Leeds United 0-1 Arsenal: Nobody’s perfect - The Square Ball 17/10/22

DOING OUR BEST

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

The city of Leeds has never done slick. But it tries, and those new boots and hairdo attempts teetering on the edge of shambles are part of what make it feel like home. This weekend was Leeds doing its best. Light Night on Thursday and Friday, bringing thousands of people into the city centre to feel some stuff about seeing some art. Saturday was Live at Leeds, and every year the crowds criss-crossing on a band chase from venue to venue change the street sensation. Even if you’re not part of it, you’re in its midst. Sunday, Premier League football at Elland Road, Arsenal vs Leeds, described by United chief executive Angus Kinnear as a ‘glamour tie’ he could have sold 70,000 tickets to.

So far, so brave. And so of course on Saturday night a significant weird monument of the city’s industrial pomp (it was a printworks joined to a girls’ school, make it make sense) went on dramatic fire, and on Sunday afternoon the world watched and waited more than half an hour for the Premier League to reboot after a surge in Beeston cut power. I ended my weekend in the basement of Hyde Park Book Club watching a group called Live Evil playing (their words) ‘some of Miles Davis’s most unpopular songs’, and midway through the first number bass player Fergus Quill’s machine broke down. He left the stage mid-tune, ran home for a replacement, and made it back in time for his solo in the second number. Slick musicianship? Not at all — he wasn’t there! But did he make the shambles of his absence beautiful? Oh yes. This blog maybe not the natural place to register the moment into city lore, but my whole reason for writing things down has been driven by an urge to sharing such things when they make me feel a bit better. The Leonardo/Thoresby buildings are still just about standing, the fire hopefully contained to the hard-to-damage space of the atrium, its beautiful interior tiling already fire-glazed for life from long ago. Leeds, the power back on, got their game played eventually.

If you want perfection you will live every day disappointed and upset. If you ever get perfection then however long it lasts won’t matter one day when all of this is gone and so are you. That’s only a bleak thought if you take it bleakly, and if you think you can escape the fate of every other human who has ever lived, and if you do, you should probably forget in particular about Leeds and Leeds United and do other things with your pending immortality. But if you’re willing to forgo perfection and take things as they are, some good some bad and some actually on fire (the jazz was, in the good sense), then you might get some kicks from a game like Sunday’s when it kicked off downwire of the substations of LS11.

First, that delay. It seems like, after the power jolted the lights and screens off then on, play could have continued but for the referee’s lost link to his video assistants at Stockley Park. Hmm. Football became the world’s most popular game because it only needed something roundish to kick and two places to kick it into, and a rudimentary grasp of some simple rules. So what went down for half an hour as communication lines rebooted and the on-grass referee wafted a ball back and forth through the goalposts trying to make his wrist whirr to tell him if it was over the line he was putting it over all felt quite far from the main issue. But I’m not sure this is necessarily new, it’s just different. Way back before floodlights, games that went on too long or were visited by fog had to be abandoned due to gloom. What feels like progress is often just moving problems around. This reminder of association football’s history is brought to you by Leeds United’s 103rd birthday on 17th October and a friendly urging to please buy my book about it.

The irony on Sunday was how from no power to low power, VAR became the main character, leaving many of us wishing it was never plugged back in. Straight after half-time, Pat Bamford went from the bench to scoring a goal, ruled out for the sort of feathery pushing referees have only started penalising since they knew an omnipotent camera was analysing every frame of incidents that, if nobody ever called a foul one way or another, nobody would ever call an incident. So that goal didn’t count. Then Leeds got a penalty, for a blatant handball by William Saliba, not given until after Arsenal had gone on the attack and come close to scoring at the other end, when the referee was at last sent to look deep into recent history on video. The right decision was not hard to give without watching a film about it. Penalties have been given for handballs like this since before video recorders were invented. Can it be true that when it comes to Bamford and Gabriel pushing each other for the disallowed goal, on-pitch referees are seeing things they don’t have to look for, but for Saliba’s handball, the referee was seeing less than he should, knowing VAR would pick it up? What I think is true is this: VAR is too prominent in refs’ thoughts and in our games. Lastly, in stoppage time, the linesman gave the referee a full rundown of Bamford and Gabriel bickering in the penalty area, advising a red card for Gabriel for kicking out and a penalty to Leeds. Then the referee looked at a video of it and gave a yellow card to Gabriel and a free-kick to Arsenal. Who would be that lino now? Was he really that wrong?

