The midfield angle of Gary McAllister

The last time I wrote about a Leeds United poster was not the last time and neither will this be; but that time, it was about a poster depicting two players standing still in a pre-season photoshoot. Ian Rush and Tony Yeboah didn't do a great deal more moving on the pitch in the season that followed, but that was okay.

This time there's so much movement the blu-tac can hardly keep Gary McAllister stuck in place. If you ever want to show someone what a midfield player should look like, here is everything you need. It's a photo from 1995, and describing it begins with the blue and green striped shirt made by Asics, colour choices I always thought were inexplicable until a couple of years ago when I had an epiphany while looking at a zoomed image of a peacock emoji. Blue and green. Peacock feathers. Did Asics manage to dip this shirt in more club lore than anyone ever realised, and do it without telling anybody? These were the days before breathless press releases trying desperately to wring an obscure heritage justification out of a shirt that's basically the same as last year except someone wants you to buy it again. So you'd just dress the team as peacocks out of nowhere and hope everybody got the reference. Did everybody get the reference? Was it just me who never made this connection? Or did I make up the connection and somewhere out there an Asics designer is getting warm behind the ears, feeling me out here talking nonsense about their work?

It's the long sleeved version, anyway, because this is Gary McAllister. And the long sleeved version is extra cool because, like the collar, the cuffs are thick cotton that grip the wrists. It's also untucked, because this is Gary McAllister, the hem and the stripe lines unflustered just below the waistline. Asics did a little more with these shirts by adding their Nike swoosh but-make-it-circular logo, pushing the dynamism, as if that needed pushing. This, remember, is Gary McAllister.

McAllister's torso is perfectly upright. You can see this from the perfect verticalism of the stripes, and prove it, like I did, with a ruler. His legs, as he glides through midfield, are at an angle to his upper body of 150 degrees hinging from the hip, and I know this because it's 2024 so I used an online protractor. We can't see who is ahead of him but, using Getty Images, I've worked out this photo was taken by his near namesake Gary M. Prior during a game against Manchester City, so we can guess that McAllister is using these 150 degrees to swing elegantly around and past Garry Flitcroft or Steve Lomas, while somewhere behind him Georgi Kinkladze is looking on in awe. The way McAllister's right instep is caressing the Mitre Delta at his feet, about to bring it through the angles and across his body on his way to some higher plain of beauty, is so close to defining what it means to sweep up the field that this photo has to be entered into the world as a work of art, communicating as close to 100 per cent of a feeling or an idea as it is possible for a camera to achieve. McAllister is gliding. The tacklers are in his wake.