Leeds United 3-0 Chelsea: Brenden Aaronson’s joy of grass - The Square Ball 22/8/22

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Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

The weekend needed this from Leeds United on Sunday because Saturday’s Premier League product was putting glitz at risk, sequins dropping from its gown into the gutter like rain. The sad cloth sack of it was teetering towards that depression when something you remember that you can love is making no connection with its ‘Everton 1-1 Forest’ or ‘Spurs 1-0 Wolves’ or a televised game at Bournemouth won by Arsenal in eleven minutes. To a football lover, this was an atmospheric low that makes Saturday’s duvet more appealing, the weekend feeling worse than the week you wanted to escape.

Football is strange that way because it is marketed so heavily everywhere that everyone thinks they should like it, but then the Premier League tries to convince with Leicester 1-2 Southampton and fails. So all that excess interest gets diverted into things like Fabrizio Romano’s rumour factory, aspiring to be the reply guy on a club Twitter account, or troubling with the soap opera of who didn’t shake hands properly with who. Split from the wild embrace of the stadiums by match ticket prices or air ticket prices, the fans the league begs for get little from a Saturday like this unless they get into all the other, worse, things.

But Brenden Aaronson just loves grass. Green grass. Yellow grass. Part-synthetic grass. All the grass, he loves all the grass, loves running in it, rolling in it, being on it, dancing across it, eating it up metaphorically with his running feet and perhaps literally with his hungry mouth. Anything for grass, on his lips, on his tongue, up his nose, coming out of his ears. Grass in his hair, grass in his socks, tearing off his boots to stuff grass between his toes: grass grass grass grass.

After Leeds beat Wolves I wrote that while the Wanderers sought space, Leeds only focused on the ball — not to have and hold, but just for the sheer joy of getting it. Against Chelsea, Tyler Adams confirmed that superbly, always his boot on the ball in tight spaces. In the first half, watching the way he was running everywhere whether he had the ball or not, I was refining the thought for Aaronson. The ball is Tyler’s thing; grass is what does it for Brenden. When, after twenty minutes, he pressed Chelsea into giving the ball away and turned to the South Stand, pumping his arms, he was a boy in his element, loving the feel of the grass, the smell of the grass, loving being where the grass is. Going indoors, does he take some grass with him? After the game at the weekend comes the rest, the massages, the recovery exercises, the video sessions, the teamtalks, the tactical seminars, and by Thursday I imagine Brenden is so crazed for grass he’s out finding fistfuls to chuck over his head, inhaling its fragrance. If Aaronson ever goes missing, find a lawnmower, and like a leprechaun he’ll be there if you follow its path.

This lunacy is perfect for Jesse Marsch’s RB football, a style that eschews much of what is usually admired about o jogo bonito, the skills and tricks and possession and passing. It sets out to destroy with perverted enthusiasm, with the aim of toppling the opponents’ tower as soon as the first brick is laid, and if that works, it wins the ball too close to goal to have room for architecture of its own. There’s no time or space to admire a pass from that point, the imperative is sticking the ball in the bloody net as quickly as possible. It inspires a fierce glee in making the game difficult to play, with pleasure concentrated in the contest, a delight for those, like Brenden, who just love charging across the grass as fast as they can in hysterical spasms of vitality.

Aaronson’s goal, opening the scoring against Chelsea, was a classic of the passion. There was no football in it, no passing or moving, no construction. There was planning, premeditation, but like in a murder. He charged over forty yards of grass with intent to fool the goalkeeper, Edouard Mendy, into trying to turn when Aaronson was ready for that, to reveal his block left was a feint right and steal the ball. It worked, and Aaronson won possession, and inches from the goal line with Mendy out of the game and no other player within twenty yards, there was only one play to make. This was the perfect RB/Marsch goal, the total distillation of years of sports science, a blast of undiluted taurine: reducing the hundreds of square yards of pitch, near-infinite air and 22 players to a tango in two yards, exploding all the pleasures football can compress into the one second it takes to score a goal from a space as tiny as the time. It was hardly the work of an elite Premier League footballer to score from one yard into an empty net, although the deliberate no-look was a top class flourish. But the thrill of it was exactly what the Premier League weekend needed.

