Leeds United. Bloody hell - The Athletic 14/3/22

By Phil Hay

Starved of bread from heaven this season, everyone sprinted for Joe Gelhardt: players, substitutes, staff. Illan Meslier ran the length of the pitch, all 90 yards in a few seconds. The crowd surged towards them, rescued from their own dark thoughts. Elland Road was in the grip of grim resignation last week. But not here, and not today.

A few yards out, Gelhardt could not miss. Raphinha’s cut-back was perfect, Norwich City’s shape had crumbled and one touch of Gelhardt’s boot stopped the stadium flatlining. A draw with Norwich spelled relegation, if not here then further down the road. A draw with Norwich was as good as a defeat. But there was Gelhardt and there were Leeds United’s bollocks, just as time was running out. “Someone asked me if I’ll remember this in two weeks’ time,” Jesse Marsch said. “I’ll remember it on my deathbed.”

Marsch had left Elland Road four days earlier, shell-shocked by a horrible defeat in his first home game against Aston Villa, admitting he had no expectation of dropping off when he got home. If there was one thing he was guaranteed to do last night it was catch some sleep, partly through relief and partly through sheer emotional exhaustion. Gelhardt was his last substitute, a Hail Mary thrown after Norwich’s 91st-minute equaliser. It felt like a hopeless errand but a Gelhardt header towards Raphinha, a return pass from the Brazilian and Norwich were prone. The final whistle found players from both teams strewn on the pitch, utterly drained.

Ten minutes earlier, Marsch allowed himself a quick glance at his watch, wishing time away on the touchline. No surprise at all if he was feeling twitchy. Leeds had led since Rodrigo’s first-half goal, a deflected shot which bounced beyond Tim Krul, but Norwich were too close for comfort. Jonathan Rowe smashed a shot off Meslier’s crossbar. VAR overturned a penalty decision given against Luke Ayling. Elland Road has an ingrained sixth sense for trouble on the horizon and it arrived on cue, just as the fourth official’s board went up for six minutes of injury-time. Teemu Pukki stabbed a pass into the box and Kenny McLean slid the ball past Meslier. Momentarily, the crowd’s resistance to impending doom collapsed.

The question for Leeds and Marsch was stark. If they could not beat Norwich, the Premier League’s backmarkers, then who could they beat? How did they expect to dig themselves out of a hole if this fixture got away from them? It was six defeats in a row before yesterday, six defeats at the unseemly cost of 21 goals conceded, and the fact that Norwich were clinging on throughout the first half was an indictment in itself once McLean scored. Teams who go down conspire to make a mess of matches which are asking to be won. Teams who go down lose their nerve when it matters. But teams who go down do not tend to dig out winners as nerveless as Gelhardt’s.

How did it come to this at Leeds, the vision and order of the previous three years descending into mayhem? This time last year, the club were in the process of making light work of the type of run that sorts the wheat from the chaff: Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool and Manchester United all wedged into a six-game sequence. A schedule like that can kill a troubled team but Leeds were a different animal 12 months ago and they navigated those fixtures without losing one of them. In hindsight it was peak Marcelo Bielsa, where even the most extreme odds were possible to beat.

They were also important weeks in shaping Leeds’ perception of their squad. Nothing in the run-in last season made the club think that they were about to push an established group of players a step too far. Nothing in it suggested to them that their reliance on so many of the same faces would be a mistake or come at a cost. Leeds stuck with it and it is striking now to compare the club’s pre-season expectation of their squad with the reality eight months on. Confidence and form declined. Recruitment did not make Leeds better. Not recruiting in January was no solution either. Bielsa paid for the backwards step with his job but in no way were those steps entirely about him.

Should Leeds have seen the decline coming? Was it reasonable to think that a squad who were mixing it brilliantly with Manchester City last spring would have another competent year in them? Whatever the truth, they are learning a valuable lesson about spotting and preempting the end of a cycle before it actually grinds to a halt. Patrick Bamford completed the first 45 minutes yesterday and Leeds showed most conviction with him on the field but it is indicative of Leeds’ depth of resources that a not-quite-match-fit Bamford is too good to leave out. In the second-half 45 minutes before Gelhardt came on, Leeds were without a centre-forward and looked less imposing because of it.

Yesterday, though, they played like a team who had no intention of going quietly or of allowing the post-Villa panic to set in and become terminal. They played like a team who, having come this far, do not want relegation on their records. In search of a reset this summer, victory over Norwich increased the likelihood of the club having the chance to right this season’s wrongs. Yesterday was, with no exaggeration, a put-up or shut-up fixture.

Quiet fell on Elland Road when McLean appeared from nowhere to bury Pukki’s cut-back. It was not going too far to say that in that moment, faith was taking its last breaths. But then a final surge, some wonderfully sharp thinking by Raphinha and Gelhardt on hand to do what football called him to do. Leeds United. Bloody hell.