Leeds 2021-22 season review: Desperation, relief and an emotional goodbye to Bielsa - The Athletic 26/5/22
By Phil Hay
Leeds United’s season is over, to the relief of everybody,
and it remains to be seen how the city remembers it.
Will the sacking of Marcelo Bielsa be the lasting imprint of
2021-22? Or will it go down as the year of the great escape in which Brentford
away on Sunday overrode everything?
Maybe, when all’s said and done, the less said about it the
better.
Leeds have walked barefoot on broken glass over the past
nine months, in danger throughout and spared relegation by the machinations of
a mad final day.
This is how The Athletic saw it: the highs, the lows, the
desperation, the ecstasy and everything else in between…
Best moment of the year
Brentford — and in no small way because the mood heading to
London for Sunday’s decisive season finale was one of total resignation.
Supporters I spoke to before kick-off, with virtually no exceptions, thought
Leeds were as good as down. Even those who tried to say otherwise admitted that
they were talking with their hearts rather than their heads.
But the thing about Leeds — and we saw this in the 2019-20
Premier League promotion season — is that when it all comes together, they can
be unstoppable.
Nobody wants in-fighting and nobody wants the feeling of
dejection. There is plenty of criticism to be done of the way the club handled
the past nine months but the emotion at the final whistle in west London at the
weekend is what underpins this crazy entity.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A lot of people
seem to take pleasure in seeing Leeds implode.
Have it.
Worst moment of the year
Bielsa’s sacking. As the Argentinian’s reign as head coach
got better and better, it occurred many times that losing him would be a
monumental step — one Leeds could never reverse and might regret at leisure. He
was the most popular Leeds boss in a generation, immensely devoted to his work,
and the struggle to find any lasting form this season must have been torture
for him.
Nothing is for ever though and it had to end one day, but if
the last few months have shown anything, it’s that Leeds were underprepared for
the reality of moving on from him. Appointing Bielsa was a huge decision. It
turned out that replacing him was an even bigger step.
You know that he’ll be quietly delighted that the squad saved themselves at the death.
Biggest surprise of the year
As above. Not because Leeds weren’t in trouble when they
sacked Bielsa in February, because they patently were, but because there was
hardly a coach in Europe with a more solid position than his when the season
began.
Bielsa had reached the stage where he looked untouchable and
as difficult as 2021-22 became, it seemed that, at the very least, he would
still be in charge at the end of it. Even the club were showing no inclination
to change manager until the early stages of February.
That spell from Everton away through Manchester United and
Liverpool brought everything to a head so quickly.
Funniest moment
Joe Gelhardt’s winner against Norwich City.
Perhaps it was because the human body sometimes reacts in a
way where dangerous situations make you giggly. Perhaps it was because everyone
thought it had comprehensively opened the door to safety, so the time for panic
was over. Perhaps it was because the crowd at Elland Road didn’t know exactly
how to react to such an unlikely turnaround.
đŸ¤© "Gelhardt is the hero!" pic.twitter.com/wh1RT4tjuu
— Leeds United (@LUFC) March 13, 2022
But as the dust settled on that finish, all you saw around
the press box in the West Stand was people in hysterical laughter — completely
unlike Pascal Struijk’s equaliser against Brighton a month later, which left
people looking like they needed a lie-down.
Goal of the year
Struijk versus Brighton. I mean, the best goal was
Gelhardt’s at Chelsea in December. Everything about that Gelhardt strike — the
build-up, the patience, the movement to the near post — was fantastic,
especially because he had been on the pitch for 60 seconds when he scored.
But in the end, it was Struijk’s header that injected Leeds
with hope just when everything seemed lost; a finish from a couple of yards out
that basically came off someone’s arse as it bounced over the line (albeit
helped by pure magic from Gelhardt on the other side of the penalty area).
It stopped a meltdown, it kept Leeds in the hunt, and very
few moments mattered more.
đŸ¤¯ The assist! The header! The limbs! pic.twitter.com/Bu9w8RIe3y
— Leeds United (@LUFC) May 15, 2022
Game of the year
Wolves away.
It’s almost impossible to explain those 90-odd minutes
except to say that Raul Jimenez bought himself a red card and everything went
haywire after that: Luke Ayling doing the Robbie Keane, Wolves’ hitherto
excellent defence made to look like a group of people who had met for the first
time in the car park earlier that Friday evening, supporters upside down in the
away end as bodies went in all directions.
It’s safe to say that in the aftermath of that result,
everyone thought the season might let Leeds off more lightly than it did.
Quote of the year
“Enforcing upon football a philosophy akin to Maoist
collective agriculturalism — which students of The Great Leap Forward will know
culminated in the greatest famine in history — will not make the English game
fairer, it will kill the competition which is its very lifeblood.”
Club programmes are traditionally benign and safe. This,
from Leeds’ chief executive Angus Kinnear on an independent regulator for the
Premier League, was straight out of the Ken Bates manual of match-day columns.
The piece I most enjoyed writing
The interview with Adam Forshaw we ran in January.
It was perfectly obvious to everyone that Forshaw’s struggle
with injury had been a nightmare but you can never fully appreciate the nature
of an ordeal like his until the player concerned spells it out in fine detail.
I’d wanted to speak to Forshaw about it for a long time and
it was eye-opening to learn how much he had been through to get over the
strangest of injuries.
That he became such a conduit for public frustration —
touted as the central midfielder Leeds failed to sign in the transfer window
last summer — was never his fault. And upon returning, he looked good.
Which GIF sums up the season?
A few weeks ago, someone tweeted the clip from Austin Powers where he runs over a screaming security guard with a steamroller. There are about 50 metres between them before impact and it’s hard to think of a better way to define the pickle Leeds got themselves into.
In the end, a very fraught relegation battle felt like it
was coming from a mile off, trundling down the road. Fortunately, it was
Burnley who got flattened on Sunday.
