Leeds United 2-2 Everton: Normal For Us
I was nervous as a sixteen year old going to games, when I didn't know the unwritten rules, and I was nervous now, walking down under the station and over the river, not sure if the rules were still the same after eighteen months.
This was a great game and that helped keep the blues, and the Blues, from winning a rainy day. Elland Road was full again and that was the making of a score draw, that might have felt like an underwhelming result if we'd watched it on TV.
A crowd makes a difference to a football match but being there makes a difference to the fans. Leeds United need this, in what could be a fairly aimless season. All the anger we couldn't dissipate after Old Trafford, because of the background knowledge that losing so heavily probably won't change anything about the overall season, found its solution against Everton. It didn't matter as much that we didn't win, because the game was an experience.
This was the Premier League as I remember it. Not the seventeen years ago version, that Mateusz Klich bridged by scoring an equaliser here, Elland Road's first home goal in the top flight since Alan Smith's penalty against Charlton. Maybe we should have chaired Klich around the pitch, too. That goal was for Leeds in relegation, but this match took me back to ascendent Leeds, the late-nineties version I grew up with, the end of George Graham's management and the start of David O'Leary's, before the babies were title challengers. I felt it as I walked to Elland Road in the rain, because of how unfamiliar that has become. I was nervous as a sixteen year old going to games, when I didn't know the unwritten rules, and I was nervous now, walking down under the station and over the river, not sure if the rules were still the same after eighteen months. The streets on Saturday weren't how they've been for a year and a half, they were packed with people and R2 buses and chants and drunks, and the new pavement liveliness took me back to the energetic thrill I got from being a kid, in the corners of rough pubs I'd never dare enter if I wasn't at the football, nursing a pint of bitter and hoping the police don't come checking ID. I didn't feel the rain then or now.
Any worries about how the crowd would adapt to all the emotions of the day, from remembering lost players and friends to crying with anger faced with a touchscreen drinks order point, was soon eased. Football crowds adapt easily. In the minutes before the players came out, Leeds fans taunted Everton with songs that, for legal reasons, I'm better not discussing. Then there was a full-throated rendition of Marching on Together as the two teams lined up, the Leeds players revelling in it, the Everton players forced into listening. Before kick-off, a list of names was read out, to stadium wide applause, paying tribute all at once to more people than anyone could do justice to, or be expected to cope with. I wonder where Eddie Gray was at that moment, and I hope he felt glad about the love as well as sad about so much loss. Then an anti-racism gesture was applauded, the game started, and 'Get into 'em, fuck 'em up' was the first in-game song of Elland Road's post-lockdown era. Within minutes, Everton were being taunted again, and the South Stand was sure a 'fat ginger bastard' in the away end was going to cry in a minute. Because all that is what football crowds do. You can't explain it, you can't really say it's a good thing, especially if you're a big-boned scouse redhead come all that way. When commentators say they've missed crowds, then correct themselves because obviously they don't miss everything about crowds, they know that honestly you can't separate it. It's hard to think of any other phenomenon encompassing so many switching sentiments, like those crowd shots of Manchester United fans when they heard about Aguero's goal, or like when Leeds fans move seamlessly through remembrance, support and piss-taking in successive breaths.