Leeds United 4-0 Norwich City: Bringing it all together — Square Ball 17/5/24

THE PROPER STUFF

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Sometimes football brings it all together and gives you a night like this, when everything no matter how tired or threadbare works like new, when all worries melt away – at 4-0, anyway – and you feel, for a time, mentally or physically or both, unlike you ever otherwise do in ways that are, thankfully, better.

It started in the stands at Elland Road, the old-fashioned shambles of a stadium that, for all its curmudgeonly resistance to modern football and manufactured atmospheres, feels more like its old self than ever when the scarves are handed out to everyone and the playlist is amped up. These aren’t the old ways, but this is how you start a party in 2024, and sometimes that’s what Elland Road needs most: an invitation to start. Sometimes that invitation to party looks like the bulging veins on Ashley Barnes’ scalp. Sometimes it looks like 35,000 free scarves held aloft in unison while a club anthem from fifty years belts across Beeston.

And on the pitch it started with Joe Rodon, the catalyst for Leeds United’s best performance since Daniel Farke started work, for the forward line’s most exhilarating night. Perhaps Norwich City were ready for Wilf Gnonto running at them again, even for Georginio Rutter finding his best form. What was the plan for when Joe Rodon kept stepping forward from central defence, winning the ball and driving with it towards their penalty area? Even Big Joe never looks prepared for this while he’s doing it. Compared to the cool surges of Gnonto, I imagine Rodon screaming as he bounces the ball off his feet, tearing at his hair with his hands as he gets closer and dangerously closer to goal. Lately, he’s not been doing this. Tonight, he was doing it from the start. It was the sign that Leeds were going to be different. Norwich had to foul him.

From there, about thirty yards out, an opening goal exploring the double meanings of cute. Cute first meant sharp, shrewd, ingenious, cunning, before it meant endearing, charming. The first cuteness was there in the combined strategising of the Leeds bench with Ilia Gruev and Crysencio Summerville, who were told to watch for nervous-looking Norwich goalie Angus Gunn leaving his near post unguarded. The second bit of cute was from Summerville, taking Gruev’s chin in hand and moving his face to face his, lest Ilia’s dish-like eyes, eager for the big gap in Gunn’s goal, be read by the Norwich wall. Such as it was. Summerville’s run to the corner halved that wall, leaving Gruev with one player to avoid as he curled and bounced the ball into the net.

This was not a moment for belief. The goal was unbelievable, and my mind was on the Derby play-off, 15th May 2019. Too soon to believe anything yet. But it was another invitation. Rodon shook the bottle. Gruev popped the cork. Six minutes in, Leeds had the chance to shrug off their tension by drinking deep of Daniel Farke’s champagne football.

Someone should give protected designation to the characteristics of United’s second goal. It came fifteen minutes after the first. Rodon was involved again, in that a few minutes earlier he’d run down the right, chipped a ball too far for Gnonto or Archie Gray, then yelled at them both for not giving him better options. This time he passed firmly along the ground to Gray. Gray zipped a pass around a defender and down the line for Gnonto, who jogged onto it and looked up at Joel Piroe, running away from his markers and pointing towards the goal. The cross, stroked off the golf club instep of Gnonto’s right boot, was impeccable, high and slow then dipping so suddenly onto Piroe’s head that he didn’t have to jump, just to stand and nod and send the South Stand crazy.

Where had all this been? There was so much more of it. Twice in a first half minute first Rutter then Gnonto went Maradona mode, slaloming upfield with the ball at their feet, evading tackles, gathering speed towards the goal(s) of the century(ies). At the start of the second half, now 3-0 up after enough first half chances to score at least five, Leeds tore into Norwich again and while it might sound fanciful to suggest it could have been 8-0 by the hour, the real ridiculous part was waiting until the 67th minute for 4-0. Gunn didn’t hold a shot by Gnonto and Junior Firpo took the rebound, looked up calmly, and flicked across for Summerville to finish. This was believable, now, after nearly seventy minutes of it. Wem-ber-lee, Wem-ber-lee, and Glen Kamara marching along the Kop, high-fiving everyone in the front row. Everything was heightened. Rutter headed the ball clear from a corner and it was cheered like another goal. There was dopamine in winning the simplest duels, and United’s players were going for hit after hit.

