Flat tyres and wiggly legs — Square Ball 24/10/23
KEEP THE FAITH
Written by: Rob Conlon
If a goal is scored but you cannot see or hear it, does it
really count? That was the question I was asking myself at about five past
three on Saturday afternoon, sitting in my car, cursing a flat tyre and the
typically malfunctioning LUTV audio feed.
Even the simplest of practical tasks present a safety risk
for me — that’s why I’m a blogger — so I was waiting for a bigger boy (AKA, The
AA) to arrive and change the tyre. It was going to take two hours before they
got there, but I wasn’t too far from my mate Sam’s, where I was meant to be
watching the game. The plan was to walk to his, watch the first half, then go
back to my car in time for a proper bloke to save me (Sam was no use, either).
But when I set off to Sam’s, The AA app kept updating my car’s location to
wherever I was, so I had to go back and wait it out. By the time Leeds kicked off
at Norwich, I’d been there an hour, and had already ploughed through some
snacks from a nearby shop I’d bought to eat purely out of boredom.
The LUTV commentary feed cut just as the game kicked,
leaving some adverts to autoplay in silence. It’s nothing unusual for LUTV.
Given supporters around the world pay for LUTV, and it’s also included as a
‘perk’ in the overpriced membership scam, someone at Leeds really ought to sort
it out, but I can’t say I was too disappointed it wasn’t working when I opened
Twitter and discovered I’d missed Bryn Law telling me Norwich had opened the
scoring after a few minutes. It was a write off of a Saturday, which is nothing
new in the experience of a Leeds fan. Perhaps sitting in a broken down car
surrounded by empty packets of Monster Munch was the kindest place to be.
Someone at the club eventually realised they needed to flick
a switch to broadcast the commentary, and what I was hearing from Bryn didn’t
sound too bad. Crysencio Summerville sounded exciting, so did Georginio Rutter.
Leeds were creating loads of good chances, even if they were missing them. It
was promising, Bryn was getting excited, and… oh, right, Norwich have scored a
second. I was tempted to return to the shop and buy a can, if only it wouldn’t
have been poor form for The AA to rock up and find me at the wheel swigging a
Tyskie.
Eventually my saviour arrived and changed the tyre using
what appeared to me a handful of tools and a dollop of magic. I got to Sam’s
with half an hour of the game left, just in time for him to open the door and
tell me Norwich had scored an own-goal. I wasn’t sure at which end of the pitch
he meant, until I saw a replay of Dan James disappearing over some advertising
hoardings with his legs wiggling in the air. It really was just another weekend
supporting Leeds United.
What should have been a stressful experience became a
strangely blissful afternoon. It didn’t seem worth trying to understand Farke’s
substitutions — I enjoyed him talking afterwards about not having time in training
to work on the 3-5-2 formation Leeds switched to, mainly because I was
completely unaware Leeds were even trying to play in a specific formation. It
was a tactical move reminiscent of Marcelo Bielsa’s approach to Kalvin Phillips
getting sent off at Nottingham Forest in January 2019. Pontus Jansson was the
only centre-half on the pitch in a Leeds shirt, so Bielsa told Pontus to mark
Forest’s striker, and told everyone else to attack, attack, attack.
Leeds lost that game, but only after going in front and
frightening Forest to death. “The game has these kind of risks and the fact
that we dared to play,” Bielsa said afterwards, “sometimes it has negative
aspects like today but it also gave us a style of play that we should be
faithful to.”
Sometimes the best way to keep the faith with a style of
play is to strip it down to its most basic principle. Four years ago at Forest,
Bielsa instructed his team to attack. At half-time at Norwich, Farke’s advice
to his team was to try shooting at goal more if they wanted to score. “He said
this is football, if you don’t score the other team is going to do it for you,”
Summerville told LUTV afterwards.
