We never expected what we got from Luke Ayling

"I didn't really know what to expect," Luke Ayling said this week, in his video saying farewell to Leeds fans, as he moves to Middlesbrough after seven-and-a-half years. He says it a few times.

"When I came here almost eight years ago, I'm not really knowing what to expect, and I leave with loads of memories a wife and two kids," he says. "I joined from Bristol City not really knowing what to expect.

"I come down as somebody that not many Leeds fans have heard of, I come here when the club weren't going through a very good spell, so I didn't really hold much ambition or I didn't really know what to expect, or didn't know where the club could go ... I come up here not really knowing what to expect, and didn't know - (I came) just to play games and try and do something special."

He sounds almost dazed. It still seems easy for him to remember who he was when he came: a dropout from Arsenal's youth system, humbled by his manager at Yeovil, close to spoiling his chance in football in an incident at a racecourse with Bristol City, no longer fitting into Lee Johnson's plans there. When a Championship player is transferred for £200,000, that's not a good sign.

Even if it was a transfer to Leeds United. In 2016, recent precedent meant joining Leeds was hardly a good sign, either. Ayling was arriving for the price of one-eighth of a Giuseppe Bellusci, with still a year to go before Bellusci, back from a loan in Italy, was being booed out of West Yorkshire in a pre-season friendly.

Ayling alludes to it in his video: "When I first come the stadium was almost half full. There's been a few bad years before that, speaking to the boys that were here before, (they said) there's been a few bad years." And there's a clip to prove it: Ayling, playing right-back in front of a sparsely populated East Stand, hoofing the ball down the line. As the footage rolls, there are hints of the coming improvement: Hadi Sacko takes the ball, runs to the byline, and crosses (yes, he could do it) for Chris Wood to tap in. It's a standard Championship goal, a punt forward, a bit of flair, a finish, but at the time it represented improvement.

"I knew what the size of the club was," Luke says, "and I was eager to get it back to where it was, but we knew that it was a long time since they played Premier League and it was going to be hard." With a half-empty stadium after five years of finishing between 13th and 15th, anybody joining Leeds with ideas of promotion was doing so in hope, not expectation, and more like delusion. As Luke said: "I didn't really hold much ambition." He just came to play a few games and see what happened.

And like I said, dazed. A Championship title winner. A Leeds United captain. A Premier League footballer. Close enough to an England cap for Gareth Southgate to be talking him up. When Ayling says, "I didn't really know what to expect," what he's saying is, he didn't expect any of this, any of what happened, any of what he achieved or who he became. And suddenly being asked to sum it all up, before he leaves a place he might have come to think he never would, he can't. He didn't expect this, and he can't process it, and he seems dazed, and that's easy to understand.

There's a simple answer, of course.

"He turned up and he changed everything. He changed our lives, he changed the way we see football, he's changed the way we act outside of football. Just changed everything in our lives, and I don't think he knows how much he's done for us. He's a special, special man, and he has done special, special things for me and this club, and I'll always be grateful for him."

This is the football side of what happened, and Ayling talks a bit about how Marcelo Bielsa did it:

"He filled us all with so much confidence to go out onto the pitch every single game, and just go up against our player, and just try your best to try and beat your player that you're playing against."

But the Bielsa part is not the whole story, and the contrast between the player hoofing down the line in 2016, and the player Ayling became, is not all down to Bielsa. Bielsa, according to Bielsa, does not create players - he can't make players better than they are. Bielsa works out what players are good at, finding strengths they might not realise they have, and brings that out of them. The point with Ayling, and many of the players who helped Leeds to promotion, was that they were already good. They just didn't know how to show it.

That helps unravel the mystery of Ayling's first season, when Leeds came close to the play-offs with Garry Monk in charge. Monk's subsequent career hasn't done much to explain the mini-transformation Leeds went through with him. It was not as dramatic as Bielsa's first summer, but going from five years of 13th-15th to suddenly packing out Elland Road and finishing 7th was a remarkable achievement. The easiest way of explaining how it was done is with a chant: 'Luke Ayling and Berardi, Pontus Jansson, Kyle Bartley'.

Jansson was the talisman of that change. After all the bluster of Bellusci, Leeds suddenly had a player who walked the walk. He came to dominate Leeds, but after Liam Cooper took over from Bartley for Bielsa, the strength of the personalities across the back four became more apparent. Ayling's determination was a big asset in 2016/17. By 2020, it was vital.

I made the argument after promotion that no player was more important to the run-in than Luke Ayling. It wasn't just the memorable interview after the demoralising defeat at Nottingham Forest, when Ayling told the media team that he, stammer and all, would face the press and take responsibility. It was the way he put his words into actions. Leeds' next win was against his old club, Bristol City, and Ayling scored the only goal. Away to Hull, Ayling settled things down by scoring after five minutes. A week later against Huddersfield, he didn't even wait that long. At Swansea, on a hot, tense, misfiring afternoon in July, Ayling's run from one end of the pitch to the other, in the last minute, gave Pablo Hernandez the chance to turn a dogged point into an era defining three. Whenever Leeds needed something that season, on or off the pitch, Ayling was there giving everything he had, more influential than ordinary right-backs are expected to be.

Subsequent seasons have only underlined his influence. Ayling cites captaining Leeds in our first Premier League game back up, at Anfield, as one of his proudest moments, but Sadio Mané also showed him how hard it would be at that level. That Ayling fought his way into England contention that season was not Bielsa's work, and it's proven by how he played after Bielsa left. Jesse Marsch is on an incessant publicity tour right now, praising himself for fighting the odds and keeping Leeds up in 2021/22, but the vital game was Wolves away, where Leeds recovered something of their old selves to come from 2-0 down and Luke Ayling forced in a stoppage time set-piece winner. The early red card at Arsenal was a low point, but Dan James doing the same against Chelsea three days later suggests something beyond Ayling was going on. Last season, with Leeds in even more chaos, there was another goal from Ayling in a win at Wolves, and a defiant opener in what became a draw at home to Newcastle, as he took responsibility back after Rasmus Kristensen floundered. Even this season, heading in to save a point against West Brom, Ayling's celebration - slapping the badge on his shirt, shouting to the Kop - made its point. Leeds needed a goal, so here was Luke Ayling, doing everything he could to make sure Leeds got one.

Leeds, and Luke, have had diminishing returns for those efforts. His goals last season couldn't prevent relegation. His goal this season hasn't prevented him losing his place and leaving for Middlesbrough. That's a combination of two things: the team changing around him, meaning he couldn't save Leeds alone last season. And age changing him, meaning he can't get into the team now ahead of Archie Gray.

But his undimmed efforts are the story. Luke Ayling has played for Leeds, before Bielsa, during Bielsa and after Bielsa, with a force of will that has been incredibly important to everything Leeds achieved in that time. Leeds had changed before Bielsa, and Ayling was an important part of that. He was a big part, too, of the attempts to rescue Leeds after Bielsa, and according to Daniel Farke, of encouraging this season's rebuild.

The seasons with Bielsa will always be most memorable, though, and in his farewell video, Bielsa's arrival is another occasion Ayling remembers by saying, "the boys were not really knowing what to expect". Crucially, Bielsa had been watching videos of Leeds, had seen the boys, seen Ayling. Asked about how the players could adapt to cover different positions, before his third league game in charge in 2018, Bielsa listed various options and concluded, "Otherwise, we have Ayling, that can solve every problem." Luke Ayling might not have known what to expect from Bielsa, but Bielsa knew what he could expect from him. And that, ultimately, tells you where the credit should go for Luke Ayling's career at Leeds. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)