Leeds United 0-1 Arsenal: Nobody's perfect

The city of Leeds has never done slick. But it tries, and those new boots and hairdo attempts teetering on the edge of shambles are part of what make it feel like home. This weekend was Leeds doing its best. Light Night on Thursday and Friday, bringing thousands of people into the city centre to feel some stuff about seeing some art. Saturday was Live at Leeds, and every year the crowds criss-crossing on a band chase from venue to venue change the street sensation. Even if you're not part of it, you're in its midst. Sunday, Premier League football at Elland Road, Arsenal vs Leeds, described by United chief executive Angus Kinnear as a 'glamour tie' he could have sold 70,000 tickets to.

So far, so brave. And so of course on Saturday night a significant weird monument of the city's industrial pomp (it was a printworks joined to a girls' school, make it make sense) went on dramatic fire, and on Sunday afternoon the world watched and waited more than half an hour for the Premier League to reboot after a surge in Beeston cut power. I ended my weekend in the basement of Hyde Park Book Club watching a group called Live Evil playing (their words) 'some of Miles Davis's most unpopular songs', and midway through the first number bass player Fergus Quill's machine broke down. He left the stage mid-tune, ran home for a replacement, and made it back in time for his solo in the second number. Slick musicianship? Not at all — he wasn't there! But did he make the shambles of his absence beautiful? Oh yes. This blog maybe not the natural place to register the moment into city lore, but my whole reason for writing things down has been driven by an urge to sharing such things when they make me feel a bit better. The Leonardo/Thoresby buildings are still just about standing, the fire hopefully contained to the hard-to-damage space of the atrium, its beautiful interior tiling already fire-glazed for life from long ago. Leeds, the power back on, got their game played eventually.

If you want perfection you will live every day disappointed and upset. If you ever get perfection then however long it lasts won't matter one day when all of this is gone and so are you. That's only a bleak thought if you take it bleakly, and if you think you can escape the fate of every other human who has ever lived, and if you do, you should probably forget in particular about Leeds and Leeds United and do other things with your pending immortality. But if you're willing to forgo perfection and take things as they are, some good some bad and some actually on fire (the jazz was, in the good sense), then you might get some kicks from a game like Sunday's when it kicked off downwire of the substations of LS11.

First, that delay. It seems like, after the power jolted the lights and screens off then on, play could have continued but for the referee's lost link to his video assistants at Stockley Park. Hmm. Football became the world's most popular game because it only needed something roundish to kick and two places to kick it into, and a rudimentary grasp of some simple rules. So what went down for half an hour as communication lines rebooted and the on-grass referee wafted a ball back and forth through the goalposts trying to make his wrist whirr to tell him if it was over the line he was putting it over all felt quite far from the main issue. But I'm not sure this is necessarily new, it's just different. Way back before floodlights, games that went on too long or were visited by fog had to be abandoned due to gloom. What feels like progress is often just moving problems around. This reminder of association football's history is brought to you by Leeds United's 103rd birthday on 17th October and a friendly urging to please buy my book about it.

The irony on Sunday was how from no power to low power, VAR became the main character, leaving many of us wishing it was never plugged back in. Straight after half-time, Pat Bamford went from the bench to scoring a goal, ruled out for the sort of feathery pushing referees have only started penalising since they knew an omnipotent camera was analysing every frame of incidents that, if nobody ever called a foul one way or another, nobody would ever call an incident. So that goal didn't count. Then Leeds got a penalty, for a blatant handball by William Saliba, not given until after Arsenal had gone on the attack and come close to scoring at the other end, when the referee was at last sent to look deep into recent history on video. The right decision was not hard to give without watching a film about it. Penalties have been given for handballs like this since before video recorders were invented. Can it be true that when it comes to Bamford and Gabriel pushing each other for the disallowed goal, on-pitch referees are seeing things they don't have to look for, but for Saliba's handball, the referee was seeing less than he should, knowing VAR would pick it up? What I think is true is this: VAR is too prominent in refs' thoughts and in our games. Lastly, in stoppage time, the linesman gave the referee a full rundown of Bamford and Gabriel bickering in the penalty area, advising a red card for Gabriel for kicking out and a penalty to Leeds. Then the referee looked at a video of it and gave a yellow card to Gabriel and a free-kick to Arsenal. Who would be that lino now? Was he really that wrong?

This shouldn't be the substance of a game of football and it can ruin a dull game but, in a tense exciting match, it does add something novel to the drama. I was het up and hopping in ways I never was pre-VAR. The more old-fashioned excitement all came from Leeds, taking on the league leaders, suddenly finding the aggression and verve Jesse Marsch has been talking about since March. Perhaps the delay did them good, they played as if pent-up, a little cooped, ready to be out their cage. The first half was fairly even, and Arsenal had good moments, but Leeds' important thing was not giving those up easily, while scampering into high pressure attacks of their own. I keep waiting for Leeds' hex on goalkeepers to wear off, but after Édouard Mendy of Chelsea and Vicente Guaita of Crystal Palace were forced into freaking out by Leeds, here Aaron Ramsdale was panicked into booting one clearance off his own defender's back, something that's becoming a sure sign that things are going well for Leeds. A lot of people had come to Elland Road fearing Leeds United would be played off the park. They weren't.