This is a little like how Peter Lorimer used to play football at Elland Road. With his cannonball shots at ninety miles an hour — 44 yards per second — Lorimer was always aiming to stop the game, to put the ball where nobody could play with it. The target was the net and very often he hit it, and the effect was to stop the game and put the ball back on the centre spot to start again. It took supreme confidence to be forty yards from goal with the ball, with Allan Clarke, Mick Jones, Eddie Gray, Johnny Giles and Billy Bremner around you ready to take a pass and build attacks, to show their skills and techniques, toy with the opponents and put on a show — and to ignore them all and make the game about smashing the ball past them and everyone as fast as possible into the net. In a way Lorimer was destructive, because not passing to Gray denied a chance for some dazzle, but the singular beauty of his choice was undeniable and made him a legend. Gray’s skills would make people sigh with delight. The ball hitting a net four feet off the side of the pitch would make them cheer and be happy for days.

In the current Leeds team Aaronson doesn’t have the options of Grays or Clarkes, although in this form Jackie Harrison and Rodrigo are doing good impressions. That’s where the optimisation in this style does its work. Leeds, player for player, do not have the quality to match the players Chelsea have spent hundreds of millions to buy. But when the game is compressed into a two yard square containing one frightened goalie and one grass addicted pest who has sprinted hard just for the fun of being there and ruining someone’s Cruyff turn, suddenly the transfer fees and the wages aren’t the differential they should be. Leeds succeeded by using their press to stifle all the opportunities Chelsea’s advantages should have given them, their skills impossible to reach with three Leeds United players busy on their ankles and in their face.

United’s second goal was from a free-kick, beautifully crossed by Harrison and headed in by Rodrigo, four minutes after the first. It was again the work of a moment. After repelling Chelsea’s vague gesture at a second half revival, using tools like an offside trap, dominant centre-backs and a brilliant goalkeeper, Pascal Struijk pushed two Chelsea players aside, Harrison fed the ball to Rodrigo, and when he realised Dan James could reach his pass before the byline, he charged into the box to get on the end of his cross. His contact wasn’t good, but Harrison had run in there too and finished it off for 3-0. These three shocks to Chelsea’s system won the game statistically, but the platform was built by making the Blues miserable all game.

Chelsea’s bizarre psychodrama will help sustain the Premier League through the week. Last weekend their manager, Thomas Tuchel, felt his hand wasn’t shaken properly and a referee was out to get him. This weekend he was upset from the moment his players boarded a plane to Leeds, leaving the coaching staff making do with a luxury bus. Slumped in his dugout, Tuchel glared as if he had a pitchful of problems, rather than a squad of very good players he doesn’t seem able to be bothered about because they’re not all already perfect. He seems disgusted by the idea that he might have to coach some of them to make them better. The future of Chelsea is sure to dominate the discourse for a while yet, but I’ll tell you now what Chelsea’s future holds: they’ll spend hundreds of millions more on more very good footballers, and even if they’re great they will still never be good enough. The Premier League feeds on disappointment and that’s why unhappiness and anger is always the story. “It is a pure joy to play games in an atmosphere like this,” Tuchel said after the match at Elland Road, but somehow he sounded bitter and furious about it.

And Brenden Aaronson? When I watched a ‘day in the life’ video about Aaronson in Salzburg I worried a little about him. At the time he was overcoming an injury, so training was mostly exercise, and he hadn’t played for a while. Other players were asking him how long to go. Afterwards at home he seemed listless. He talked through a short clothes rail of shirts he’d collected, pleasant to him but small against the stark white walls of the big apartment, mementoes of a career not long enough yet for nostalgia. Two friends from home had visited a couple of weeks before, his family was coming the next day, but for now he was alone. The film ends by watching him playing Fortnite with headphones on, the room outside his head oppressed by silence. It seemed no life for a young footballer, but life has always been difficult for young footballers. Perhaps some days Brenden put down the controller and gazed through the full-height windows towards the snow-topped grass-sided Alps in the near distance and thought about the difficult funnelling of his passions into his profession, the way that to keep doing what he wants to do he had to travel around the globe and submit his playful instincts to a formal schedule when all he wanted was contained in all he could see from his room. Grab a ball, bounce it on the floor, then take it outside onto the lovely lush grass. Tuchel is right to say it’s a pure joy, but I think that’s just abstract to him, some memory of bliss lost on the other side of his permanent anger. I imagine Brenden Aaronson now, in Leeds, crossing his fingers and hoping against hope that he gets picked to play against Barnsley.