The 90-yard run at Swansea that sums up Ayling’s impact at Leeds — The Athletic 11/1/24

By Phil Hay

Let’s call it an inauspicious start.

Luke Ayling moves to Yeovil Town from Arsenal and not long after picks a fight with Paul Huntington in training. Yeovil’s manager, Terry Skiverton, sides with Huntington, orders Ayling off the pitch and gets stuck into him afterwards. You’re Flash Harry, Skiverton tells him. Billy Big Bollocks. Not that he really means it.

As narked as Skiverton is, the point of the berating is to see what Ayling does next. And when they speak again the following day, Ayling gets an apology in straight away. The Flash Harry dig has resonated. It isn’t him and he doesn’t want Skiverton to think that of him. From there? The growth of a warm and healthy relationship and the start of Ayling’s road to Leeds United and the Premier League.

The road came out the other side of the Premier League in May and yesterday, it took him out of Leeds, too, seven-and-a-half years after Bristol City made the mistake of thinking an offer of £200,000 for him was decent money. In finding examples of why Ayling was so good for Leeds, any writer is spoilt for choice. The football speaks for itself, but so do Ayling’s traits and mannerisms, the role-model syndrome which is not exactly rife in the sport. Dominic Matteo likes to say to young players: don’t try to be like Lionel Messi, try to be like James Milner. In the same spirit, there are infinitely worse examples of how to do it right than the 32-year-old Leeds are loaning to Middlesbrough.

But for all the leadership, the camaraderie, the harder moments in which Ayling chose to speak for the dressing room when no one else seemed willing, his epitaph at Elland Road has to centre on Ayling the full-back. Fundamentally he was the epitome of right player, right club, right coach, right time, peaking as Leeds peaked, bettering himself as Leeds bettered themselves, helping to flush Groundhog Day out of Elland Road and clear the way for self-worth to flow in. It is quite a feat to take to the grave: that you played in an era when certain people started to talk of Leeds as their second club.

The wing-back mentality, the overlapping and underlapping, the appetite to take possession forward revealed itself as his first season with Garry Monk as manager unfolded, but it is funny how a signing made two years before Marcelo Bielsa showed up in Yorkshire could be so tailor-made for a specific tactician; how, if Ayling had not been on the books in 2018, he was exactly the right-back Bielsa would have tried to find from elsewhere or create himself. Ayling and Bielsa, Mateusz Klich and Bielsa, Pablo Hernandez and Bielsa: players intended for the Argentine and his football, even if they did not know it at the time and even though they had encountered nothing quite like his football before.

Think of Ayling and nothing comes to mind more quickly than his volley against Huddersfield Town, a ridiculous finish that was symptomatic of the sheer speed with which Leeds were hurtling forward in early 2020, the last moments of open-to-the-public stadiums before Covid-19 changed so much.

But Ayling’s defining moment came a couple of months later, away at Swansea and in circumstances that explained why Bielsa’s team were what they were in the year they went up. No squad in the Championship ran further. No squad in the Championship had more left in their legs in injury time. No squad in the Championship were more opposed to the idea that a draw was worth settling for if a win didn’t look like materialising. Everything was high stakes, every morning a challenge to hit strict weight targets, every ounce of work about performance, all in the hope that when it mattered most, the coaching, the talent and the muscle memory would do the job.

It was Ayling who first revealed what Bielsa’s regime really looked like shortly after his appointment as head coach. Ayling went away with a weight target over the summer preceding Bielsa’s appointment and came back bang on the money, trim and skeletal. Bielsa’s staff informed him that to meet a revised target, he would have to lose another half a stone, prompting Ayling to joke that “there ain’t no cereal in my house anymore”. But Bielsa needed the tiny percentages and the marginal gains, especially for days like Swansea away.

Explaining what that warm, July afternoon felt like in the flesh is not easy. The tension was crippling because Leeds, in the hunt for promotion, were almost there but not quite, and not quite is where Leeds are most at risk of imploding. To be frank, 99 per cent of the game was an entertainment vacuum. Bielsa oozed stress in the technical area (as he often did). His players ran and ran but mostly down cul-de-sacs and then, heaven sent, came a watershed goal.

There are 88 minutes and 19 seconds on the clock when Kalvin Phillips spreads a pass through his own box to Ayling, close to the six-yard line. LUTV’s commentary called it perfectly at the time: “Luke Ayling can set off on a run here.” Ayling obliges, covering 40 yards to carry possession towards the halfway line. From there, it’s Ayling to Klich, Klich out to Helder Costa, Ayling overlapping onto the right wing where Costa picks him out with a vertical pass. By the time Ayling cuts the ball back for Hernandez to hook a finish inside the far post, he’s covered 90 yards in the penultimate minute of his fifth game in 15 days. There’s almost nothing left to draw on as he jogs around the back of the net to join the celebrations.

That was Leeds and that was Bielsa. That was Hernandez and that was Ayling. The goal is immortalised in a mural in the centre of Leeds, depicting Hernandez with his shirt off, tearing away in delight, knowing promotion is close enough to touch.

The finish was the Spaniard’s and Leeds will forever love him for it, but in the attack that put the chance on a plate, the power and glory was Ayling’s.