Leeds United 2-1 Nottingham Forest: Just right - The Square Ball 5/4/23

SAFETY

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Thought experiments can be painful things in football when jobs and careers and fortunes are all on the line. Javi Gracia was in the dugout, Jesse Marsch was far away, Andrea Radrizzani and Peter Lowy were comparing contracts in the executive seats. More important than any of that or them, on a night when Elland Road was remembering a loss, of Chris Loftus and Kevin Speight 23 years ago, that makes any dumb game insignificant, alternative histories can hurt when feelings are involved. In football, feelings are always involved, although they get obscured by managerial careers and owners’ fortunes being won or lost, stuff that shouldn’t matter to thee or me. There’s so much surrounding the sport that you wouldn’t miss if it went away, when you could concentrate on how a game makes you feel.

But anyway, Leeds United’s what-if on the pitch against Nottingham Forest was: what if Luis Sinisterra had been fit all season? What have we missed, how much have we lost, how different would we feel this spring if his first half performance here wasn’t a brief glimpse of a player struggling for full match strength, but one in a long line of consistent statements of brilliance from someone who might have won player of the season if he’d been let out the treatment room?

Sinisterra was sublime in the first half, lining up defenders on the left until they were just in position for him to swerve and sway between them towards danger. Then right at the end of the half he was ridiculous, cutting in to take on a defender and beat him, then deciding the best way to score was to wait and beat him again so the angle for his precise curving driving shot into the bottom corner was giving him a line that could not be broken. 2-1 to Leeds. Perfect timing.

This was his theme at the start of the season and the cruelty of his absence since is that he was here saving us from the start. When the team was misfiring in the League Cup against Barnsley, he took the ball and lamped it, low into the net from 25 yards. A goal down to Everton, another shot from nothing rescued a vital point. Away to Brentford, when Leeds were about to go in at half-time 2-0 down, Sinisterra changed the team-talk by creating a goal from a throw-in, lifting the ball over a defender than hitting in low before anyone knew what was coming. I can’t remember a player with so much skill using it to cut through so much bullshit.

Last autumn, out there in Kalvin Phillips’ old no.23 shirt, Sinisterra was the Raphinha replacement it felt impossible to believe in, because surely lightning couldn’t strike twice on the wings for Leeds United for less than £21m a throw. You had to whisper it back then, like blasphemy: could Sinisterra be even better than Raphinha? Then he got injured and the question got forgotten. And, to an extent, the player. Now, his goal against Forest is unforgettable, but with that comes the regret, remembering how different this season could have been if it had all been like this, with him.

Leeds needed that goal, and a lead moments before the break, just to make sure this hideously important game didn’t get out of hand. There are nine matches left, so it wasn’t truly all or nothing. But it felt that way. And after seeing Nottingham Forest play, anything less than a Leeds win would have felt worse than nowt. Typically, Leeds had a decent try at making everything go wrong, going behind to Orel Mangala’s goal in the twelfth minute. But Forest were so bad it mollified the impact of conceding. In the opening ten minutes Leeds had already looked ready to score four or five, and their most difficult task was about not letting Forest look good, like when they hit the post from their first corner, or themselves look worse. Unlike at Arsenal last Saturday, Leeds treated 0-1 like 0-0, and stuck to the plan of simply being the better team.

Luke Ayling was more like clinging to the plan, but he got through. He started the game so badly I could hardly bear to watch, and when a simple ball got away from him to the feet of Javi Gracia, they had a moment together, the coach trying any word or touch he could to soothe this stricken soul. Ayling was all over for Forest’s opener, cushioning an easy header to their Emmanuel Dennis, getting lost chasing two behind him as the ball went to Mangala. But half an hour later he was trading backheel flicks upfield with Weston McKennie. Ayling in this form is an enigma and I never want to love him less even for all the clunkers and mistakes.

Besides, how much did he help Jackie Harrison torment Forest? Behind every good winger there’s a good full-back, and Harrison was looking like a great winger here. All the promise of his 1950s Boy’s Own quiff was confirmed in his workrate and his service, those testing crosses that didn’t find Pat Bamford in quite his best sniffin’ nine form but were worth sending in. He got the equaliser with some classic wingplay — Ayling helping on the overlap — tiptoeing past Harry Toffolo and Danilo, helping McKennie set up Marc Roca for a shot, then doing the right thing following in when Keilor Navas fumbled the save. Even while burying this chance his feet were sweet, deserving entry into Jackie’s Big Book of First Touches, as he volleyed beneath the keeper’s dive.

The way the chance was created, the quick thinking to see it coming, the way it was confidently snaffled — this was an equaliser that as good as confirmed a winner was coming. Once Sinisterra put Leeds ahead, the second half was secure so long as Leeds did not beat themselves. Nottingham Forest, cycling through their overstuffed roster of big fees, bold reputations and really bad players, couldn’t come up with anything worth calling a response. And a Leeds back four, that we feared might wobble without Max Wöber, put a stop to anything Forest even suggested. Taiwo Awoniyi got closest to Illan Meslier, as one of several long balls meant for his pace sprang the offside trap, but Junior Firpo sprinted from left-back to stop him, Pascal Struijk joined in to finish him off. Leeds defended as if even a shot against them would be heresy. In midfield, Roca and McKennie kept to simple work of domination, winning the ball in their own half and passing it forward in theirs. Those forward passes didn’t produce a third goal, although if Bamford wasn’t still catching up on two years of lost fitness, they might have. Instead they sent Bamford up the other end of the field, with the ball, where it could do Leeds no harm.

Safety is the motif for the rest of the season. Safe jobs, safe careers, safe investments. In sport, these are all small kinds of safe that are particular to the business of it. Feeling safe in the Premier League is also fairly minor, compared to what safety can mean in real life. But safety is what everybody wants from Leeds between now and the end of May, and it’s why everybody feels so warmly towards Javi Gracia now. The way he encouraged Ayling through his mistakes is the way he’s keeping everybody feeling more confident about where this season is going. Safety is a strange thing to want from a game that can provide excitement instead, but comparisons to rollercoasters are apt because we want thrills from them, but also a safe landing at the end so we can ride again. ‘Game state’ is a popular term in modern football, but I prefer ‘game feel’, and it’s what made a match that could have been so fraught feel so good. Those last minute helter-skelter thefts of Jesse Marsch’s, when results were compressed into stoppage time, were like having needles of adrenalin punched right into the thigh. This game, as Leeds asserted themselves as they should, was like a steady sesh on serotonin, a football match like a pub garden one spring lunchtime when it feels like things are going right for a while.