Leeds United 2-0 Norwich City: Good taste in winning
At Elland Road, the Peacocks were giving the Canaries every chance to play fair. Well, apart from the scoring after thirty seconds thing, but in some ways that was a kindness.
At Elland Road, the Peacocks were giving the Canaries every chance to play fair. Well, apart from the scoring after thirty seconds thing, but in some ways that was a kindness.
Opinions of Lonergan did improve once everyone remembered he wasn't Rachubka, he was the other one. That still meant shivering memories of the 3-7 to Forest, and scepticism after he'd seemed to struggle with the pressure of playing for Leeds.
All this hard work and nothing more than a single point of comfort at the top of the table: that's football at its reassuring, familiar, painful best.
The declines of Gelhardt and Meslier are regarded as mysteries but their underperformance might be quite simple: neither of them, in different ways, has had enough to do.
Andy Hughes helped Leeds rediscover its sense of footballing self, and helped ensure the club was delivered from its worst times with some of its favourite memories.
This was a match when fans were looking for answers, forgetting that football is essentially unsolvable and that should be why we love it. Never mind love! give us final judgements.
Leeds would be a very different place after a century of intra-city rivalry, maybe solving professional Mancunian and Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson's 1990 assessment of Leeds as a city full of "fucking psychopaths".
It was a shock, for anyone who hadn't kept up Andy Gray's career, to see the one-time inheritor of Uncle Eddie's balletic wingplay now a big targetman heading in a free-kick.
Illan Meslier could have just left it all alone and let things take a quieter course. Goalkeeper? More like, let in a goal to keeper things interesting... er.
Farke finally realised that Eustace was pushing Leeds into a Rodon-dominated hell and that the answer to how the hell he was going to score against John anyhow was by going to hell himself and getting Rodon out.