Leeds United 2-1 Nottingham Forest: Just right
This game, as Leeds asserted themselves as they should, was like a steady sesh on serotonin, a football match like a pub garden one spring lunchtime when it feels like things are going right for a while.
Thought experiments can be painful things in football when jobs and careers and fortunes are all on the line. Javi Gracia was in the dugout, Jesse Marsch was far away, Andrea Radrizzani and Peter Lowy were comparing contracts in the executive seats. More important than any of that or them, on a night when Elland Road was remembering a loss, of Chris Loftus and Kevin Speight 23 years ago, that makes any dumb game insignificant, alternative histories can hurt when feelings are involved. In football, feelings are always involved, although they get obscured by managerial careers and owners’ fortunes being won or lost, stuff that shouldn’t matter to thee or me. There’s so much surrounding the sport that you wouldn’t miss if it went away, when you could concentrate on how a game makes you feel.
But anyway, Leeds United’s what-if on the pitch against Nottingham Forest was: what if Luis Sinisterra had been fit all season? What have we missed, how much have we lost, how different would we feel this spring if his first half performance here wasn’t a brief glimpse of a player struggling for full match strength, but one in a long line of consistent statements of brilliance from someone who might have won player of the season if he’d been let out the treatment room?
Sinisterra was sublime in the first half, lining up defenders on the left until they were just in position for him to swerve and sway between them towards danger. Then right at the end of the half he was ridiculous, cutting in to take on a defender and beat him, then deciding the best way to score was to wait and beat him again so the angle for his precise curving driving shot into the bottom corner was giving him a line that could not be broken. 2-1 to Leeds. Perfect timing.
This was his theme at the start of the season and the cruelty of his absence since is that he was here saving us from the start. When the team was misfiring in the League Cup against Barnsley, he took the ball and lamped it, low into the net from 25 yards. A goal down to Everton, another shot from nothing rescued a vital point. Away to Brentford, when Leeds were about to go in at half-time 2-0 down, Sinisterra changed the team-talk by creating a goal from a throw-in, lifting the ball over a defender than hitting in low before anyone knew what was coming. I can’t remember a player with so much skill using it to cut through so much bullshit.