Birmingham City 1-1 Leeds United (2-4p): Best medicine
Football is escapism, and a football game is played in one place between the referee's starting and ending whistles, and if everyone remembers that, we might get more games like this.
Leedsista is entirely written by me, a human person, and entirely funded by people like you, Leeds fans, who think decent non-AI, non-clickbait writing about their football team is worth £3 a month to read or £5 a month to listen to the podcast version.
If you enjoy reading what I write, I hope you'll consider becoming a paying member to help keep it getting written.
Find out what you can get with a 30 day free trial:
Rio Ferdinand just wanted to hear the Champions League anthem, and Leeds fans just wanted some flair to excite them. Then Ian Harte stepped up.
The joy of this match came gradually, when it became about two teams trying really hard to beat each other and everything else fell away. Ending in a penalty shoot-out perfectly encapsulated what Leeds United and Birmingham City had been driving towards for more than two hours, and it made Lucas Perri very happy, so all was well for Leeds by the end.
It took some effort to get there. Birmingham City versus Leeds United clashes secondary histories. They were underwhelming visitors to Elland Road for the Peacocks' 100th birthday. They're part of our FA Cup winning story from 1972, but as proof that few bother to remember a 3-0 semi-final win over a Second Division side. We beat them in the 1996 League Cup semi-finals, too. History keeps prodding us to not forget the darkness of Ian Hambridge's death amid riots at St. Andrew's in 1985, lest we repeat, but it's uncomfortable to remember.
For this year's FA Cup fourth round Birmingham threw themselves into the past, wearing a remake of their 1970s 'Penguin' kits — blue, with a white central bib. 'This drop is not simply a nostalgic reveal,' the BCFC website declares, 'but a powerful statement in the Club’s ongoing story, one rooted in belonging, resilience and enduring attitude'. By unveiling it against Leeds, 'Now, a new generation will write their own story'.
At noon, on a Sunday, a kick-off time proving nobody in football actually knows what they're doing. This match came with a trans-Atlantic selling point, of NFL ownerships competing by proxy: Leeds United and the San Francisco 49ers, at Birmingham City and the Las Vegas Raiders. The Brum ownership includes Tom Brady, claimed to be the greatest quarterback of all-time. Brady's celebrity eclipses the sporting element at Birmingham, as Will Ferrell or whichever other random celeb has been outed as an owner does at Leeds. I don't want this: but I'm used to football exploiting this. This match had everything football's owners want to sell. America! Sports! Hollywood! Money! Opportunity!
And it's on at twelve noon! 7am on the east coast, where if people don't fancy a Sunday morning lie-in they might catch the second half! 4am on the west coast, and ain't nobody getting up for that! I hope Birmingham's chairman Tom Wagner, who the crowds wished well with recovering from a recent stroke, was resting soundly when the applause was sent to him in the 13th minute. I expect Leeds United's very welcome and committed fans across the USA were wide awake in their ungodly timezones, and in fact the Peacocks' cross-Atlantic fanbase has probably never been more together since Tyler Adams was here, because at noon on Sunday in Birmingham, 7am on Sunday in New York, 4am on Sunday in San Francisco, absolutely everybody was starting tired.
Birmingham City sure lose their lustre after you're dazzled into waking by Tom Brady's teeth. While the gridironing aspects seemed to be forgotten for this match, the Blues' celebrity has been hyped whenever they've recently vied with Wrexham, with the Midlands' version coming off the lesser. Yes, behind the homely shrugging and fans-by-accident tenure of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in north Wales lurks Shaun Harvey and plenty of money but, scruffier by nature, they've hidden it well.
Read the whole history
4.8/5 on Amazon, 1,400 reviews | 4.6/5 on Goodreads, 282 reviews
'A sports book that left me reading under the lamplight at 1am and begging for more at the end of every chapter. Unheard of'
But Birmingham City haven't bothered pretending. Wayne Rooney. Obnoxious Peaky Blinders stadium plans. A £15m striker, Jay Stansfield, in League One. Bailey Peacock-Farrell. More than £16m spent this January including some on Kai Wagner, Brenden Aaronson's old teammate from Philadelphia Union, once rumoured for Leeds and once, in 2023, banned by MLS for using racist language in a game. While Wrexham are successfully upholding the mirage of aw-shucksing their way to the Premier League, Birmingham City are the loud, bullying jocks making sure everyone knows they're buying their way in.
Or buying their way to 11th in the Championship, so far, but only two points away from Derby County and Paul Heckingbottom's Preston North End in the contest for the last play-off place. (In case you've not looked at the Championship table for a while: Millwall are 3rd. This is not a drill.) Birmingham are on a run of four wins and three draws, kickstarted by beating Frank Lampard Junior's descending Coventry City, and are strong enough to rotate their cup team and still trouble Daniel Farke's rotated Leeds United.
United's line-up put on a first half demonstration of the dangers of getting what we think we want. Everybody's favourites in waiting were here. Wilf Gnonto! Ao Tanaka! Noah Okafor! Facundo Buonanotte! Roll up, roll up, and find out in 45 minutes why Farke's unwillingness to let his reserves of flair loose in the Premier League has, in fact, a point! Leeds were overrun and ineffective. Birmingham should have taken the lead, several times. The best excitement was when Lucas Perri produced a wonderful save from Stansfield's powerful, unexpected strike, diving and wrong-handing it onto the angle of post and bar.
