Leeds United 3-1 Leicester City: The occasion

Consensus is that you’re supposed to play the game, not the occasion, but sometimes, do you get a game worth playing if you don’t have the occasion too? And do you get an occasion like this without Elland Road still standing, like King Canute resisting the modern tide, in its last century pomp?

Leicester City manager Enzo Maresca tried to dismiss the stadium’s impact before coming to Leeds on Friday night. He’d been before, as a coach with Manchester City, and watched Pep Guardiola and Erling Haaland hush a crowd who were already speechless at the awfulness of Jesse Marsch’s football without any help from the best team in the world. Maresca went home on Friday amid fresh doubts that his Leicester side are even the best team in the Championship, and nursing a cut to his hand, sustained when he slipped and fell on the little white wall surrounding the dugouts. That little wall was supposed to be broken up and taken away in a wheelbarrow after United’s promotion to the Premier League in 2020 but, like so much else at Elland Road, it survives there like a little myth, and a menace to the modern world. Maresca will want to move on from this game as quickly as he can. The cut, the scab, then the scar on his hand won’t let him.

Daniel Farke, meanwhile, was passive throughout a night that was a chaotic rival to our play-off semi-final with Derby in 2019. In the first half I was willing Leeds to calm things down, to take more care, to take even one breath, but I wasn’t feeling that way for long. A goal down to a flicked on corner they didn’t defend properly when Wout Faes headed in at the back post, Leeds had to take on a version of Leicester happy to take what they had got. Leeds tried to terrify the Foxes into conceding, shredding their own nerves in the process, trying to get the City defence to act as crazy as themselves. It should have worked – it should have worked before Leicester took the lead, when Wilf Gnonto linked up with Archie Gray and gave Joel Piroe a chance to either score a certain goal or set one up for Crysencio Summerville. Then Gnonto had to score, but dithered and turned and ran into Summerville. 

It looked like nerves got the best of both those chances, while at the back Joe Rodon was in a state of constant panic, and failing to link them together was a flailing dervish called Georginio Rutter. Ilia Gruev, at least, was not frit, and took it upon himself to get more of the ball, but there was nobody he could give it to who wasn’t having some sort of flap. Forcing Leicester into their own conniptions was a viable tactic but they didn’t fall for it.

Farke’s willingness to let this game be itself was close to being the wrong decision. Leicester came out for the second half with a new attitude of resistance and had enough big chances to win, destroy their opponent’s confidence, and raise serious doubts about how United might cope with a final day promotion decider against Southampton or, if they freak out and screw that, the play-offs. But having come through the most nervous game of their careers and won, maybe this was the perfect training for United’s younger players.

As fans we don’t have to remember the whole game anyway. 34 years ago, Leeds played another big match for promotion against Leicester at a fervent Elland Road, hosting its last game of the Division Two season. The winning goal, and the scenes that followed, are legendary: Gordon Strachan’s left foot, John Helm’s commentary – “Have you ever seen a better goal? And have you ever seen one better timed?” – David Batty being carried around the pitch by jubilant fans, Vinnie Jones wittingly or not announcing that Leeds were up when they weren’t. The vivid imprint of those scenes in Leeds history even dims Mel Sterland’s brilliant opening goal, that should have settled the nerves but not so much in the end, and Gary McAllister’s equaliser for Leicester that silenced the whole stadium. Those were big moments but soon became just plot points, bits building up to the main event, the one that will be replayed forever.

There was another important moment in that game, spoken about even less. At 1-1, with less than half an hour left, McAllister hit another drive, certain to put Leicester in front. Mervyn Day kept it out by diving full length and diverting the shot with strong palms. Could Leeds have come back from 2-1 down? It wasn’t certain. Did they gain confidence from a spectacular save keeping them in with a chance? It’s likely. 

