West Bromwich Albion 1-1 Leeds United: We Need A Resolution
Leeds and West Brom are on the same side of the fighting against the teams below. As such you could take this match as pure sport, a game to decide nothing except who has the better team.
Leeds and West Brom are on the same side of the fighting against the teams below. As such you could take this match as pure sport, a game to decide nothing except who has the better team.
We looked at the league table as if seeing it properly for the first time. Leeds United in 1st place. Secure in the automatic promotion places by eleven points. I said last season it was going to be fascinating to see how Leeds messed it up and, well, I was right. This season?
Luke Ayling dragged Klich to the ground for a celebratory pile-on as if he's been missing those long-range Klichers as much as Mateusz. They should enjoy them, too.
We've been preoccupied with sexy this season. And a point in Sheffield ain't that.
Criticisms came easily to mind after this game because last season they existed as fears. Fears that, ultimately, proved as inevitable as the spectre in the cellar of the abandoned house, as soon as you opened the door, when it came out roaring and shrieking and on its way to Chelsea.
The reminiscences of Bates in Steve Dale's actions shouldn't make Leeds fans glad to see it happening to someone else, even if that's our first instinct. Instead we should be furious that, in more than ten years, nobody in charge of football has come up with a way to stop this happening.
Spontaneously, like a unicorn had fired it from a glitter cannon out of the field's crowded left, the ball was in space on the right, and Stuart Dallas was through to score.
This is, as I've written a lot over the last year or so, why they call him El Loco. Marcelo Bielsa reorganised Leeds with two central strikers and one winger, and if that imbalance was confusing from the stands, it was worse for Brentford, trying to adjust their back three to suit.
Last season's game was another in United's long history — that word again — of proving that getting what we think we want is usually the precursor to a disaster: the club that spent nine seasons in Division Two after the war, won promotion, and was woken one night to its Main Stand burning down.
Salford City is a cosplay football club; Ferguson, the Nevilles, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt watching players pretending to be Manchester United, acting out a live-action roleplay rivalry against a team they've never played before, but with whom the script dictates they have history.