Leeds, Farke had been saying in the build to these games, perform well in the spotlight matches. Here might be the clue to why this happened against Norwich, with everything on the line in one game, and not against Sunderland or Blackburn, when had the team looked half so up for it they could have won the damn league. That damn league, though, is a burden, a complex and unpredictable weight that can obliterate the game it is supposed to support. As Jesse Marsch will tell you, it’s hard to find clarity amid 46 league games that are being played to solve one hundred million pound problems that are not yours, part of a three year war against diminishing parachute payments, the abstract complications that obsess CEOs, seep into the minds of fans, and keep players from focusing on the simple things in life: beating your man, crossing the ball, heading it in. In the closing weeks of the season, Farke couldn’t find a way through all his squad’s problems back to their best form. In what could have been the season’s final match, he could give the players one thing to focus on. Listen to the crowd. Play the best you can. Don’t worry about another game until you’ve won this one. Now go.

Now, also, stop. There is tension at the heart of all football teams, between eleven players who want to play according to their instincts and whims, whether those are good or bad, and a coach who is trying to push that eleven like too much plasticine into too small a mould. It means restraining some at the same time as elevating others. Rodon: do a bit more. Rutter: do a bit less. Somewhere in there is the perfect balance. It’s simple, like alchemy is simple.

At 2-0 up Farke stood for fifteen minutes outside his dugout, his arms outstretched, his palms down, beseeching, begging for calm. A minute after United’s second goal, Ethan Ampadu’s slip had let Josh Sargent through on Illan Meslier, whose save was superb, narrowing the angle, reading the chip and reacting to block it. Remember, 15th May, 2019. We were 2-0 up on aggregate that night, too. Farke had no choice but to restrain his team, and actually they looked glad of it, Gnonto playing backwards passes as sharp as his forward ones, Gray standing in front of Farke like a teacher’s pet, in the same arms out pose. It was fifteen minutes of the sort of boring football Leeds fans have been deriding as Farke’s fault this season, but after so much exhilaration it was hardly noticed.

But it was important. Here, better than all season, it made sense. These spells of calm give the team somewhere it can go either when things aren’t working or when they need to recover, a place to rest and rethink. They know that if they stumble or risk getting tackled, they’ll find a teammate willing to take the ball and send it back to Meslier and safety. It’s a secure platform but it can also, at its worst, give the players a place to hide, when a 50/50 chance to go forward comes down on their shoulders 80/20 in favour of passing back to Meslier, and the team starts thinking backwards. Even here it was beginning to feel like a dangerous tactic, as Ampadu and Kamara passed back and forth to each other, threatening to lull the boisterous, valuable crowd. Then it worked. I count 31 slow, patient passes in United’s half before Kamara breaks the mood and zaps the ball between yellow shirts to Piroe, who has dropped deep and spins between three players and off into Norwich’s dozing half, where only two defenders and Rutter are ahead of him. His cross to Summerville gets helped to Rutter at the back post, and he smashes the ball in off the bar. That, everyone, is what all that slow damn passing at the back is supposed to be about.

And this is what football is supposed to be about. Not, I suppose, for Norwich, whose fans did at least get some good news when, after calling for it in the second half, their manager David Wagner was sacked this morning. Farke, meanwhile, was saying, “This is why we all wanted to be a football player, for nights like this,” and if we can’t be football players, this is why we want to be football fans, to willingly pay hundreds of pounds for tickets and travel to a show that, as often as not, isn’t worth the trouble. It’s a show that never lets up, either, bombarding its fans into concern about things that none of us got into football for: Profit and Sustainability calculations, pixel-measured offside traps, wage bills balancing against broadcast revenue. Still now that stuff just won’t quit, as bank accounts are emptied to pay for passage to Wembley, and Farke’s job still teeters, less precariously today, on the outcome of his season-end measurement against the company’s major KPIs, ie, promotion or not.

That stuff, though, honestly, who cares. Sometimes football brings it all together and gives you a night like this. Or it gives you a night like 15th May 2019, and through it all it gives you Liam Cooper. That night, when it all went wrong, Liam Cooper was one of the villains, and plenty of fans would have been glad for that to be the last of him at Elland Road. This night against Norwich, when everything went right, almost certainly was the last of him at Elland Road, when he was roared onto the pitch as a late substitute the way he should have been roared on to lift the Championship trophy in 2020. Perhaps it’s because winning and losing are so ephemeral that they’ve been usurped by narratives, so that wins only count if they ‘end’ in something bigger, as if football ever truly ‘ends’, as if there’s anything in football truly bigger, in the end, than a night like this, four goals like these, players like them, people like Liam Cooper. Against Norwich, after a long season, Daniel Farke’s Leeds finally looked like something special. Obviously, I know I will care if this team never hits those heights again. But if they never do, I’ll always be glad they did it once.