Kalvin Phillips, and Remembering When We Thought It Best to Forget
Only for Kalvin Phillips' sake, I reckoned, should we be trying to remember anything about the otherwise numb blank of the Cardiff game, not letting a happy moment be buried by the bitterness all surrounding it. But it has only worked out that way now thanks to the Yorkshire Pirlo himself.
All the tweet was, was Kalvin Phillips scoring at Elland Road on his home debut, the Sky Bet Championship account bringing it out for Yorkshire Day instead of accepting that Leeds United are in the Premier League now and we no longer claim the Sky Bet. In the words of Mariah Carey, we don't know her.
And nobody knows, from the tweet, what a weird and horrible time that was at Leeds. Now anyone can tweet about that game like history was being made, but at the time people like me were writing about it as an ongoing existential crisis being made real by the eerie absence of Cardiff fans, who were boycotting about only being allocated 500 tickets, and the eerie absence of Leeds fans, who were spending their day drinking ahead of Josh Warrington's contest of skill and science with Dennis Tubieron later that night. Vinnie Jones was doing the ring walk, and Josh was carrying more fight than Leeds United were in those days. Hearing Marching on Together belted out by 10,000 at Leeds Arena that night beat anything from the 22,401 enduring the afternoon's defeat to Cardiff. At Elland Road it was cold, it was raining, it was dark. It was April, but it was Leeds United.
Phillips' goal was weird, a looping Charlie Taylor cross holding up in the wind, Cardiff keeper David Marshall falling over, his defenders looking in the wrong direction, Kalvin concentrating and cushioning the ball into an empty net. Cardiff's two goals were terrible. Marco Silvestri put up a decent display to keep the score down, but nobody would help him at corners: both goals came from flick-ons to the back post, the first buried by Sean Morrison, the second scrambled in by Aron Gunnarsson after Silvestri made a point-blank save. There could have been more like that, and Silvestri got angry about it, but nobody cared. As for attacking, at one point Steve Morison tried to control a pass, and the ball bounced off the back of his kicking leg, onto his standing leg, and out for a throw-in. Neil Redfearn said he'd given them a rocket at half-time, without much effect. "I was more unhappy with the senior players than anything," he said. "The kids give you effort and endeavour."