Leeds United 0-0 Aston Villa: 90 minutes, shakedown

I'm not sure who has the bigger problem. Fans? Or the Premier League? But after four weeks of pining so hard for seeing our favourite team play our favourite sport at the level we pined hard for sixteen years for, ninety minutes is all the time to drag our fandom into misery, as Aston Villa tried to "drag the points away from Leeds," as their manager Steven Gerrard put it.

It's 2022 and the game has never been more capable of beauty, never played by fitter athletes or more skilful players, or coached by better equipped tacticians. But the Premier League's dominant tone is paranoid tinnitus about relegation. The fear isn't of competitive shame, like in sport, but financial ruin. It gets pointed out during relegation battles that while millionaires could be taking pay cuts if the result goes against their team, admin or catering or office workers at a relegated club could lose their jobs altogether. When commentators say this, we're supposed to nod along in awe of the pressure the players are under. But the correct response is to point out that it's really stupid to put people's livelihoods on the line that way. Pressure doesn't produce entertainment anyway, so what is even the point of stressing everybody out this much?

What we get from pressure is games like this one at Elland Road, a soccer starved theatre that ended the game thirsty for the referee's blood. The match was dictated by Gerrard's fear of failure. His team of talented attacking international players started timewasting and slowing the game down inside the first ninety seconds, when Leon Bailey booted the ball across the pitch to delay a free-kick, continuing through the first half as goalkeeper Emi Martinez and centre-back Tyrone Mings were given long lectures from referee Stuart Attwell about hurrying up, but no actual discipline. That made the red card for Luis Sinisterra, a second yellow for blocking a Villa free-kick two minutes into the second half, a turning point and a focus for anti-football frustration. Bailey, Martinez, Mings and their mates had spent the first half slowing the game down to suit Aston Villa. The one time a Leeds player slowed the game down in a way that did not suit Aston Villa, he was ordered off the field.

That Attwell seemed to have forgotten he'd already booked Sinisterra looked incompetent. That he might not have given him a second yellow if he'd remembered underlines how pointless the whole charade was. That Martinez and Mings got warnings for slowing the game, and Sinisterra got a card first time, is just perverse. Some people, trying to guess at Attwell's thinking, have suggested the half-time interval was important: that these offences merit a lecture in the first half, and a yellow card in the second. There's nothing in the laws of the game about that, but it sounds true, because enforcement against timewasting has become pantomime anyway. Villa could not-play the way they did in the first half safe in the knowledge that each player had one lecture's chance at wasting time before any cards would come out, rendering the referee's whole performance of whistling and arm-jerking and sauntering over for long chats — often longer than the timewasting — pointless. Everyone knows it's all for show. Everyone knows there will be no action taken. The game becomes about reading the ref's mind and not getting caught if he suddenly turns from theatrical to meaningful, the trap Sinisterra fell into. But a game of cat-and-mouse with the ref over keeping the ball out of play is not a game of football, which is what everyone actually wanted to see.

Jesse Marsch was right, after the game, to emphasise the referee's role in the entertainment. "They took up another hour-and-a-half of our time this week to remind us they will do better at controlling the run of play in matches," he said. "I didn’t create that dialogue, that's not my agenda, that's the league's agenda." There's more to this than just stopping timewasting, though.

Neither card against Sinisterra was worth anything. The first one was for a clumsy foul near Villa's box, but if that got a yellow every time, Tyler Adams, John McGinn, Robin Koch and Jan Bednarek would all have been sent off. If Attwell hadn't given a yellow card to Sinisterra, nobody would have ever thought about that foul ever again. Likewise the second yellow, for sticking his leg out to stop a free-kick being taken: if Attwell had elected to warn Sinisterra for that, nobody would have thought twice about it. Sinisterra was not persistently timewasting, or constantly fouling, or endangering his opponents or stopping goalscoring opportunities. Yet somehow, in Attwell's fucked up mind, what he did was bad enough for him to be ordered off the field in this game, with a suspension meaning he won't be allowed to play at all against Crystal Palace. These were subjective decisions for Attwell, and with that leeway he decided paying spectators should be denied the chance to see an exciting player for the next 135 minutes because that player... well, what were the actual crimes, again?