Leeds United 4-0 Bristol City: Football is better than everything
Going up and staying up are two different things; proposing and building are two different things; 1st and 2nd are two different things; football and everything else are two different things. From everything over the last week, I'll take the football.
Football has a curious self-defeating nature and was trying, for most of the last week, to let everything else that isn't football piss on Leeds United's party before the pyro along the Lowfields could clear and give glimpses of the CGI Elland Road of the future.
There was Daniel Farke, the celebratory firebeast of the city, dancing with coffee and cake and a few other drinks after achieving the objective of the season. Here he was now, a week later, the most under pressure manager in the Championship, rumoured to be sackable from atop the league. The EFL got its own kick in by naming Scott Parker, leader of the runners-up in waiting, their manager of the year. Fine, can we still have a celebratory parade? We can, but apparently that may be construed, on social media, as tinpot. If United don't finish 1st, some dour souls will want the first parade since 1992 quite literally bantered off. The city could use a cheerful party: part of the week's general bringdown was a loser in Headingley attacking women on the Otley Run. It's a relief far greater than promotion that this didn't go the way he wanted.
Back at the EFL Awards, Dan James didn't win Championship player of the year so presumably would have been made to play against Bristol City in sackcloth and ashes, had he been fit: the shame of it. Perhaps Gus Hamer's prize made up, in Sheffield, for the disrespect shown to them and Chris Wilder by Pat Bamford and Jayden Bogle last week. Pat through his hangover had to phone the Sheffield United manager and apologise to the man who once got drunk at his own party and called Bamford a 'muppet from Leeds'. Burnley, meanwhile, after celebrating promotion on their own pitch, went to London and smashed QPR the way Leeds had smashed Stoke. The Clarets are turning on the style now, with promotion settled, when it doesn't really matter. But if it means they win the Championship title ahead of Leeds you can bet it will matter very much. Back to the beginning then, for Daniel Farke's future is being reported as far from settled yet.
Football! Save us!
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Football did save us. At times this season Leeds United's football has needed tension for it to work properly. The last minutes against Sheffield United and Sunderland were some of the best minutes; The Bad Draws, though bad at the time, at least brought the games to life. Leeds won ten games 2-0, easily. Four more were won 3-0 but felt like the 2-0s, with cherries. They've been leading at half-time in more than half their games this season, and won just under half their games to nil. What little drama there was tended to be self-inflicted. Despite all the pressure to deliver promotion to the Premier League this season, it might have been more of a fun time if Leeds had been a little less good at it.
Bristol City's visit to the going-up Leeds let us feel what it's like to watch all this while relaxed. Everyone cares about winning the title, but not enough to spoil simply going up for its own sake, so from among the yellow scarves and the yellow shirts came a ninety minute chorus of celebratory song including, even, long awaited chants for Daniel Farke. A farewell serenade, or a call for him to stay? Remembering how the Kop used to chant David O'Leary's name during mundane mid-table Premier League matches made me wonder why the bar has been so high for singing for Farke; and feeling how the singing improved the atmosphere had me wondering more. Then again, the songs that really lifted the place were, cheekily inspired by Pat Bamford, about Sheffield United's manager, not ours. Based on the 'concept' images of 'Enhanced Elland Road' the club was sharing during the day, the West Stand might not make it to seventy years of service, and this would have been a fine night for letting the bulldozers move in next morning. Football is never that neat, so the next aim is to keep whatever is happening on the pitch decent enough for long enough that, first, the redevelopments can be paid for, and second, the fans aren't minded to start tearing the old stands down themselves.
The game on the pitch was oddly irrelevant and Bristol City helped, like Stoke City last week, by not getting too involved. Only their goalkeeper, an unrelated O'Leary named Max, did anything of note, standing up like Dino Zoff to a barrage of shots at the start of the second half. It's hard to say whether the Robins' red-cheeked embarrassment was their own incompetence — mind they're 5th and could go through the play-offs to the Premier League — or the Peacocks' habitual dominance. I vote the latter. United played the way they've played all season, dominating possession, creating chances, not scoring as many of them as they could or should, and strolling off with three easy points. But they were better here, as they were against Stoke, partly through practice as they're bound to be better at this after 45 games than after five (the solitary home defeat, that was, to Burnley). And partly because the relaxed atmosphere of celebration helped them revel. They could play here without the fear of their own crowd that so upset Ao Tanaka around the Luton and Middlesbrough games, twenty days ago, when the city's current faves were almost run out of town in shame.
