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It is always a good sign when Elland Road is scrambling the brains of opposition players and managers rather than the minds of Leeds United supporters. It’s only around six weeks ago that a Leeds fan snuck onto the pitch midway through the defeat to Aston Villa to beg Daniel Farke to make a sub. Since then, Enzo Maresca has watched his Chelsea team mauled in Beeston and immediately began talking himself out of a job, Mo Salah has cried out of Liverpool after sitting on the bench while Ao Tanaka stole the show with a 96th-minute equaliser in a 3-3 thriller, and now Ruben Amorim followed Maresca’s lead in challenging his ownership to sack him so he never has to come back to LS11. And as I finish typing that sentence, it has been announced they duly took him up on that offer.
The strangest thing about Amorim’s hissyfit after his Scum team drew 1-1 with Leeds is that this was a much tamer affair than the hype and anticipation promised. It wasn’t all that surprising. Games against Them are always the first to be circled by Leeds fans when fixture lists are released in the summer, and the state of that lot from Old Trafford plus the tantalising symmetry of the match being originally scheduled for January 3rd sparked dreams of a repeat of the magic of 2010. But broadcasters — in this case TNT rather than the usual villains of Sky — ruined those vibes by moving the game to Sunday 4th, and ruined optimal boozing time by making it a 12:30pm kick-off. If you throw in plenty of absentees for both sides due to injuries and suspensions in the middle of a busy fixture list then it’s no wonder that the atmosphere on and off the pitch screamed of two teams happy enough to keep ticking along with a draw.
Instead, this was a day when Leeds lived up to Richard Finn’s proposed mantra in issue three of this season’s TSB magazine — Make Football Shit Again:
My proposal, which may well happily dovetail with what’s going to happen anyway, is that we persevere with devaluing the product of EPL football. We keep playing boring, shit games with dogged physicality and determination and drag it all down with us, driving fairweather fans away from the game one goalless minute at a time.
So shove the hype where the sun don’t shine. This was an (early) afternoon for two old foes to reacquaint themselves with one another, and there isn’t an Instagram filter or EDM backing track that will make the skidmark Anton Stach left on the pitch with a hefty slide tackle in the opening minutes look any prettier.
Sitting on the second to last row of the East Upper, it all felt oddly distant. Wafts of singing sporadically reached the upper tiers, but the football on the pitch was far too cluttered for the fans in the stands to ever maintain a sense of rhythm. As valuable as it is, Ilia Gruev poking the ball away from a tackle time after time is not the stuff of terrace limbs, so much so that in the seat in front of me an older fan who had admirably made the most of the reduced drinking time got bored of shouting “you Scum bastard” on his own and dozed off midway through the first half. His son awoke him during the break with the promise of another trip to the bar but they never returned, with the son having presumably had to put his old man to bed.
Once the early excitement had worn off, the occasion felt tense rather than raucous, enhancing the sense everyone was more concerned about what could be lost rather than won. Which in the year 2026 largely refers to dickswinging bragging rights online. With Scum controlling more of the possession, Leeds remained as resolute and organised as they were at Anfield but had the same problem of struggling to work out what to do with the ball when they kept winning it back. With Jayden Bogle missing due to a calf issue, James Justin continued at right wing-back and was once again solid defensively, albeit there were moments Leeds missed Bogle’s thrust down the touchline going forward.
A bigger worry remains Noah Okafor’s fleeting influence. It may be unfair to expect Okafor to single-handedly stamp his authority on a game as our new Raphinha, one of the best footballers on the planet. Likewise, it wasn’t in Leeds’ summer plans to leave him as our one and only marquee creative signing. But it took one shimmy of Raphinha’s hips on his debut at Villa Park to suggest Leeds had signed someone from outer space, which he quickly built upon with genuine matchwinning displays, whereas Okafor routinely shows only the briefest of glimpses before being kept quiet too easily. While he drew a good save out of Senne Lammens in the second half with a cleverly improvised overhead kick, when Daniel Farke decided Leeds’ best route forward was to go big man-big man and replace Okafor with Lukas Nmecha there were few complaints.
