Leeds United 2-2 Swansea City: Control
Football is ninety minutes of striving for joy and, given the odds, winning is so rare that to demand it of the participants would be foolish of me and unfair on them.
My mistake was, after he'd done well to save a dipping volley at a corner, thinking too much about Illan Meslier. So I'm not about to repeat that mistake now. Unlike, say, Illan Meslier. I was thinking, then, how nice it was that Meslier was having a good game of normal goalkeeping, making decent saves and doing things right, with a penalty save on top like a cherry. Then he tried to catch the ball from the next corner, going at it as if it was a hot melon, and dropped it at the feet of Harry Darling to equalise for Swansea.
My solution, then, is to think about Meslier a little less. I don't have it in me to go off at him about this. I'd feel something ugly about me, a supposedly mature person, ranting on about someone's mistakes in a game of football; something selfish, childish, entitled. The online rhetoric around Meslier is already toxic enough and the aim with toxicity, I think, should be to reduce it, not to perform it. People being angry about not getting their own way isn't generally helpful in society and when it's about football, it's ridiculous.
Football artist Paul Trevillion once said something that I found profound, that changed my way of thinking and stays with me, which is that winning — games, trophies, glories — is what the players do. The cups are for them. Our part, and our pleasure, as fans, is getting to watch them trying to win. It's why I didn't go to Elland Road for a photo with the Championship trophy in 2020. The cup was better off in bed with Liam Cooper, who had worked hard his whole life to win it. I'd had my happiness watching his efforts, watching him lift it.
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The deal between football fans and players is in there, how the guarantee when you buy your ticket is that the team will be trying to win. Not that it will win. No team can promise that. What we're buying, and buying into, is the jeopardy, and the jeopardy is the point. If you want a guaranteed outcome after ninety minutes, go to the cinema. Football is ninety minutes of striving for joy and, given the odds, winning is so rare that to demand it of the participants would be foolish of me and unfair on them.
Losing — or in this case, drawing — is also something experienced differently by protagonists and spectators. In a competition about who feels worse about mistakes on the football pitch, you have to take a walk in the boots or gloves of the players whose high salaries mean little sympathy while they're shouldering outsize responsibility for thousands of people's feelings. Bad as I felt about the goals Leeds conceded on Saturday, I'm glad I didn't have to worry about them being my fault. And, remembering how the fans' treatment of goalie Paul Rachubka activated teammate Andy O'Brien's inherent anxieties to the extent he couldn't envisage playing football at all anymore and, compounded by the death of his former teammate Gary Speed, propelled him into treatment for depression, I feel like there's a good case for thinking twice about what I might say about how Meslier's mistakes make me feel. Remembering these are people actually makes the sport more enjoyable, as that's what distinguishes it from a computer game that I could just close and restart if it's not going my way. I don't gain much from a witchhunt, or wanting to punish people for making me feel a bit bad for a while about a game. I probably had a better night's sleep on Saturday than Meslier did, and then other things to do through the rest of the weekend. He has no choice but rewatching and talking about and working on what happened all through this coming week, while I do have a choice. I won't be walking into a dressing room full of angry people whose promotion bonuses and careers are on the line this week through my actions, so it's not hard for me to choose my life over Meslier's right now. Me? I'm fine. I've got my seat in the audience as part of what is, after all, an entertainment industry, but one increasingly preoccupied with suffering, anger and blame. Maybe that's the entertaining part for some people, but not me.
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Meslier, anyway, is paying the usual goalkeeper's tax whereby his mistake on that corner for the first goal was to misjudge the flight of the ball by, what, six inches? Twelve? He had it in his hands and he dropped it. At the other end of the pitch Dan James can cut in, shoot and miss the goal by twenty clear yards three times a match and he gets a round of applause and nominated for player of the season. Those are the margins goalies sign up for, but it's nonetheless absurd that missing the goal by miles is fine at one end, while missing the ball by inches at the other is heinous. I often think of Cristiano Ronaldo and his full production of spending minutes carefully lining up to shoot from a free-kick before putting the ball into the stands, every time, and a 'keeper at the other end hitting the headlines for a split-second misjudgement. Given the time and preparation a striker can give themselves, no goalie would ever do anything wrong. And for a goalie to fail by the margin strikers often do would involve them standing in a different postcode.
Tax part two was goal two, Swansea's stoppage time equaliser, when the goalkeeper was the last line of a collective failure that lasted ten full minutes. Wilf Gnonto fired Leeds ahead in the 86th minute when a great save by Lawrence Vigouroux stopped Pascal Struijk's header from Joe Rothwell's corner, and Gnonto raced onto the rebound and volleyed it in. With that Leeds would have had the game won, if they'd not allowed the next ten minutes to be carnage. Not once did they get the ball into the corners to waste time. They didn't play clever keep-ball to demoralise the opposition. They didn't get the ball away from their end and wind the clock down. Nobody had the sense to tell Largie Ramazani, playing recklessly as a substitute, to stop dribbling around in his own half to prove a point in his argument with Swansea manager Alan Sheehan, a point that backfired when Joe Allen, a million years old, took the ball off him and resumed the pressure that led to the equaliser. This goal was a fiasco, Junior Firpo throwing to Mateo Joseph who miscontrolled, Ao Tanaka losing a 50/50 tackle to Joe Allen, Allen's pass going through Struijk's legs into the penalty area and Žan Vipotnik's shot powering right through Meslier. It was so well struck that Meslier's was actually the least of the failures here, and although the post-shot xG and such has been waved around it's telling that there aren't stats to measure who out of Tanaka and Allen should have won their duel. And any individual focus distracts from what was not even a brief outburst of mistakes but a collective ten minute failure to control the game.
