Eight years later, Sam Byram is the future again

Sometimes it's a good idea to resist too much narrative in football, and sometimes the narratives are so overwhelming that you have to forget about resisting and allow yourself to be caught up in the tension. This week is heavily plotted. Bukayo Saka slaying his penalty miss demon. Gareth Southgate getting closer to slaying his. Harry Kane getting to play another tournament game thanks to Ollie Watkins. The second by second drama of Jordan Pickford's face.

In the Copa America, all the possible finals could have kept soap operas running for years: Marcelo Bielsa, with Uruguay, facing the country of his birth, that he used to manage; or, if Argentina had been defeated in the semis, Bielsa versus Jesse Marsch's Canada would have been more than a meeting between two former Leeds managers, but Bielsa taking revenge on Marsch for Argentina's defeat. Instead, they'll meet in the third place play-off, where to be honest I don't trust Jesse to behave: invited into Conmebol, Marsch seems to have imagined himself taking on every South American football stereotype and gone in search of the scrap he always seems to be up for but can rarely find. I'm not saying he's going to kung-fu Bielsa right off his water cooler, I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

Compared to all this, Liam Cooper's absence from Leeds United's pre-season so far, and more significantly his failure to agree a new contract, feels like a mild bit of chapter-closing, but perhaps there is something to it. I started thinking about this when I saw Sam Byram, his contract automatically extended after he played so many games last season, smiling through a return to training interview on LUTV. As if the great football scriptwriter who never lets Leeds win anyway has got bored, this felt like a narrative shift forward, but it's also an odd move even further into the past.

The narrative engine driving most of this stuff is redemption, or putting right something that was wrong. That was Liam Cooper's purpose last season, with as much help from Luke Ayling and Stuart Dallas as they could give him: putting Leeds back in the Premier League, where they were in 2020, and where they should have stayed. Some people have asked why Cooper saved his frustrated demand that, 'If you don't want to be here, fuck off', until the end of the season when it was too late; maybe it was less about rescuing that season — most of the players he was yelling at seemed quite happy to be here as they were earning very handsome wages so that was fine for them — more about sorting things out in the next. Even with a bonus of £2.5m on offer Sam Allardyce couldn't fix United's brokenness on the way down, so it was asking a lot for some of the captain's yelling to keep Leeds up. But getting Leeds back up again was something Cooper could influence. I imagine the bench at Wembley was a frustrating seat for Liam in May, as his chapter did not get the ending he wanted.

Enter Sam Byram. Byram is two years younger than Cooper. But he'd played two full seasons for Leeds before Cooper arrived. Then, a season and a half later, amid Massimo Cellino's indignant reaction when he wouldn't take a wage cut to stay, he was sold to West Ham. It was far from a simple exit, as Cellino could not simply sell a Leeds player, but had to turn transfers into public battles for affection: "I am so hurt inside," Cellino said, "Sam Byram is the only one that maybe thinks Leeds is too small for him." He was backed up by a manager who would have gladly been his lapdog if the load bearing implications hadn't made that impossible. "If we're thinking Sam Byram is the saviour of Leeds United, we've got problems, haven't we?" said Steve Evans.