This shouldn’t be the substance of a game of football and it can ruin a dull game but, in a tense exciting match, it does add something novel to the drama. I was het up and hopping in ways I never was pre-VAR. The more old-fashioned excitement all came from Leeds, taking on the league leaders, suddenly finding the aggression and verve Jesse Marsch has been talking about since March. Perhaps the delay did them good, they played as if pent-up, a little cooped, ready to be out their cage. The first half was fairly even, and Arsenal had good moments, but Leeds’ important thing was not giving those up easily, while scampering into high pressure attacks of their own. I keep waiting for Leeds’ hex on goalkeepers to wear off, but after Édouard Mendy of Chelsea and Vicente Guaita of Crystal Palace were forced into freaking out by Leeds, here Aaron Ramsdale was panicked into booting one clearance off his own defender’s back, something that’s becoming a sure sign that things are going well for Leeds. A lot of people had come to Elland Road fearing Leeds United would be played off the park. They weren’t.

Enter, then exit, Rodrigo. Our misfit striker played one of his most influential halves for ages, growing in skill and confidence, until he lost the run of himself ten minutes before half-time. Receiving a pass on the left wing, he had a hundred options to choose from ahead of doing the one thing nobody on the pitch expected: a powerful cross-field pass towards his own goal and Bukayo Saka. While Leeds tried to understand an Arsenal attack being launched by their own centre-forward, Saka was put through by Martin Ødegaard and blasted a first timer over Illan Meslier at the near post. That was the end of Rodrigo’s good game. Marsh opened discussions with Bamford in the technical area, and Rodrigo didn’t trap or pass the ball well again this day. Afterwards, Marsch added that Rodrigo’s “big switch is not normally what we’d like to do,” which is about as severe a public condemnation as I’ve heard him give. It’s one thing to mess up while executing the match plan. To lose the game while off-piste is abandoning responsibility to an extent that could get not-such-nice young men demoted from the Leadership Council.

I’d been impressed by Rodrigo before his brain started coming out of his ears, but I had to reassess my thresholds for influence after Bamford replaced him — good and bad. That goal that wasn’t given, it came so quickly, and would have been so good. It was a taster of the half that was coming. Bamford was so good, and Leeds were so much better with him upfront, but everything that looked like it must become a goal for Leeds then wasn’t. The penalty for handball — Bamford took it and hit it well, aiming for a corner Ramsdale guessed at but couldn’t reach, but sent it a centimetre wide of the post. I was wishing for Bamford to write himself into the headlines and I guess he did, damn it. To his credit and the Peacocks’, the miss wasn’t allowed to be a turning point, and nor were any of the others — Leeds kept going consistently through the half long beyond the point weaker teams might have lost heart. Within minutes of the penalty Bamford was back in the box with the ball, then Brenden Aaronson was cutting a pass across for Luis Sinisterra, whose shot was blocked.

Pat was peeling around and beyond defenders, getting on the dangerously curving passes zipping near-vertically toward’s Arsenal’s box, but Leeds couldn’t get him or anyone to have a good square hit, a solid rocking shot, all their efforts ending a-scuff and a-tangle in the six yard box. I wondered while watching this stuff about the times Marsch talks about wanting his players to be ‘clean’ when attacking, and whether — like last week’s wish for ‘bunches’ of goals when Leeds are on top — he isn’t asking for too much, or maybe for the wrong thing. Will cleanliness turn United’s chances into bunches of goals? Or does he need Bamford not to be clean, but be lucky? Patrick has always played a skill game. Sometimes I wish he was a cloven-footed seven footer scoring them off a lucky bony arse.

“We need Rodrigo to get hot, we need Patrick to get hot,” Marsch said afterwards, about how he’s going to find goals in this team. That might work, as I’m optimistic we’ll get a second act of the Bamford-as-Kane show of 2020 when he gets more fitness, more sharpness, more hotness. But if that’s the criteria, why hasn’t Sonny Perkins been drafted onto the bench, at least for a look? I have no idea if Perkins will make the grade as a top Premier League striker, how can I know anything about that. But I do know Leeds think him worth the tribunal for nabbing him from West Ham, and that he started this season with a glut of goals that have to be described as hot. He’s eighteen — he’ll cool off. But if we’re looking for heat, why not let him strike while he’s got it, instead of waiting for him to play his candle out in the Under-21s?

That’s a thought for another day. The thought for this day was that, if I didn’t want the result to be what it was, I loved being suckered into the glory of Leeds’ attempts to change it for a better one. I also might not want, if it was left to my idle imagining, Leeds United’s football to be played like this, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been totally engaged by our play anyway. That’s not the enrapture of love but its a synapsing into enough senses to make the world beyond Elland Road fall away and put me into a moment that I’ll want, later, to remember enough about to write it down so I can tell someone. The least likely result from this game was Leeds beating Arsenal, and it didn’t happen. But there was a really good game of football had here and it would be a shame to waste it.