keep up a steady racket.'
Watching Antoine Semenyo, and thinking, maybe we should have given Dave Hockaday another chance. Are these the fantasies a World Cup is supposed to give us? Maybe Leeds fans have no other kind.
Cush was an ironic new hero for the Peacocks, a 5ft 4in 'pocket Hercules' taking over from 6ft 3in 'Adonis of a youth' John Charles. But he'd caught Leeds' eye in an international for Northern Ireland, when he had tamed John Charles' attempts for Wales.