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Leeds, playing like they have all season, finally had the good vibes backdrop Tanaka has been craving. And they played in it all the way until they'd scored four goals. They might have made do with two. The first came after fifty passes during more than two minutes when Bristol City didn't touch the ball. There were olés for Leeds in the second half, but they could have started here. Eventually Jayden Bogle took things into his own hands by forcing Junior Firpo into heading a wing-to-wing pass down to Manor Solomon and lifting the tempo: cued up, Solomon passed centrally to Joel Piroe, who laid the ball off into Brenden Aaronson's path, and he beat a player but his shot didn't beat the 'keeper. So, a couple of corners, and after the second was scrambled clear, Solomon spotted Tanaka unmarked away from everybody and swung a high cross to dip at the back post where Tanaka could, with a sweet first touch, knock the dropping ball in the net. That was after twenty minutes of the first half. Ten minutes into the second half United eschewed the build up for one simple lovely pass from Piroe, turning in his own half and like Pablo Hernandez — this isn't heresy, this was worthy of Pablo Hernandez — splitting the Bristol defenders with one swoop of the ball and surrounding them with space where Wilf Gnonto went running. He paused, controlled, picked his spot and picked a shot the goalie couldn't cope with, into the corner of the net.
Just for consistency I'd have taken an eleventh 2-0 win of the season, but Largie Ramazani was inspired by the party to double the lead. He came off the bench with ten minutes to go and Firpo put the ball across for him to finish with his first act; his second act was a celebratory somersault. In the last thirty seconds of stoppage time he ran off a defender's shoulder, glinting in Ilia Gruev's eye, and brought down Gruev's long high pass on the edge of the penalty area. As the ball bounced, Ramazani didn't wait; he loves an early strike and struck one here, low across the goalie, his second and United's fourth, and maybe Farke was right to use Isaac Schmidt for seeing out the necessary results, saving Ramazani for these moments when everyone is happy and he can do what he likes.
Everybody was happy. Even some of the Bristol City fans did a post-match conga as Elland Road welcomed the Leeds players back on to the field, one by one, and gave them glitter cannons and champagne and house anthems to dance to. Sixteen-year-old Harry Gray stormed around with a scarf tied around his forehead, dangled himself from the South Stand crossbar, and had his photo taken with great-uncle Eddie, who may have been sent on the pitch to tell him to behave. More senior professionals like Ethan Ampadu and Wilf Gnonto were busy playing tig. Young people chasing each other around a field is football in a nutshell though so this was all good. The sweetest goofball grin of the night was Sam Byram's as he Leeds-saluted to the South Stand as if he'd only just been given permission. When he came back to Leeds, he talked about being forced out by Massimo Cellino in 2016, how if he'd known Steve Evans would soon be gone and Marcelo Bielsa would soon be here, he'd have ignored West Ham and stayed. "There are some regrets that I missed out on getting Leeds promoted, but I feel like this is a second chance to achieve that," he said.
This is not Leeds United's first promotion...
Relive the glories of 2020 and 1990 — and 1964, 1956, 1932, 1928 and 1924, too.
Once upon a time in 2015, in a former sort-of life, I was involved in cajoling Byram up Beggar's Hill to have his photo taken, for a season ticket campaign, with Elland Road in the background. "Wow," he said, as he looked down on the old stadium from an angle I guess he'd rarely seen. "Looks good from up here, doesn't it?" Ten years later the answer to that is still yes, especially when the Old Peacock Ground is clouded with blue and yellow pyros, glitter, fireworks and a haze of joy. And ten years later the answer to that is also no, compared to the giddiness inspired by the idealised computer graphics of what it might soon look like now Sam Byram, et al, have returned Leeds United to the Premier League. Returning and staying are two different things; proposing and building are two different things; 1st and 2nd are two different things; football and everything else are two different things. From everything over the last week, I'll take the football, because I think it's the football that made Sam Byram happy, and me happy, and hopefully you happy, and in a few days in Plymouth it will be football that can make us feel happy some more, if this odd game can for another ninety minutes overcome its self-defeating habit of letting everything else dictate. Give the ball to Ramazani, to Tanaka, to Byram. Let them dictate our happiness and we just might be okay. ⭑彡