JON HOWE: THE RETURN OF THE CHAMPIONS - Leedsunited.com 20/8/21

In his latest column for leedsunited.com, lifelong supporter Jon Howe looks ahead to Saturday's match with Everton.

Howe is the author of two books on the club, ‘The Only Place For Us: An A-Z History of Elland Road’ - which has been updated as a new version for 2021 - and ‘All White: Leeds United’s 100 Greatest Players’ in 2012.

Perhaps the worst thing about losing football matches is that it makes you hate the thing you love. We all have our perfect weekend scenario mapped out in our heads, knowing that it can be ripped away from us faster than VAR can decide a goal that was offside last season isn’t offside this season. Of course, as football fans, we approach every game on an emotional knife-edge, mindful that the thing that brings us extremes of joy, can also bring polarised depths of hurt. And some defeats hurt more than others.

Saturday’s defeat to Manchester United hurt. It hurt the players, it hurt Marcelo Bielsa and it hurt the supporters. It certainly hurt me. The anticipation of the first game of this particular season was built on the premise that “at least it can’t be as bad as last season”, except that it could. This felt worse, and while it might one day reside as a faint statistical anomaly that we sardonically chuckle about - like the two consecutive seasons in the 1980s when we lost 6-2 and then 7-2 away at Stoke City - right now it’s a scientific impossibility to fast-forward to that time, so we’re stuck with it.

I pity the poor folk who devour stats and live their lives dissecting figures with forensic detail to uncover numerical revelations no one had spotted before, because staring at the outcome of this one match for a full seven days, and trying to glean any positives from it, is a grim existence. The only thing that has kept us going this week is the knowledge that some more stats will soon come along to cloud the issue one way or another, but much more romantically, those stats will come after we have all experienced a full and buoyant Elland Road for the first time in nearly 18 months.

In many ways, the thought of watching Leeds United in a capacity stadium again, and re-attaching a lifeline like an intravenous drip, renders whatever result subsequently occurs somewhat irrelevant. This is a big moment in everybody’s lives; something that was cruelly robbed from us at the most agonising juncture and which felt so distant and unattainable for so long, and which we cherish so fondly, is back.

There will be many Leeds fans lost in thought on Saturday, and lost in a cacophony of noise, perhaps in mild shock and confusion at the sensory explosion after months and months of isolation and solitude. Or perhaps thinking about loved ones lost, heroes lost and the forbidding fate dealt us by a huge chunk of treasured time taken from our lives.

Leeds United is a religion, and not being able to demonstrate that devotion, to venerate in person and to be hostage to the insipid remoteness of a frosty TV experience has only strengthened our consecration and made our love more devout. The emotional outpouring on Saturday could make the game itself something of a sideshow, were we not perfectly aware of how precious Premier League points are, and the fact that we currently haven’t got any.

I think it was Alan Hansen who coined the word ‘bouncebackability’ some years ago, and many teams have been conveniently labelled with it since then. It is an admirable quality of sorts, and this Leeds United certainly has it, when plenty of previous incarnations haven’t. The ability to react to defeat requires you to be sufficiently humble to acknowledge your flaws, and sufficiently honest to acknowledge where and how you can improve. From there you need to have the spirit and the desire to right those wrongs, and quickly.

Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United has that. In two seasons in the Championship there was never a ‘rut’ of any prolonged nature. And if you can raise your weary mind and body from the soul-destroying heft of the Derby Play-Off defeat to go again and win the league by 10 points, then no one should question your capacity to rise like Lazarus. Those are the characteristics of worthy champions.

More recent history also points in Leeds United’s favour. Of the 15 defeats in our inaugural Premier League season, eight of these were followed by wins. This suggests a positive response against Everton at Elland Road. But knowing how hard Bielsa works his players after defeat, you have to wince at the workload they will be under this week, and they will willingly take it on; almost like the players dare not let us down on such a unique and longed-for occasion.

But then there should have been a similar sense of pre-match revenge at Old Trafford last Saturday, particularly with Leeds fans this time present. Clearly a lot of things went wrong, and however much you prepare for a certain game, sometimes you have to hold your hand up to being bettered in a mad five minutes, and overall, being bettered by a team with Galacticos spending abilities, while we also had two key players missing.

Of course many people can’t wait to point to Bielsa’s ‘naivety’ or his refusal to change tactics, without realising that it’s exactly that stubbornness which has got us where we are. We can’t bask in the glory of the fruits of Bielsa’s inflexibility and then pour scorn on it when it doesn’t go our way. Sometimes there is simply a gulf that our lesser resources cannot bridge, but then, when we talk about the courage and self-motivation of bouncebackability, call me old-fashioned, but I’d quite prefer to re-discover the uncomplicated serenity of consistency, and sail through the tranquil waters of one defeat in 11 games like we did in the final weeks of last season. Avenging defeats is a great quality, but not having to react to them in the first place is probably a better one, and recent history proves we can do that.

So fans will be back at Elland Road this weekend and it promises to be just as frantic, electric and perhaps chaotic as Old Trafford was last week, but with the overwhelming positive energy this time working for us.

And if anyone needs further motivation, just think about Luke Ayling for a minute. His face told a story of anger, bewilderment and shock, and someone whose best professional moment had become an afterthought within three minutes and a complete irrelevance in less than twenty. As a momentary interruption to an otherwise distressing afternoon, it deserved a much better place in history. His career incentive from here must be to score a comparable goal that can be re-watched without a surrounding context of abject misery and which doesn’t trigger spasms of throbbing discomfort.

We can help Luke Ayling do that, and this starts on Saturday. Every day we successfully navigate and every game Leeds play is a means of distancing us from last weekend and making the result a faded statistical triviality we can one day laugh about. So think about that small nugget of joy every morning that you get out of bed, and certainly when Leeds United play before a full Elland Road on Saturday. This is when the season actually starts, and every Leeds fan has a part to play.