Leeds United 0-4 Manchester City: Not that - The Square Ball 1/5/22
YORKS
Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
Against Manchester City on Saturday, Leeds United had little
to no chance to make things better for themselves at the bottom of the Premier
League. Burnley had influence, and used it by beating Watford; Everton did all
they could, beating Frank Lampard Junior’s inconsistent old boys Chelsea at
Goodison Park. Leeds can’t rely on others during the rest of this season, but
we can’t stop them doing them, either.
The impossibility of United’s weekend was summed up by their
playing much better than against Crystal Palace on Monday, but losing 4-0
anyway, while losing Liam Cooper to hopefully a minor injury just before the
game and Stuart Dallas to an awful one during it. All the while, Elland Road
sang and chanted and cheered. As they proved at Selhurst Park, Leeds fans don’t
need a drum. They don’t even need goals or a win, either. A club-organised
pre-match tifo? It gave the East Stand useful paper armament for pelting Jack
Grealish, but otherwise I’m not sure why Manchester City were greeted by a card
display spelling ‘Yorkshire’, as if Knaresborough, Doncaster and Hebden Bridge
were coming together to intimidate the Premier League champions. At the end of
the game, OptaJoe pointed out that, in the 19-3 aggregate, Leeds have conceded
more goals to the two Manchester clubs in one season than any top flight team
before. Yorkshire, Yorkshire.
A working relation of ‘Yorkshire’ to Leeds United depends on
the addition of words like ‘Pride of’, because that’s a contested status among
the county’s many clubs that we claim, or ‘Republican Army’, the Leeds song
that puts us at the vanguard of a Yorkshire separatist movement that’s hard to
market as Premier League friendly. The point is that our club is in the biggest
and best city in Yorkshire, but we’re not much arsed about using Leeds United
to represent all the other towns and cities that aren’t as good. If Yorkshire
means Bradford and Huddersfield, we’ll just be Leeds, thanks.
The tifo was a trifle but it’s symbolic of a club not
understanding how to be its best self at the moment. The atmosphere,
particularly the way it sucked in City’s fourth goal as if it was scored amid
an interstellar collapse, was incredible, but Jesse Marsch’s attempts to tap
into it, pumping both fists in the air as he strutted down the tunnel at
full-time, struck an odd tone after a 4-0 defeat. Our job is to cheer, and we
did it. Marsch’s job is to make the team win, and he didn’t. There’s a
dysfunction that keeps cropping up in his press conferences, sometimes about
how the fans need to learn about his tactics to know when to cheer properly,
sometimes about him thinking the players have been frightened to play in front
of us, when I’ve never known a beleaguered team get so much backing. The best
way to encourage the best support at Elland Road is to let the crowd do what it
wants. The players, lapping and clapping at full-time, know this, taking the support
in without trying to compete with terrace hysteria. Leeds fans don’t need
cheerleading to do Leeds fan things.
The football, too, feels off, although Manchester City don’t
usually let teams play much of it, so it’s to Leeds’ credit that there was as
much as there was. But Raphinha, booting an up and under into the air towards
the penalty area, did not look like he was making best use of his considerable
talents. Jackie Harrison, as well, dribbling headlong towards the middle of the
pitch, where all City’s really good players were waiting to tackle him, was
playing in self-sabotage mode. For good spells at the end of the first half and
at the end of the game, Leeds were dangerous, maybe something close to the
counterpressing and attacking that might one day be in store. But none of it
looked like the natural, simple evolution that was talked about when Marsch
took over. There’s a lot of chat around Elland Road now about the signings we
could make to get the best out of his football next season. The more important
task was and is for his football to make the best of what’s here now, because
if it doesn’t, next season might never come.
The goals were poetically frustrating. United’s defending of
set pieces had improved enough lately to be commended; of course they conceded
from two, making the game unwinnable, no matter how well they defended in open
play. For that purpose, we got a new team shape, damaged by a pre-match injury
to Liam Cooper, on whom so much depended in the last two clean sheets. Three at
the back with wing-backs looked solid enough, and would Cooper have made the
difference on set-pieces? We’ll never know. It might all have been different if
Rodrigo, seizing on an early mistake with proper gegenpress ceremony, had
squared to Raphinha to make it 1-0; squandering the chance to take a lead to
defend was agony. It wouldn’t have made much difference if Dan James, skipping
around the goalkeeper and shooting in the last few minutes, hadn’t had his shot
blocked on the line. We might as well forget about the sucker punch fourth goal
that concluded the game as neither here nor there; their third was a wonder of
surgical slicing, but not many teams can do that like Manchester City do. Split
the difference and let’s call it 0-0.
What is the difference between 4-0 and 0-0, or the 1-1 we
got against City last season, or the 2-1 win at their place, and the aggregate
11-0 of this campaign? Answer that, and you could unlock the mystery of Leeds
United, 2021/22. From the stands we might never know the reasons, we can only
look at the effects. The day’s most potent symbol was not the tifo or the
tornado of paper, but Stuart Dallas, committing to a tackle with Grealish,
pounding the grass in pain as he held his leg as still as his instincts were
telling him, the knee broken somewhere. Dallas’ legs looked bloody great at the
Etihad last season, as he ran away from scoring his iconic winner to celebrate
in front of nobody; he looked bemused when that won goal of the season, but
nothing summed up our exhilarating rise better than that win against the odds.
It seemed odd before the game that Jesse Marsch hadn’t watched it, and didn’t
know which team got the red card, because there was no better example of the
character and commitment of the players he has inherited, of how second
division players with top class characters have led us to the top. And there’s
nothing surer than, a year later, Dallas paying for poking that one in the eye
of the champions. I often lean on a line from iconic Yorkshire drama This
Sporting Life, when the factory-owning chairman of the local rugby league team
threatens that a rising star player with too much attitude ‘will have to learn
he has to pay something for his ambition’, but it is persistently relevant to
the way Leeds United Football Club, over the years, have been punished every
time we’ve dared to encroach on the glory that polite society prefers should
belong to others. If we can’t find a scientific explanation for this season, we
can try one that depends on a pecking order that never allows Leeds in its
upper reaches for long. The 1980s were revenge for the Revie era. The 2010s
were revenge for the millennium. This season is revenge for last season, and
Stuart Dallas’ knee is a symbol of what it has cost.
The only way out is defiance, to stay up against the odds. A
line from another key northern artwork, Nottingham’s novel Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning, gave the title to an album by Sheffield’s Artic Monkeys:
‘Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not’. Leeds will never be what
anyone else wants them to be, and that includes anyone who has ever owned or
managed the club and thought they could tame it, and includes anyone outside
the club who wants United down and out this season. Had City scored five, or
six, would Elland Road have just got louder? It might have been like screaming
into a void, or trying to stop a great team with a paper dart barrage. But the
Premier League’s sole Yorkshire contingent don’t sound ready to leave. Against
Arsenal, Chelsea and Brighton next week, the team has to work out what to do
with that information.