Manchester United 5-1 Leeds United: What Are We Doing?
What was simple was promotion and staying up and annoying people. Those ambitions generated their own momentum and gave Leeds ample opportunity to piss people off. But what are we even doing now?
What are Leeds United without momentum? A Premier League football club, like we wanted for sixteen years, but not exactly like we wanted. Because we never wanted to be just another Premier League football club. Once you're there, though, what else is there to be?
Leeds United has to be extra. It's not a club that does peace. To talk of stasis in the 2010s when we always finished 15th in the Championship isn't accurate because the club's exceptionalism was consistently expressed through havoc. And we always wanted out — there was always promotion to aim for, or wish for, as became Massimo Cellino's preference. Once Marcelo Bielsa overcame a decade's inertia, Leeds United was a steamroller with a brick on the gas. It smashed through the Derby play-off defeat as if it was hardly there. It steamed right through a pandemic. It obliterated expectations by barrelling up the Premier League to 9th.
It was unexpected but it was also right, for Leeds United. The expectations United have exceeded in the last three seasons were all other people's. Leeds fans got excitement, but not only that, they got their swagger back. Promotion back to the Premier League, in the end, was just something we'd been demanding for sixteen years. It wasn't a favour to us, it was like having stolen jewellery returned. There was more to the last three years than promotion because technically, let's face it, Neil Warnock could have done that — he'd done it before and he loves to talk about it. But he would never have done it in this style, and that has been the difference. For three years, at all times, Leeds United have been proving something to someone, and that has been special, especially when we've been proving it to everyone. Beating Manchester City proved something, Derby County's self-destruction is proving something, even Ben White's abject debut in an Arsenal shirt on Friday night got a few knowing smiles from Leeds fans who never saw him so bad for Leeds. It has been an exhilarating three years not only because we got our Premier League status back, but because we got our club back, and our club is nothing like theirs. It's better, in all the ways that matter.