All of this might have been, to an extent that feels unfair on him, Sean Longstaff's fault. Buonanotte didn't do enough to show us anything about anything he might be about. But we've seen before how Gnonto in particular and Tanaka quite often need players, alongside them, to help them into the game. Neither will dictate, but if you set a game up for them, they'll add the necessities. It seemed to be Longstaff's job to build their platform, but Birmingham were too good for him to work alone. Buonanotte went off at half-time so Ethan Ampadu could come into the midfield and start doing everything properly.
Helpfully, Lukas Nmecha soon put Leeds ahead with a proper goal, taking the ball from Okafor and driving towards the net, riding a tackle, waving his long leg over the ball like his stepover was casting a spell above a cauldron. Then he used all his magic might for leathering the size five Mitre Ultimax Pro inside the nearest post.
Then Ampadu, Perri and Sebastiaan Bornauw became the key Leeds players. Bornauw had spent his first half trying to do far too much, passing and moving amid crowds inside his own penalty area, but Ampadu was a clarifying presence for him as for everybody in the second half: tackle, block, win the ball, keep the Blues away. I can't put it better than saying Leeds were playing properly, at last. They needed plenty of defensive spirit against a performance that was by turns dangerous and hilarious from Birmingham's half-time sub, Ibrahim Osman, their own loanee from Brighton, who got into positions to take six shots that all ended badly for him.
Leeds were pushing for another, Birmingham were pushing for one, and the game was hardly interrupted by Birmingham's 89th minute equaliser. Leeds didn't clear a corner properly and Patrick Roberts hammered the ball straight at Perri in the middle of the goal. Thanks to James Justin's head, it ended up in the top corner. That bought extra-time and football that money can't buy, between two teams of players who had made their minds up, ignoring all implications, connotations and outside stress, and down to wanting to beat the other and that was all.
Rather than a stale amble towards penalties, Leeds and Birmingham put on a refreshing half-hour of end to end attacking and defending with no reference beyond the final score. Here I'll risk tarnishing their self-contained efforts by reaching outwards for a point from elsewhere, but you know the end of Liverpool versus Manchester City last week, when City's third goal was disallowed and Dominik Szoboszlai was sent off instead? That was generally agreed as a right intervention by VAR because it ensured fairness across the league table, reducing City's goal difference, suspending Liverpool's player for the next match.
But since when did officials start refereeing the wider context? The ref's job is to referee what is happening on the pitch in front of them. In the moment, the six-and-two-threes between Szoboszlai and Erling Haaland was fairly cancelled out by the ball rolling in the goal and nobody, players fans or staff in that stadium, thought otherwise. But, apparently, the chance that Arsenal might quibble it in four months' time was enough to cancel the joy and make a wider contextual decision and, apparently, we need refs to think about their whistle's impact on the league table before they dare to blow.
Nah. Football is escapism, and a football game is played in one place in one time between the referee's starting and ending whistles. And if, returning to St. Andrew's, everyone there had been cup-minded in the modern way and overthinking about protecting important players from injury, easing off in extra-time to avoid fatigue, overfilling the fixture list with 'unnecessary' cup games, we wouldn't have got a half-hour like this.
I was guilty, in the last round, of giving in to a notion of Leeds going out of the FA Cup because avoiding relegation is more important. But the end of the penalty shoot-out here, when all the Leeds players were smiling and happy, brought back how soothing it can feel to win by any means. Did the triumphant Peacocks feel their tired muscles on the coach home? Not half as much as if they'd lost in ninety minutes, and if we're worried about the next Premier League game, I propose that a bus ride home in a good mood is as good preparation as any.
The whole thing certainly cheered Lucas Perri up. United's goalkeeper is one player I'd like to see taken back to the days when Birmingham City dressed as penguins in earnest. A 28-year-old goalkeeper with one of 1972's combovers would by now be an iconic retro-nostalgic treat. Even better if he'd taken the acrobatic risk of wearing the latest technology in 1970s wigs. As it is he's benefiting from living in an age of technological hair regrowth, a burly hairy presence between the sticks, and living in an age of shoot-outs powered by ops-intelligence.
The greatest part of Perri's day was that his waterbottle chart of players' penalty preferences didn't work, because Birmingham's retro shorts didn't show him the numbers he needed to know who was coming at him next. What was coming towards him was an embodied tale of soccer romance on Valentine's weekend, Tommy Doyle, with his two 1974 League Cup finalist grandfathers: Glyn Pardoe's daughter married his Manchester City teammate Mike Doyle's son, and they had Tommy.
Leedsista newsletter
Free, independent writing about Super Leeds in your inbox
In 2026, all Lucas Perri had against all this were his wits, his instincts and his ability. And maybe the temptation to throw his gloves aside and play bare-handed like the old days before diving, full-length, to save the key pen. What Perri had afterwards, reviewing his useless water bottle with the goalie coaches, was his head back and his mouth open, roaring with laughter. The best medicine! Leeds had won. ⭑彡
New! Hoodies! Money off mugs!
Free members of Leedsista can get £1 off a Leedsista mug (as many times as they like. Paying members can get £2 off. If that's you, check your emails for the codes — if you wish that was you, you can join Leedsista by clicking here.