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More like 96 minutes, in total, beginning in the best and worst way, with a goal that Brenden Aaronson scrambled in. He followed the ball into the six yard box while Jayden Bogle was crossing it and, after Joel Piroe's attempt at backheeling into the net was blocked, Aaronson cheekily kicked the ball out of and through Hannes Delcroix's legs into the net. A minute later Leeds were heading for Swansea's six yard box again, trying to scramble the ball into the goal again, and this helter-skelter opening seemed to turn the game into something Leeds didn't actually want it to be. Despite the Peacocks having the lead, the Swans had the idea that this could be a physical battle, and set out to win 50-50s and put United under pressure and make sure Leeds couldn't find their calm rhythm in buildup. The second equaliser was coming in the ten minutes after Leeds' second goal. The first equaliser was coming for the full hour after their first.
In a weird way the match was a good advert for Daniel Farke's more boring tendencies. He tells his players not to attack unless they're sure their defensive structure is ready for any counters, but in this game — and against West Bromwich Albion a few weeks ago — the players didn't seem to be listening. The link might be Joe Rothwell, because while you and me and him might think he's Maradona, he isn't. And his desperation to impress and stay in the team is leading him into Maradonaesque attempts that he, and his teammates, aren't good enough to support. It wasn't just Rothwell against Swansea but all around were Hollywood passes, rushed attempts to attack early, wild swings towards beautiful goals, when more sensible — and hush my heathen mouth for saying so — would have been more Farke-style safety-first passes to the centrebacks.
Ethan Ampadu's return from injury was supposed to give Leeds the security to play more expansive football but, as I've felt all season, the captaincy seems to have made him more erratic. It's not great when your lynchpin defensive midfielder is hard to predict. Joe Rodon, another we want to see leading, let Swansea have a chance to equalise by giving away one of the dumbest penalties you'll see, knocking into Lewis O'Brien from the wrong side as he was running out of the least dangerous part of the box. It had come about because James had swerved around two tackles and tried a through ball to Manor Solomon, but passed straight to a defender, not getting the ball within ten yards of its target. Meslier saved the penalty. Leadership, in the end, was all askew because Ampadu started with Byram but both were off by the time Leeds retook the lead. With the armband, Struijk did his best, rising to win header after header with his tight sleeves rolled up and his hair like a mane, an impressive aesthetic contribution. But the players around him, either too young or too inexperienced at this level, weren't taking that as a hint to calm down. They got drawn into playing how Swansea wanted and stayed there. If only, and again forgive my dangerous talk, Leeds could have got Josuha Guilavogui out there after taking the lead, just to boot the ball downfield and force the others to do likewise.
Someone, in any case, needs to work out why the players have gone away from the boring-but-victorious template Farke marched them to the top of the league with, and then work out how to get them back to being that best version of themselves. They are still, despite apparent disasters, in 2nd place in the table. It's not even April yet. As disasters go, two 2-2 draws are not terminal. Leeds fought back from 2-0 down and out against QPR, were ten more sensible minutes from winning against Swansea, and due to Gnonto's injured ankle haven't had the chance to practice what Loftus Road suggested, of using him where Aaronson has been. After shaking out their airmiles and their jetlag this week, Firpo and Tanaka can be back in the team at Luton; likewise Dan James and Manor Solomon, who were on the pitch against Swansea but seemed internationally distracted, can do better. If Farke felt he had to manage those returns from overseas this weekend, perhaps he got the calls wrong, but the decisions should be better weighted in his favour in the weeks ahead. He can also, of course, have one more hard think about who should play in goals.
All of which is part of all of what this season is, when a team is trying to win promotion. Leeds United have had few modern successes so we have to go a long way back for our parallels, but if you're old enough to remember 1990 you're old enough to remember Mervyn Day costing Leeds a defeat to Barnsley with two games of an up-or-bust season left. Day then played his part in the two wins that got Leeds up, a brilliant save stopping Gary McAllister from putting Leicester ahead in the first of them. Then, in summer, Leeds bought a new goalie. John Lukic was better, but even he threw four in for Manchester City in one match just weeks away from winning the First Division title, which Leeds did with help from Lukic's incredible performance in a 0-0 at Anfield. There have been too many bad moments from Meslier this season, but not so many that Leeds aren't 2nd in the table with plenty of games to go. He could be a hero in one of the games ahead; another goalie might be a hero in one of those games. I'm looking forward, still, to seeing what things might happen. ⭑彡