Leeds United 2-1 Hull City: Upsides
When Chris Wood scores a goal like that and runs to the fans in the South Stand, we're the ones who are so desperate to be there to cheer him that we'll pay any price and suffer any indignity.
Preparation for this game included anger at the imposition of pies upon disinterested customers, reports that Massimo Cellino had been interfering in tactics during half-time at Loftus Road, and news that Sam Byram had rejected an improved contract offer. It also included three awful performances: two defeats to Rotherham and QPR, and one from Chris Wood on Soccer AM's You Know The Drill segment.
Take all that and then put the Leeds United squad side by side with Hull City's, and it was hard to see anything other than a continuation of the dismay of recent weeks.
Instead, Leeds United won. Of course they did. And as I watched on the TV in the North-East Upper bar, Chris Wood finished a brilliant move made by Cook and Dallas with a touch of supreme deftness that he'd shown no trace of either in front of the Soccer AM cameras at Thorp Arch, or in his Leeds United career so far. And although a lot of people did make their feelings about the pie tax known by leaving their seats on seventeen minutes, there weren't enough of us to dent this new practice of adding surcharges to match tickets at random. And Sam Byram, the rebel, the wantaway, the money-grabber, was cheered on to the pitch.
None of it was quite the way it should be, and yet Leeds United ended the day three points richer, which counts for a lot. But it isn't everything.
The relative failure of the protests catalysed by the pie tax counts for something, too. It was always going to be a tall order to get people to leave their view of the pitch in significant enough numbers to have a visible result; and on Saturday, the order was too tall.
One of the beautiful things about football support is the glue-like bond that holds fans to the players on the grass, and how difficult that bond is to break; many people simply wouldn't hear of turning their back on the team during the game, even for seventeen minutes. That bond is believed in with such passion that there were even scuffles as people made their way to the concourses to display their displeasure. As an aside, while several hundred fans were on the receiving end of sarcastic chants and worse for leaving their seats on a point of principle, the thousands who left five minutes before the end to get to their cars more quickly were just regarded as an example of soccer normality. But that's an aside.
What's more to the point is that the decision to break the bond between fan and pitch is not always ours to make. The pie tax protests might not have been enough to dislodge thousands of fans from the stands for seventeen minutes, but the pie tax that people were protesting about just might. Nothing will rob the players of the support of the fans faster than charging fans between £37-£42 for a ticket in one of the traditionally cheaper ends of the ground five days before Christmas, because the fans simply won't be able to afford to get in the ground to support them in the first place.
That's why the issue of new, unadvertised surcharges is an important one, and why it's a shame it hasn't been more strongly resisted. The club, like every club, published its ticket prices at the start of the season; now they've found a way to vary them at will, with only a murmur of protest from the fans who will have to pay those variable prices to watch their team.
Or not. Watching Leeds United on a TV screen yards away from the match itself was a glimpse into what might be the future for us, and is the present for a lot of Premier League teams, where ticket prices are so high that priced out fans gather in pubs as near to the stadium as they can, to watch the match on a satellite stream.