Stoke City 0-3 Leeds United: True Meaning
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.
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.
Maybe we should learn from Kiko Casilla's impassive demeanour; he works at Leeds on the inside, knows where Bielsa keeps the levers and pulleys at Thorp Arch, and he doesn't look frightened. If he ever needs to relax, he can just punch Liam Cooper. It's fine.
There’s no way of scripting Elland Road. Whatever is said beforehand gets lost as soon the ball is kicked. "That's why football is the best sport in the world," Bielsa said this week, "Because before the games you can have one feeling, but after the games the feeling is different with the result."
Pablo Hernandez swept all our cares away with one shot from his glitter-cannon right boot, leaving West Brom choking on his smoke and Leeds fans, their ears still ringing, picking tiny tinsel pieces from their hair.
Once I would have been yearning for the final whistle so I could quit morose observance of such a drab winter's scoreline, leaving the Hull fans in the away end curling their hands in the air like children, opening and closing their gobs like fish, singing about cats like fucking idiots.
Joy takes a toll, and Marcelo Bielsa was asked afterwards about heart attacks. "When you change the destiny of the game in the last seconds, you have to take into account (that) hazard." Quite.
Only football can do this. Humans have done a lot of damage to this planet over millennia. But over the last 150 years some humans have kicked a football into a net at just the right moment and made it all feel like a price worth paying.