So history isn’t likely to remember much about Illan Meslier’s full length diving save from Stephy Mavididi to keep the score 1-0 and stop Leicester capitalising on their dominance and running away with this game. Mavididi blasted the ball at the bottom corner from fifteen yards, and Meslier stopped it with the sort of thrilling save he used to make once per game in his first season in the Premier League, saves as exciting to watch and as important as goals. After his last minute clutch kept an equalising header out of his net in our away game at Leicester, after everybody already thought it was in, it now seems Meslier saves his best saves for them. But this was important, and I wonder too about his role in the two big Leicester chances that followed – two big misses, that didn’t need the goalie’s touch, but Don Revie used to say that David Harvey’s best saves were the ones he didn’t make, when his positioning made it too hard for the striker to score. About Meslier at Plymouth last week, Farke said, “you literally could feel his appearance on the pitch”, and as the Foxes looked unable to overcome his presence – and when they did, from another corner, they had it flagged offside – Maresca took his most dangerous forwards off the pitch, settling for a 1-0 win.

Farke made changes too. On came Pat Bamford and Dan James, who might have started if fit; then Connor Roberts, to save Junior Firpo from himself and add more knowhow. Then, soon, an equaliser as if from nothing. It was actually from Rutter’s refusal to give up on one of his least effective games, after an hour of trying and failing to dribble through two or three or four at a time. He adapted to this problem by relying more on his strength to take him as far as he could and then YOLO, let the ball go where it will as long as it’s nearish to the Leicester goal. With ten minutes to go he got near enough for a weak clearance to drop to Roberts, who wasn’t messing about with his finish, or his celebrations. Leicester had settled for 1-0, but Leeds weren’t settling for 1-1.

Of all the incidents in this game none mattered more than the two tackles by Ilia Gruev and Glen Kamara that won a throw-in straight from the restart, three moments celebrated like three more goals and reinforcing the volume inside Elland Road. I wonder how Bamford felt. Last time he won promotion with Leeds, he was playing in empty stadiums, hearing only the faint rustle of cardboard crowdies, not knowing whether the fans at home were happy, sad, pleased, angry, singing or silent. It sometimes gets said that Bamford played better without fans watching him – he scored a lot of goals that way – but when you listen to players talk about that surreal time, and contrast it with unreal nights like this one, it turns into a tale of mental toughness, our promotion team having to find the resources within themselves that every other team has been able to take from their supporters. Well, every other Leeds team. I’m not sure the difference was as marked at other, less febrile grounds. But when, three minutes after the equaliser, two minutes after those rousing tackles, Archie Gray’s deflected shot made it 2-1 to Super Leeds United, it was impossible to imagine that goal meaning all it meant without fans, without Leeds fans, without Uncle Eddie in the John Charles Stand, without a pile-on of players and fans in the north-west corner, a goal and a scene as Elland Road as it gets.

That goal was another made by Rutter’s determination to make something happen, although that’s only important for acknowledging his individual contribution: collectively, Leeds were going to score, whoever made it. He was at it again for the third, driving for the penalty area and winning a free-kick that James shot in off Bamford, a goal that, strictly, wasn’t necessary. But by this point Leeds were untouchable, certain to win, and the celebrations for the second had been so good they had no reason not to score and do it again. If the night had gone on much longer, this would have been the pattern, Leeds racking up goal after goal just to keep feeling the euphoria. The occasion, that looked like it had defeated them, was now the making of them.

Although he looked calm, I can’t believe Farke’s match plan looked like this, but he is managing this season with a quiet authority in common with Howard Wilkinson’s approach in the early 1990s: get good, play as well as you can, and everything will turn out as it should. And I doubt the architectural plans in the boardroom, blueprints pending promotion, account for nights like this. Because we weren’t there in 2020 we have to live our second chance now, before the little dugout walls are broken down and the old bricks are sent as mementos to Maresca: Leeds are at the paradoxical point we avoided during the last title, of fighting for a 21st century Premier League future and using, as artillery, our modern-resistant 20th century present. If moving up will mean moving on, let nights like this move you while they can. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)