Liam Miller from Manchester United, for Leeds United - The Square Ball 15/10/21

DARE WIN IT

Written by Patrick Gunn

Life is full of little coincidences. Every now and again a big one rolls around, like Stephen Hawking being born on Einstein’s birthday or one Violet Jessop surviving the sinkings of both the Titanic and Brittanic, then the near-sinking of the Olympic (a little suspicious, no?). But mostly they’re little reminders that life moves in mysterious ways.

One such coincidence got me thinking this week. On Wednesday, the news broke that Bournemouth’s David Brooks had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, the very same illness that former Leeds defender Sol Bamba has battled in recent times. Obviously my thoughts go out to Brooks, a wonderful player, and I hope he comes through this as well as big Sol himself. Being the week of our game with Southampton, I couldn’t help my thoughts moving to Liam Miller, who tragically passed away from pancreatic cancer back in 2018, just a few days shy of his 37th birthday.

It’s always sad to hear about the passing of a former player, even if they were only with our club for a short time, and the emotion is always heightened when someone so young is taken with so much still ahead of them. I was just fourteen when Liam Miller signed for Leeds on loan from Manchester United, and my opposition to ‘them’ then was probably more staunch and youthfully vibrant than it is now, but it didn’t take me long to warm to a player of his quality.

I was never particularly drawn to the typical fan-favourites one might expect a young football fan to be. My bedroom wall was adorned with the Martyns, the Bakkes, even the Hopkins at one point (swiftly taken down once the nightmares began), but even I found it hard to get excited about a midfielder who did the gritty stuff without scoring a few goals here and there. Something about Liam Miller, though, piqued my interest.

Maybe it actually was the fact he’d come from the old enemy, the team we were supposed to hate unconditionally. Perhaps it was because he was the first ‘Premier League’ player I’d seen at Leeds in a few years. Or maybe it was simply because he was very good at football. Maybe Miller was the player who sparked my admiration for the workhorses — the ones who run, tackle, shove, slide, then watch the players in clean shirts take the plaudits. In his entire career (402 games by Wikipedia’s reckoning), Miller scored a handsome 24 goals from midfield. That’s a goal every 1,507 minutes. By David Batty standards (a goal every 5,580 minutes) he was prolific, but then my time in the Harrogate and District League could be called prodigious in comparison to Batts.

In his time at Leeds, Miller scored just one of those 24 goals. One solitary goal, but it stands above most in my memory of watching this football team. 3-0 down to Southampton at half-time, about as far away from home as you could get, in the middle of November, you’d have forgiven any Leeds fan for getting up and jumping in their car early to start their four hours and more of driving back. You’d still have forgiven them on 71 minutes, when Paul Butler headed in a consolation goal from a corner. By the time David Healy had thumped an 84th minute penalty into the top corner to tie the game 3-3, you’d have asked them why they hadn’t turned their car around and tried climbing back into the stands.

I’ve had some mad moments in the middle of a Leeds crowd. I’ve come away with black eyes, bloody noses, shoes that didn’t belong to me. But I can’t imagine what it would have been like in the away end when Liam Miller crashed in the winner two minutes later.

I can’t imagine, though I’ve pretended with a pair of balled-up socks more than once, what it would have been like to be Liam Miller in that moment. Demoralised and deflated only forty minutes earlier, probably taking pelters from some disgruntled northerners who’d been up since 6am — now wheeling off, arm raised, the disgruntled in front of him replaced by absolute delirium. I wonder if any other goal, any of his other 23, ever came close to that feeling. I wonder how often he looked back on it; if he ever watched the video. ‘Liam Miller, from Manchester United, for Leeds United.’ The phrasing might have mattered to some people before that goal, but he was ours from then on.

Before Miller scored that goal, Leeds hadn’t won in five games. They only dropped points twice in the nine games that followed. Although the win against Watford this season was essential, keeping up our form against Southampton on Saturday seems just as, if not more important if we want to kick-start this season and put whispers of second-season syndrome to rest.

Another Liam Miller moment wouldn’t go amiss, though much as I’d appreciate the coincidence, I’d rather we kept it a little less dramatic.