Leeds United 1-1 Leicester City: Good at bad - Square Ball 26/4/23

NO HEROES

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

There’s something still there, some hardly functioning remnant of what Leeds United used to be when they were working so hard to get into this position that is slipping away from them now. It’s like a faint red spot on a heat monitor, or a vibration under concrete from a twitching leg, trying to kick the debris away. Is it enough? When you’ve put so much effort into getting here, and surviving, when do you know enough’s enough and give up?

It was fair to assume that would happen when Max Wöber didn’t make the squad, but this isn’t about him. The best of this match was Jackie Harrison matching skill with workrate against the team that must have marvelled at his half-finished medical in January. It was Liam Cooper blocking shots in the box that were flying past Illan Meslier a few weeks ago, and Luke Ayling giving his goalie a big double thumbs up across half the pitch, thanking his desolate keeper for an excellent pass to the wing. It was even, to complete the ghosts of our recent past, Pat Bamford spurning the chance to make himself the matchwinning hero at the very end, when with the goal at his mercy, he once again put himself at the mercy of the Kop.

This was part of the secret to United’s promotion, and it’s about more than just graft. That these players, and their former teammates, achieved what they did was absurd. We used to mock Gjanni Alioski as a hapless right-winger, but somehow we still yearn for him as a Premier League left-back. Nobody foresaw Gaetano Berardi’s journey from walking red card to totem of promotion. Mateusz Klich was trying to put right the wrongs of Wolfsburg. Ayling was the reject from Bristol City, Cooper the reject from Leeds, when Kyle Bartley was around, anyway. Compare Harrison, stuck on the bench at Middlesbrough, to Harrison, playing left-back and left-wing simultaneously for Leeds. Bamford was one of the lost loan souls of Chelsea, looking for a home.

It’s not that these players suddenly got good, and it’s only partly to do with their coach. It’s down to their shared understanding of how you can perform to your best by becoming intimate with your faults. Luke Ayling knows how it feels not to be good at something, because growing up with a stammer meant he was never good at talking. But he learned what to do about it, to make sure it has never held him back. Harrison is a dedicated student of his own game, and knows when his delivery is off point. You can hear his anguish on the effects microphones, then you can see him trying again. You don’t need to tell Liam Cooper he’s got a mistake in him, because he knows, and every game he plays at this level is about not making that mistake. When he failed with a tackle to stop Kelechi Iheanacho’s break, leading to Jamie Vardy’s equaliser, Cooper fell to his knees and pounded the ground with both fists in anger over and over. He knows this about himself, that at this level it’s always been about living with the stress of playing better than you ever have before. It means these players have never been perfect. It’s a big part of how they got Leeds into the Premier League in the first place.

This is still there in these players but as a team Leeds now revert too easily, fold too fast, give up not so much the fight but the initiative whenever adversity approaches. There are too many players now who don’t fit with the mentality of their teammates, because whatever hard times they’ve known have not been faced the same way. The summer’s intake have all grown up in the American dream that tells you, you are Gandi, you are Mother Teresa, you are the next president or World Cup winner. That you can become the individual you want to be because greatness is within you already. It’s not only the American players, but those who heard Jesse Marsch telling them what fine young men they were in Salzburg and Leipzig, who felt his concentration on bringing out their shining light within rather than making them better at football. Marc Roca’s a big reader, and one of his favourite books is Awaken The Giant Within by Tony Robbins. You can guess what it’s about from the title. Perhaps Roca was searching for the giant inside himself when he started spinning round on the ball in stoppage time until he lost it, inviting another Leicester attack. All these guys have grown up believing in the same thing: that their brilliance is a given, and life is about proving your individual greatness to other people.