Regardless, Leeds still battled hard to cause their opponents problems. After what would have been a galling volley from Matheus Cunha was ruled out by the offside flag in the opening ten minutes, Dominic Calvert-Lewin had the two best chances of the first half. After being played into the inside left channel of the penalty area by Brenden Aaronson, Calvert-Lewin’s touch took the chance onto the outside of his right boot and over the bar when he might have been better using his weaker left foot, like an inverted Pat Bamford. He deserved more from his second opportunity, flicking on a long ball to the right wing then racing into the penalty area to meet Anton Stach’s cross and guide a header towards the bottom corner only to be denied by the post.
And so The Moment arrived in a fittingly scrappy fashion. Pascal Struijk fought to win a tackle in his own half, clearing the ball upfield, and the pitch unexpectedly opened up for the chasing Aaronson. The surprise at such an opportunity presenting itself was perfect for Aaronson, giving him little time to think and no other options to consider. Run. Shoot. As for the finish: where the hell did that come from?! Aaronson’s decisive touches in recent weeks have been a pleasant surprise, and stroking the ball past Lammens and into the far corner with his left foot was his best yet. It was quite possibly the best of his entire Leeds career; the type of moment that makes the premature talk of a redemption arc eighteen months ago feel suddenly much more legitimate in the here and now. A matchwinner against That Lot? That’s too good to be true.
Always loved Brenden Aaronson, what a man #lufc
— Tom Noble (@tomnoble.bsky.social) 4 January 2026 at 13:57
Ultimately, it was. Three minutes later, a ball was played behind Leeds’ defence to Cunha. Sebastiaan Bornauw was covering, but Lucas Perri meandered out of his goal, then stopped and waited as Cunha rolled a shot slowly into the bottom corner with a decent impression of Jermaine Beckford at Old Trafford. Farke was visibly furious on the touchline, immediately stropping back to the bench in a huff so he could watch a replay and figure out how Leeds had thrown away all their graft.
Farke didn’t hold back after a second viewing. “Normally I don’t like to speak about individual mistakes,” he said post-match, “[but] it was obvious Lucas took the wrong decision and came off his line. It’s probably not even a chance, he’s running away from goal.” It’s difficult not to agree with Farke’s assessment and equally difficult to know what to make of Perri, whose eye-catching point-blank save from Leny Yoro in the first half was, to be fair, also praised by his manager.
Perri’s kicking had been erratic as usual in that opening 45 minutes, but as he made that stop from Yoro I was happy to accept his wayward distribution as long as he kept the ball out of the net. Cunha’s equaliser led to some uncomfortable but fair questions about Perri’s ability to do so, especially when he had been so well protected by Jaka Bijol in particular blocking and heading and tackling everything in sight. When Scum did fashion the occasional chance, Leeds were grateful they generally dropped to Benjamin Sesko. In their eternal wisdom, Scum have paid £70m for a striker who looks like a Ralf Rangnick experiment to clone a striker from a test tube of Red Bull — only to mix it with a strand of hair from the head of Billy Paynter.
If a winner was to arrive then it would have to be from a moment of magic. Cunha hit the post from the edge of the box, Joel Piroe stepped off the bench to bend a fine effort just over the bar and onto the top of the net with his first touch.
When it was all over, it felt like an unsatisfying end to a satisfying result. As I got back in the car and switched on Radio Leeds, a caller was so frustrated with Perri’s dallying he suggested Illan Meslier is still the best goalkeeper at the club. Earlier in the day, I’d spotted Meslier arriving at the ground in his four-by-four on my walk to Elland Road. It was nice to see him, but a reminder that I much prefer him when he’s not standing between the posts in a Leeds shirt. For anyone with that particular devil nagging at their shoulder, I implore you to think back to Sunderland or Hull or Swansea last season: he’s not the answer to any of our problems.
Twenty-four hours on and with a little bit more perspective, not least the desperation of teams both below and above us in the table, it’s much easier to feel better about it all. With the results of relegation rivals falling perfectly for Leeds, the Peacocks are now a point further away from the bottom three and still above their point-per-game target. With everyone knowing one more win in the next few fixtures would go a long way to making the rest of the season so much more comfortable, my main worry going into Sunday was that the result could be as deflating as that awful sliding doors defeat to Newcastle three years ago this month — and the far uglier mishap from a certain goalkeeper than Perri’s. But this time we escaped that fate, which is more than can be said for Ruben Amorim, as Leeds continue to do more damage to their opponents than they do to themselves.
So, who’s next? Oh, right. ⬢
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