In the NFC decider, 49ers were a cool team dressed badly

A couple of weeks ago, when an overtime win against the Los Angeles Rams took San Francisco 49ers into the postseason, bookmakers had them 12/1 to get from there to the Super Bowl. Playing against the odds has suited their season. Back at the start of the campaign, George Kittle remembered, they'd won two and lost four, "and every time I got on social media, everyone's telling us that we should fire Kyle [Shanahan] and bench Jimmy [Garoppolo], that we had to change everything up … This team was gritty and salty and got us to the NFC Championship Game."

Winning that Championship game would give the 49ers the National Football Conference title, and put them through to the Super Bowl to play the winners of the American Football Conference, which is the same but different. After two hard-fought play-off matches going down to the clock's last ticks and the snow's last balls, 49ers could go into this one confident because they were up against the Rams again. When they've been unable to beat anybody in Santa Clara, their home since being dragged into the desert away from Frisco itself, they could beat the Rams. Last season they started with two wins and three defeats, 2-3 in gridiron scripture, then they beat the Rams. Then they went 1-3 before beating the Rams. This season, 3-5, they beat the Rams, only their 24th win versus 34 defeats in regular season games at Levi's Stadium, the Field of Jeans. That started an upturn that gave them a chance of the play-offs, but to get there, they had to go the Rams and win. Job done, as a play-off ghost of Leeds past liked to say. This weekend they were off to Los Angeles again with the Super Bowl on the line. Job done? Maybe you can see what's coming.

First we need to deal with the LA Rams' uniforms. They wear primary blue shirts with yellow shoulder stripes, yellow shorts with blue and white piping down the thighs, blue socks, and blue helmets with yellow squiggles; it's a Leeds United kit, basically, or more exactly a Leeds United away kit you might have drawn when you were bored at school, even down to the way the big yellow numbers fade down to white at the bottom, the sort of detail you'd add if you'd just learned how to do shading and wanted to show off. If you were a Leeds fan putting this game on TV at random and picking a side, there is no way you'd reject these guys in favour of the Niners, who might wear white shirts with Macron-gold shorts, near enough Leedsy, but ruin the whole effect with red stripes and flashes and red socks, which is supposed to be a baseball team so I don't know about that. This is a Manchester United away kit and it's terrible, but we in Leeds are lashed to the 49ers whether we like it or not because their investment limb rustled up enough bored tech-wealth to buy into LUFC. Why couldn't it have been the Rams, uniting sheep-shaggers across the Atlantic? Because their owner is Stan Kroenke and he already owns Arsenal, is one reason why. But for Leeds-49ers and Arsenal-Rams to make sense, though, the American clubs need to swap kits.

With a heavy heart, then, let's suppress our hankering for those lovely clothes and root for the Bay Area Boys. This would be easier if they ever had the ball! But it was pretty neat when they took a big lead anyway. The Ram-a-lamas, with Matthew Stafford at quarterback almost as doubted as the four-nine's Jimmy Garoppolo, were controlled and patient and keeping the ball for long stretches and scored first, driving for twenty plays to the end of the first quarter and getting points by throwing the ball to Cooper Kupp in the end, and the end zone, who is not to be confused with the Autobot Kup from the first generation Transformers.