Learning not to love football again - The Square Ball 2/3/22
UNICORN SANDWICH
Written by: David Guile
It was the summer of 2016, and England were about to play
Wales at the Euros. The whole country, it seemed, was in the grip of fevered
excitement at the prospect of the contest that awaited. All except me.
I was at home, reclining on a sofa and watching the game
under the influence of insanely strong painkillers, after breaking a rib
playing football. I don’t know if you’ve ever broken a rib, but it tends to
make you feel like you’re about to die when you do basic things like breathing,
walking and jumping up and down when England score a goal.
It’s probably a good thing that I spent the match in a weird
kind of mental limbo, owing to the combined effects of the painkillers and
about forty sleepless hours. Something kept getting lost between my eyes and my
brain, levelling all the usual peaks and troughs of emotion that accompany a
match of that magnitude. I remember the cheers from the street outside as
Daniel Sturridge smashed in a late winner, but I don’t remember feeling
anything other than a mild sense of ‘oh, that’s good, isn’t it?’
I don’t remember much else after that. I do remember finding
a unicorn making a fried egg and ketchup sandwich in the kitchen and engaging
it in conversation about American politics before a sudden realisation that I
was standing alone in a silent, darkened room. But that’s another story.
Anyway, the point of all this (other than ‘don’t mix beer
and cocodamol’) is that the experience gave me quite a chilling insight into
what football would be like with all the emotion stripped out of it. I say
chilling because I’m not sure I’ve got any emotion left in me after Marcelo
Bielsa’s departure. It reminds me of that curious numbness you get in the
immediate aftermath of a bereavement, where you almost feel bad for not feeling
anything.
On Twitter, everyone appears to be at a different stage of
their own personal grief cycle. Some appear to have made their peace with
relegation. Some have found themselves driven to tears. Many are angry, and are
venting their feelings at the board and even at the incoming Jesse Marsch. One
particular tweet was addressed directly to Marsch and stated, with some serious
‘Karen’ vibes, “I fail, unconditionally, to see your pedigree to manage our
club”. Quite what Marsch will have made of this I don’t know, but presumably it
helped someone, somewhere, manage their feelings.
As for me, I can’t really feel anything but absence. I
suspect fifteen-year-old me would have taken a perverse joy in this numbness,
making myself out to be some kind of misunderstood anti-hero, wronged by the
world, then playing some Linkin Park very loudly. 36-year-old me doesn’t like
it. I can’t even bring myself to care about the lazy, predictable comments of
Talksport’s idiot gallery. Who cares if they never understood what we saw in
him? We saw it.
This morning I filled out a survey on The Athletic’s
website. One of the questions was ‘Do you care if Leeds stay up?’. I clicked
‘yes’ automatically, thinking it was a bit of a daft question to ask. It was
only afterwards, after a bit of introspection, I realised I’d made that choice
with my head and not my heart. I want us to stay up — of course I do — but the
fact remains that, after three and a half years of beautiful but fatally flawed
idealism, we’ve taken the cynical, brutally pragmatic route of sacking the
manager, like any other common or garden Premier League club. It has tainted
this season, which was already horror movie material, beyond repair, and now I
want nothing more than to shut it away in a dark filing cabinet at the back of
my psyche and chuck away the key.
I worry that Leeds, post-Bielsa, might never make me feel
anything again. Already, my experience of watching England, which used to mean
so much more in the sunny days of Euro ’96 and France ’98, has dwindled to a
fleeting distraction from the Premier League schedule. England aren’t Bielsa’s
Leeds. They’re barely even Heckingbottom’s Leeds on the excitement scale. I’d
get more enjoyment from eating a cardboard sandwich than from sitting through a
full ninety minutes of them. The moment Kalvin Phillips gets substituted I
switch the TV straight off.
I’m not sure whether this disillusionment with the national
team is simply a symptom of advancing age, or whether I’m now just incapable of
watching any football that hasn’t been crafted by Marcelo Bielsa. If it’s the
latter, I’m in big trouble, because I don’t know how to unlearn everything I’ve
spent the last four years learning. What am I supposed to do, bang my head on a
door frame until the memory of Stuart Dallas’s goal against Stoke goes a bit
fuzzy?
And I need the feeling to come back. I need it desperately,
because I’m so used to feeling something, anything, whether it’s elation at a
fifth goal deep into stoppage time at St Andrews, or despair as Jack Marriott
slots past Kiko Casilla and ends the world, or feeling all the breath leave my
body as Jarrod Bowen chests a cross over Illan Meslier’s crossbar, or the
simple joy of watching Bielsa stop his car to embrace a fan in a wheelchair,
casually creating a memory that will last a lifetime. Leeds United have never
made me feel more alive.
Anything is better, anything at all, than feeling like I did
that day, confined to the sofa, doped to high heaven on tranquillisers and
caring with my head but not my heart. That’s the hole that Bielsa has left.
I’ll back Jesse Marsch, because he deserves that much, and
none of this is his fault. But the job ahead of him isn’t just about avoiding
relegation. Bielsa gave us everything: good football, results, moments when the
world itself detonated, and the little flashes of humanity that characterised
his reign.
He gave everything and asked nothing more in return than to
share in our happiness. As epitaphs go, that’s not a bad one.
