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.
This was Leeds United's first ever 5-4 win, but when I go to live on my eternal island alone, let me take a videotape of the Nordic broadcast of 1991's 5-4 defeat to Liverpool instead. Not this. I loved this and my team won, but I wouldn't know what to do with me and a tape of this game forever.
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.
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.
Bielsa's possess and attack philosophy is only as good as its cutting edge, and Bamford was persistently the spork at the knife fight.