Liam Cooper, ejected from Hull City’s Premier League academy to start again in League Two, grew up learning different lessons: you’re rubbish, so what are you going to do about it? And I would argue he has achieved more in his career than anyone believing success should be theirs by right of talent and self-belief alone. And he’s better prepared for the fight Leeds are in against relegation now, because this isn’t about anyone demonstrating their birthright to success. It’s about being less bad than three other teams despite being as bad as them. I’m not expecting Leeds United, with sixteen wins from their last 71 Premier League matches, to suddenly become brilliant. I’m pleading with them to not give in to how bad they’ve become.

In the first half against Leicester it looked like they’d cracked it. Rodrigo played as if possessed, snarling at defenders, smashing stray balls into the Family Stand, kicking anyone in blue who tried to get over halfway. I suspect he was only fit for an hour, but he played nearly seventy minutes with a furious desire to make the most of them. Weston McKennie, who seems to have no shortage of people telling him it’s everybody else’s fault he doesn’t have the Ballon d’Or that’s his by right, was the switched on, committed and combative midfielder his publicity promises. Leicester had a goal ruled out for offside, an astonishing banger into the top corner from Youri Tielemans that felt like a warning, but if they were as good as that shot they wouldn’t be below Leeds in the league. Leeds were the more determined, creative side, and Harrison made a goal from next to nothing, dribbling himself an angle on the wing and crossing to the back post, over Bamford and down for Luis Sinisterra to head firmly in.

Leicester, with Dean Smith, John Terry and Jamie Vardy rattling around their changing room, were bound to react after half-time, and did, sending Leeds into their shells. Some of Meslier’s clearing kicks betrayed his nerves, although he still kept Leeds in things with saves while the South Stand, sensing his fragility, sang his name. There were scrambles and blocks and tackles in the box because Leeds couldn’t find a way to relieve the pressure — Bamford wasn’t winning headers up front, and McKennie and Roca were too far from him to get on the loose balls. Their composure went, and maybe their fitness, as United’s passing plunged from 71 per cent good in the first half, to 56 per cent in the second. As the crowd cried for Wilf Gnonto, Brenden Aaronson replaced Rodrigo, apparently to maintain strength in midfield and a counter-attacking threat, according to Javi Gracia. But there was no strength in midfield worth maintaining, while Adam Forshaw gazed blankly down the touchline from his warm-ups, with a picture in his mind of how this game could look if Leeds had the ball and kept the ball.

Leicester’s equaliser felt inevitable once Vardy was on, and so did the other time he put the ball in the net — offside — and the chances they should have finished. It was too much like wishful thinking for Roca’s stoppage time header to go over the line, although it was close, or for Bamford to bury his golden chance into an empty net and wait for VAR to answer any questions of offside. Leeds actually ended strongly, playing a way that might have got them another goal if they’d done it all half, but Javi Gracia’s reaction to the equaliser felt like part of the problem: he got the attention of all his team, arms out, palms down, gesturing at them to be calm. Elland Road, broiling, needed more than serenity and inner peace. The players paid more attention to the crowd than their coach, and went trying to get the win.

The point, and much of the performance, were technically progress, but neither made anyone at Leeds feel better. All the problems are still problems, everything that’s making people angry is still there. Leeds fans are caught between wanting to put the board, in particular, through a primal scream of fury to avenge defeat, and knowing that the best chance of change at the top is winning games, staying up and being taken over — so if they can’t have one, they’ll take the other. A draw gave them neither, not the celebration of victory and safety brought close, nor the catharsis of plunging into disaster. It just kept the emotions all bottled up for Bournemouth on Bank Holiday Sunday, and 1990 is calling on the carphone to tell us why that might not be a great idea. The players, meanwhile, need to remember who they are and how they got here, because that wasn’t easy and neither is this. The hardest part of success is to keep doing the things that made you successful. I get a weird sort of faith from watching Bamford scuff a season-saving chance anywhere but in, from seeing Liam Cooper fistfighting the ground beneath him. Doing all that wrong and still getting results. That’s Leeds United as I knew it when Leeds United was good.