Leeds United 0-1 Southampton: Turning up — Square Ball 28/5/24
LAST TIME, THIS TIME, NEXT TIME
Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
Leeds United only needed to turn up, that was all. Just show
up, be there, be themselves. Or maybe being themselves, being Leeds United, was
the problem – maybe that’s always the problem.
But it was Wembley, it was the Championship play-off final,
it was the richest game in football, all of that. But it was only Southampton.
Southampton are a good team and beat Leeds twice in the league season, but they
finished a place below in the table. Not much between the two sides, as they
say, and nothing to fear. Leeds could beat Southampton if Leeds played well.
They only needed, first, to turn up.
What the hell is it with Leeds United and Wembley? We may
never know. Maybe there isn’t an answer. The 1973 FA Cup final that Leeds lost
to Second Division Sunderland remains one of the enduring mysteries of the
club’s great Revie era. Few people know more about football than the legendary
players on the pitch for Leeds that day, but they could never explain what
happened to them. In our modern era, when so many fans seem to resent the teams
they support rather than love them, when players and managers must be ‘held
accountable’ for losing a game, just having one of those days no longer cuts
it. But it might be the nearest thing anyone can say to the truth.
A lot goes into having one of those days, of course, to the
point in the 100th minute on Sunday when Ethan Ampadu scuffed a pass and
watched it bounce slowly across the pitch and out for a throw-in. He knew that
he’d also just scuffed one of United’s very last chances of equalising and
gripped his head with his hands, despairing, hardly letting go until the final
whistle blew. In the first half United’s player of the year had been caught out
for Southampton’s goal, and a while after that I watched him curving a square
pass around the front of a striker to Joe Rodon, putting an extra edge of risk
on a pass he’s played a thousand times. I had the feeling that, however
slightly, Ampadu was not playing his normal game.
Wembley is not a normal place. It’s enormous. The stands
feel endless, and the Leeds end looked raucous, all scarves against the Saints
end flags. It was hard to tell if it sounded raucous, as Wembley supplies its
own nullifying din of noise, like one of those rooms designed to deaden sound,
where nobody can stay for too long without feeling mad. When the players kick
the ball the sound of it doesn’t reach the stands, a lessening of the senses
that makes it feel like watching a computer game on mute through clingfilm. The
arch adds to the disorientating scale, as did a replica trophy the size of a
double decker bus that was dragged away before kick-off like Gulliver
imprisoned on Lilliput. The roof was open but the rain was something I could
see not feel. A helicopter was twirling low, filling the roof-less patch of sky
then disappearing, reappearing. One of the weirder details is the drone camera,
hovering just above the players on its criss-crossed wires, zooming and
swooping and swaying and distracting – distracting me, anyway. I wonder about
the players.
When Leeds lost 4-0 at QPR a month ago, I wondered how much
of their frozen performance that night could be put down to the many
inexperienced players in United’s team never playing at a ground like Loftus
Road before: a cramped little stack of boxes that keeps two tiers of tense and
bawling fans within touching distance of the pitch. Combining that with the
pressure of an important Championship game, and the inherent heaviness of Leeds
United’s shirt, turned an ordinary game into something the players had never
done before. I was worried, on the morning of the big match, about the same
players coping with their first experience of a final at Wembley, but hoping
that the relative luxury of the place would counteract the novelty. But then
this is the point of Wembley in the first place. We know these good teams can
play football. But can they play football here?
Southampton can, by the looks of things, and if there is an
unturned key to this match, perhaps it’s something Daniel Farke could have
done, or done differently, to help his inexperienced players deal with the
occasion. The nerves were obvious, not only from Ampadu. Archie Gray was
berated when he messed up a counter attack in the first half right in front of
his manager, but really, an eighteen-year-old struggling to produce his normal
form in the biggest match of his young life was to be expected. Georginio
Rutter, always an emotional player, was one to watch carefully too, and Wilf
Gnonto, who is easily frustrated and combustible. It was more surprising that
the more outwardly confident Crysencio Summerville didn’t make an impact, and
unfortunately less surprising from Joel Piroe. After them, Leeds are running
out of players who can take a grip on a game and win it themselves, which is
why Joe Rodon started trying to make things happen from the back, rushing
forward with the ball.
The counter example was Dan James, who came on for the last
half-an-hour and got stuck in with determination and energy, smashed the bar
with a brilliant shot, smashed his head open, then played even harder. There
was a case for tapping a few more of the Leeds players on the head, if it would
knock similar performances from them.
Rather than a bang on the head, James’ real advantages are
the blows he’s had in his career. It’s not been easy being Dan James. There was
the failed transfer to Leeds, the sudden death of his father, the pressure at
Old Trafford, the decision to give that up and try Leeds again, being
ostracised by Jesse Marsch, returning from his loan at Fulham to find he was
now on Championship wages through no fault of his own, missing the crucial
penalty that could have sent Wales to Euro 24. Even starting on the bench at
Wembley feels like a knock he didn’t deserve. But the long line of stitches
down his forehead after the game, and his rueful dazed smile, are a map of the
resilience all that has built within him.
I’m not sure it’s necessary to know how to win at Wembley in
order to win at Wembley. After all, everyone has to win it the first time,
first. But I think it helps, in general, to know something about how to lose.
There’s a great paradox here. Daniel Farke has spoken about how, after
relegation, teams have to work hard to get rid of their losing habits, to build
wins and sustain a winning mentality. And ninety points later, after an almost
an entirely unbeaten season at Elland Road that rubbed away memories of going
there week after week last season to watch Leeds lose, Farke had achieved that
aim. The problem, though, is that his young team have got so used to winning
that they look confused whenever they’re not. Often, through the season, bright
starts would be wasted for lacking an early goal, ideas would dry up,
frustration would take over. Sometimes the sheer weight of United’s attacking
talent would, eventually, tilt the result back their way; or the leeway granted
by a 46 game season would let them take a point or absorb a defeat, to put it
right in the next game. In recent weeks that leeway has not been an option. The
number of next games kept decreasing until, at Wembley, there were none. The
4-0 victory over Norwich was determined, mostly, by Ilia Gruev scoring so
early, a sixth minute reward for a good opening. Defeat to Southampton was
dictated when, after Leeds had made most of the opening moves, William
Smallbone played Adam Armstrong through United’s misaligned defence and he
smashed his shot into the bottom corner. United’s only remaining resource was a
form of slow panic.
