Leeds United 1-1 Everton: Autumn leaves - The Square Ball 31/8/22

I MISS YOU MOST OF ALL

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Here was a beautiful night for football, August ending with warm hints of autumn coming instead of July’s searing klaxons of the planet’s impending death. Autumn is the season when leaves fall and mulch, but first nature gets its one last rage of joy before winter. The pinkening skies over Beeston and the distinctive smell of washing machine repair made the terraced streets and industrial estates a landscape for fond nostalgia, not fear of the future.

I don’t think we’ll ever get to the bottom of what happened in Frank Lampard Junior’s past to turn his life choices so petulant and self-destructive. Given the conditions, and the glory that always feels possible in the sport of football, the sourness of this Everton team was spiteful. Lampard is their manager and he isn’t very good at it, doesn’t seem to enjoy doing it, and doesn’t need to do it. Like billionaires who tweet, if I had his life, I simply would not. Lampard must feel like he has something to prove, but after his playing career, what is it? Did he secretly hate every moment of being an energetic goalscoring midfielder, desperate for a redemption tour as manager to set the record straight? Did he have his agent faxing Neil Warnock every season, begging to arrange a transfer? Was he breaking coffee dates with Gianfranco Zola or Andrea Pirlo, to meet Paddy Kenny over cake and learn the secrets of The Boss he never had?

Everton’s time wasting was decisive in the way this game lost its chance of pleasure and descended into bad temper. It’s an odd tactic for Lampard to rely on, as the plughole after his morning shower must remind him daily of time’s cruel march, but signing Conor Coady from Wolves has confirmed his commitment to sacrificing what’s left of his youth and taking all ours down with it. After the game, Lampard denied it all, saying Leeds fans “became obsessed with time wasting” and calling that “weird”, but such feeble gaslamping is so characteristic of Lampard it was convincing nobody of anything except that his would be a Tinder profile to avoid.

Jesse Marsch’s ‘obsession’ with the time wasting manifested as standing in his technical area with both arms in the air, pointing to his wristwatch to imitate the referee’s signal for stopping the clock as Jordan Pickford waded through his rigmarole. This was the latest example of Marsch, in his words, “escalating” his behaviour to try to “affect the way that decisions are getting made”, and in the sense that it seemed to make the ref, Darren England, even less likely to warn Everton about their go-slow, it had an effect of sorts. Adding just three minutes of stoppage time at the end let Everton get away with it, and felt like the ref’s reminder to Marsch that only one wrist mattered in the match. I expect Darren England will be so pleased with the outcome he’ll need to put that wrist in a protective cast before he’s finished his self-congratulations.

Self-inflicted injuries were another of the night’s spoilers. Rodrigo dislocating his shoulder apparently just by running a bit wrong felt inevitable from the moment Angus Kinnear committed his programme notes to print. Kinnear claims innocence with these, telling TSB that when he used his column to compare proposals for distributing payments through football to famines in China under Mao, he was only writing to a “really very small” readership and didn’t think “those things would have been taken out of context and covered in the mainstream press, that was never my intention”. That was the one edition of his notes last season cross-published on the club’s website with a link tweeted to 900,000 followers, suggesting someone intended them to have a wider readership. This week his subject was the transfer market, and his achievement was to present the club’s fairly reasonable attitude towards adding a new striker before the window closes — that Leeds will only sign one they think is really good — in terms that even antagonised fans who agree with it: ‘We believe we have three striking options that are better than the majority of our peers (two proven international number nines and a player regarded as the best emerging young striking talent in the league) and will only supplement this with an exceptional addition rather than just a warm body.’

Imagine the clammy cold creeping across Kinnear’s loins as Rodrigo went staggering off in the first half, sobbing and huffing oxygen to dull the searing pain in his shoulder. But the shivers should have already set in when Jackie Harrison’s cross flashed across Everton’s six yard box, a golden chance any proven international number nine would have converted to a goal as simply as breathing, but that Rodrigo just looked at. The emerging young striking talent, Joe Gelhardt, took over but got little change and two fluffed chances out of Everton’s injury affected backline. Then we got to see option three, first choice Pat Bamford, carrying all the weight of the sixty minutes for England against Andorra that he’s desperate to add to. Despite being more involved in build-up play than Gelhardt, he looked far from sharp enough for the Premier League. Marsch said afterwards that Bamford, “starting on Saturday is a serious possibility”, and on this showing I see him lasting a half, which is half of how Bamford got into this situation in the first place.

Being at odds with fans about transfer policy is one thing for Kinnear, but despite Marsch’s expressions of gratitude to the board and insistence that there are no ‘Marsch transfers’, just collective responsibility, the manager has sounded like he’s singing from a different sheet for the last few weeks. After this game he wasn’t only saying that a new striker has “been a goal of ours from the start of the summer”, but readily confirming rumours linking Leeds to Wolves’ Hwang Hee-chan, one of his RB old-boys, saying, “I like Hee-chan. He knows our football, he’s on our list. I can tell you that he’s been on our list from the beginning.” Kinnear used to complain about his manager turning down player after player the board wanted to sign, now he’s back to the days of clickbait websites getting their fuel from Paul Heckingbottom’s frustrated dreams of signing Andy Yiadom.

The match itself had its own little turn back towards recent history. Leeds were dominant, but fell behind to a first-half sucker punch. Which sucker? Pick one. Rasmus Kristensen was caught out by Luis Sinisterra’s tackle on Anthony Gordon, and a succession of Leeds players — Sinisterra, Kristensen, Marc Roca, Tyler Adams, Diego Llorente — let Gordon go, recollect the ball from a pass through Llorente’s legs, and shoot in through Illan Meslier’s. United’s dominance was redoubled after that, but so was Everton’s dedication to spoiling the match, and it became like one of those tense Championship comeback slogs from the tougher end of the two years before promotion. Leeds were even playing out wide again, like the old days, but forced into it by Everton’s packed central defence. Jackie Harrison was excellent, reprising the best of his wing play, but putting so much attacking through him meant asking too much from Pascal Struijk, going forward as his back-up from left-back.

In a burst of determination after half-time, Brenden Aaronson stood out and got the ball to Sinisterra, making his first league start, who outwitted the England goalie with a sharp shot inside an unexpected post. Leeds needed the equaliser to get the rewards of their second half play, but they couldn’t build from there to win, and were nearly caught out when their emphasis on going forward opened easy diagonal routes to counter. Struijk stopped one with a tackle, a goal was called offside by the width of an elbow, Meslier made a superb stop one-on-one. United’s aggressive intentions were blunted by the simple fact that Alex Iwobi and Amadou Onana are bigger and stronger than Aaronson, while Tom Davies kicking Meslier and Gordon barging Kristensen over off the ball, the latter foolishness starting scraps on the pitch and the touchline, came with the knowing grins of players who came readier for a night of dark arts than Leeds.

It was all good fun to watch, in the way football has of being enjoyable even in its ugliness. If I’d wanted to see sport equal to summer’s sultry end I should have watched tennis. Marsch complained about Everton’s damage to the night’s “entertainment business”, and he was right, but I can’t deny I was entertained anyway by Leeds United’s battle with their villainy. The rest — transfers, injuries, strategies, investment — is all stuff to worry about later, hoping in the meantime that, unlike the hairless waste spreading across Frank Lampard’s head, our season won’t expand out of control into desolation beyond repair.