Southampton secure most valuable win in football as Leeds fail to escape their past — Independent 26/5/24
Leeds 0-1 Southampton: Adam Armstrong’s first-half goal sent the Saints back into the Premier League at the first time of asking and condemned Leeds to more play-off woe
Richard Jolly
After the expensive relegation, the lucrative promotion.
Southampton contrived to finish bottom of the Premier League in a year when
they spent some £160m, had three managers and only mustered six wins. They
return to the world’s richest league courtesy of the world’s richest game,
their prize for play-off victory probably beginning at £140m and, if they stay
up, worth rather more. If Bobby Stokes, the hero of the 1976 FA Cup final,
still has the most famous Wembley winner in Southampton’s history, Adam Armstrong
has the most lucrative. For Leeds, consigned to another season in the
Championship, it ranks as the most costly.
A sixth unsuccessful play-off campaign means they are still
without a win at Wembley since 1992. On the 35th anniversary of Don Revie’s
death, the Damned United remain incapable of escaping their past. There was
another kind of unwanted sequel: a third defeat to Southampton this season,
with Armstrong scoring in all three. There were times when Leeds looked like
the finest team in the Championship but that trio of losses to Southampton
means that, unlike Saints and Leicester, they have not rebounded to the top
flight.
In the dugouts, the subplot started in Norfolk in 2017. For
Russell Martin, the Norwich captain bombed out to train with the Under-23s
seven years ago, it was revenge on Daniel Farke, the manager who exiled him.
Martin has reinvented himself as a coach and this was his first promotion in
charge. Indeed, there was a danger his reign would descend into disaster when
the Saints lost four consecutive games in September. A win over Farke’s Leeds
was the catalyst for a 25-game unbeaten run. Now, another has made him a
Premier League manager.
Martin had earned points for style in his managerial career
but with questions about the substance of his teams. A first year at
Southampton has ended with an answer in the affirmative. That he was chosen by
Jason Wilcox, the director of football who later decamped to Manchester United,
means the Old Trafford newcomer left a legacy.
Wilcox was not there to see it; neither was Southampton’s
most infamous fan, Rishi Sunak, who, with his usual sense of timing, had turned
up to witness relegation. But Adam Lallana and Matt Le Tissier were sat side by
side, stars of Southampton’s last two stays in the top flight. As they lasted
11 and 27 years respectively, there will be the hope Saints prove more than
just a yo-yo club.
But perhaps they benefited from one of the bracket of
players who are too good for the Championship and not quite good enough for the
Premier League. If so, Southampton could be doubly grateful for Armstrong. His
last two seasons at this level have produced 52 goals but whereas
higher-ranking clubs came calling for Romeo Lavia, James Ward-Prowse and Tino
Livramento last summer, they left him at St Mary’s.
In a Wembley fixture with a habit of ending 1-0, the opening
goal carried still greater importance. Armstrong got it. His movement has
always been his greatest asset. He ghosted in behind Ethan Ampadu to meet Will
Smallbone’s pass and drill a shot past Illan Meslier. For Smallbone, a lifelong
Southampton fan and the man Martin first turned to in replacing Lavia in his
midfield, it was a wonderful moment; for Armstrong, made more potent by the
drop in division, a 24th goal of the season to accompany his 13 assists.
His has been an extraordinary campaign. It almost got better
still on the stroke of half time: the elusive striker had a shot on the turn
saved by Meslier. But if Southampton had more incision in the first half, they
could have been made to rue substitute Samuel Edozie’s second-half miss.
Leeds were undistinguished before the break, lacking the
spark they demonstrated in demolishing Norwich in the semi-finals. Farke
required a response and got one, his side penning Southampton in, Joe Rodon
adding another dimension by running the ball out from the back. Crysencio
Summerville, the Championship’s player of the year, was subdued by Kyle
Walker-Peters to such an extent that he was substituted but a replacement was
inches from an equaliser.
Dan James rattled the bar with a half-volley. It was James,
too, who drew an injury-time save from Alex McCarthy: the goalkeeper, only
playing because of Gavin Bazunu’s season-ending injury, commanded his box in
what may prove his last game for the club. It is probably Che Adams’s last,
too, with the forward also out of contract. If so, each can leave confident he
played his part in restoring top-flight football to Hampshire.
For Taylor Harwood-Bellis, the best of the Saints defence,
promotion means the loanee will be bought. Walker-Peters should stay now.
Martin faces the dilemma of how many of this side are equipped for the top
flight, of what to do with the arrivals in the misguided 2022-23 spending
spree, some of whom have been loaned out this season. His policy of playing out
from the back, which risked danger against Leeds, could prove still more
perilous in the Premier League.
But Southampton will be there. Fourth for much of the
season, they took the third spot to go up, their huge overhaul last summer
eventually resulting in a change of division.
For Sport Republic, the owners whose maiden year was
disastrous, the second has been redemptive. But for Leeds, Wembley had a
cruelty, the play-offs a brutality. Again.