Optimists anonymous - The Square Ball 23/3/22


PULLED BACK IN

Written by: David Guile

I’m conscious the tone of my posts has shifted considerably since I began in August with a light-hearted piece about fantasy football. It’s got steadily darker and grittier, like a succession of Batman reboots, culminating in my last offering, a Bielsa tribute as cheerful as a night trapped in a lift with Kasper Schmeichel. That’s the Leeds United effect, I suppose.

This doesn’t sit comfortably with me, because at my core I’m an optimist. Contrary to popular wisdom, I think all Leeds fans are optimists on some level, even you. In fact, especially you. What rational reason was there for sticking around through all those years of decline and humiliation unless you believed, deep down, things were one day going to be better?

Things did get better, thanks to Marcelo Bielsa. And then, in time-honoured fashion, they started going wrong again. Nothing opens up divisions within a fanbase like six straight defeats and the sacking of a popular manager. At times like this, Leeds Twitter polarises into two distinct tribes — optimists, known to their enemies as ‘happy clappers’, and pessimists, otherwise known as ‘doom-mongers’. Social media quickly becomes a battlefield between two factions while Leeds United toil away in the background, making both sides miserable, until an upturn in the team’s fortunes brings about an uneasy peace.

While I’m essentially an optimist, my own approach is ‘live and let live’. We all process disappointment differently, and while I’m not one for venting my anger online after a bad result, it clearly helps some fans to externalise their frustration. So long as it doesn’t veer into outright abuse or tagging players into conversations, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a moan, but reading pages and pages of tweets about Tyler Roberts, cows’ arses and banjos grates after a while. So I tend to just take myself out of the conversation entirely, logging out of Twitter and distracting myself with other stuff, which is why my house becomes forensically clean whenever Leeds go on a bad run. Post-Villa it looked like I was trying to cover up a murder scene.

My response to six straight defeats was to cut myself off entirely from the football discussions that break up the monotony of my week. It didn’t take long to miss it and start feeling low. Occasionally I’d log in to Twitter, survey the carnage for a second or two and log straight out again before the temptation to get sucked into a silly dispute could take hold. Talking helps me feel better nine times out of ten. Arguing never does.

It can be lonely being an optimistic Leeds fan at times like this. Twitter isn’t a safe space for us. Every time we seek each other out online someone inevitably dives in howling ‘DOOM DOOM DOOM’, causing the conversation to descend into acrimony. Sometimes I start wondering whether it might be easier to switch sides and abandon all hope, breaking down the giant monolith of relegation misery into an easy instalment plan spread across the remaining weeks of the season. But something always stops me. Most recently that thing was Joe Gelhardt.

It was the timing as much as anything. The late, undeserved Norwich equaliser opened the trapdoor, revealing the horrors lying beneath: Reading’s soulless bowl of a stadium, rainy Tuesday night treks to Swansea, and of course Chris Bloody Martin itching to score two of his three goals a season against us. I was probably a minute or two from accepting all of this as a fair price to pay for actually witnessing Leeds win more than five games a year. Then, just as those last embers of hope were cooling, and my feelings of nihilism were reaching their peak, Raphinha broke free and rounded Tim Krul, taking the ball agonisingly wide, and Gelhardt was there to deliver a moment I was almost too scared to hope for.

I don’t need to describe what happened next, because you’ll have had your own experience of it. Suffice to say the end result was a visit to hospital and a stern lecture from a junior doctor about the dangers of punching a concrete floor. It was worth it.

As if that wasn’t enough, Leeds somehow won the next game as well, from about as hopeless a position as I can remember. We were two goals behind a miserly Wolves team, after losing four players to injury during the match and Raphinha to a positive Covid test before it, with Sam Greenwood, Charlie Cresswell and Kristoffer Klaesson doing their best to plug the gaping holes left by the absences. We had no right to even hope for a result. Somehow we got one. I still can’t quite fathom exactly how we did it.

Of course Luke Ayling was the one to finish it off. Who else but the man who dragged us through the stickiest patch of the promotion season, the man who hauled us to a 5-4 victory at Birmingham, the man whose positivity and humour have brought joy to a club whose default settings were fear and despondency. His importance to this club goes far, far beyond what he does on the pitch. No player embodies the spirit of optimism quite like Luke Ayling.

Now I’m looking at the table with renewed hope, which, as all Leeds fans know, is dangerous. Hope is worse than any drug, and it’s a habit I’m never going to be able to kick, even if I wanted to. It’s intoxicating, and I’m aware that one day it’s probably going to destroy me. But I’m too far gone to ever change.

For now, after the crushing numbness of recent weeks, it’s enough just to feel alive again, and to hope that this gruelling season may yet have a happy end. Thank you, Leeds United. You just keep me hanging on.

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