Sunderland 1-0 Leeds United: We can’t just be normal

It’s turning out that we picked a bad year for our weird, infuriating football club to start being the one thing we’ve craved all century: quite normal. You can tell the story of Leeds United since the millennium by pointing to any date on the calendar and asking, why couldn’t we just have been normal? But now normal is here, normal might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Marcelo Bielsa did not save us, and the Premier League did not change us. Only at Leeds could a manager carrying the decades old nickname of ‘El Loco’ come to seem like a balm of sanity on the cracked nerves of our club. Of the four managers who tried to follow him last season, two are now podcasters, one is manager of Lincoln City, and the other seems to have just given up. None could cope with how the frenzied neuroses of Andrea Radrizzani, Victor Orta and Jesse Marsch combined to catapult United as far from safety as they could. Imagine Marsch trying his quivering ‘let’s not be stressed, guys’ on Orta, while Radrizzani was squealing angry tweets aloud and Angus Kinnear wept down the phone to Sam Allardyce, telling him he missed what they had at West Ham. They were putting the dismay in dysfunctional even before Chris Armas knocked on the door to ask for his pay.

Things have changed since the summer, and the executives at Leeds now have LinkedIn profiles resembling professional resumes, where Jesse Marsch’s looked like a cry for help. Paraag Marathe is impeccably presented, and his associates Morrie Eisenberg and Robbie Evans have emulated him perfectly by not presenting themselves at all. Gretar Steinsson and Nick Hammond have popped up with the players Daniel Farke fancied – a Spence here, a Rodon there, a sprinkling of Ampadu, Kamara and Piroe – while together they muted any potential mutiny as Gnonto was almost led off the ship. The message being sent from the backroom is almost paranoiacally clear and consistent: we are NORMAL PEOPLE who are running a NORMAL FOOTBALL CLUB in a VERY NORMAL WAY, and the back office is backing the front office, which is fronting. Everybody is here to find players, help them win games, sell tickets and shirts, get promoted, and build a bigger stadium. And nobody is going to panic and get Neil Warnock in here if it looks like taking longer than six months.

Which is where the awfulness of all this rears its head. United’s 1-0 defeat at Sunderland was a very normal Championship result from a very normal Championship game. Two good teams playing fairly well, frustrating each other, hoping for individual brilliance in attack, getting it instead in defence – big saves by Anthony Patterson and Illan Meslier – until the game was settled by a moment’s lapse into ricochet. It was only the Peacocks’ fourth defeat of the season, and last season Sheffield United were promoted while losing eleven games, the season before Fulham were champions while losing ten. The defeat put United’s points average down to 1.95 per game, but beating Coventry this weekend would put it back up to exactly 2. Last season Sheffield United’s average was 1.98. Fulham’s title winning rate was 1.96. When we went up, in 2020, it was with 2.02 points per game, ahead of West Brom and their 1.8. If Leeds United want promotion this season, even taking Sunderland into account, Daniel Farke and the team are going about it in a very normal way.

What the absolute hell, then, about Ipswich Town and Leicester City above us? They both have points averages above 2.4. At the rate they’re going, they could both break Reading’s Championship points record of 106. It’s a freakshow, a Premier League – League One sandwich with Leeds United’s tilt at normality not so much stuck in the middle as being squeezed out and down the sides, leaving an auto-promo top two of bread slices crammed together. Only a weirdo would eat that but it’s on the menu for 2024 and Leeds are being made to suffer for knuckling down and, for the first time in years, putting their pants on the right way round before leaving the house. We are as near to faultless as we have been for years but somehow, still, Ipswich and Leicester’s incredible form has got to be our fault. In a normal season, messing up in midweek in the north-east could be shrugged off as an inevitability due to being broadcast on Sky Sports and life in general. These things happen, even to very good teams, and nobody should expect to get through 46 matches without at least a few like this. But then we look up the table, and wonder what exactly we did to deserve being 3rd. To encounter one team with 100 points in the Champo may be regarded as unfortunate. To meet two looks like carelessness.