Leeds Under-23s had a scrap, here’s how it went

It’s nice to be nice, but sometimes Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United can be too nice, and I can’t help feeling like a really good on-pitch tear up, a 22-player brawl involving subs and coaches, a real end-of-days what’s happened to our game? dash of brutality, might unclog some dust from this season’s spluttering system. When did Leeds last have a fight? It might have been Mateusz Klich pouring water down Joe Williams’ neck as we fought Bolton in 2019, or that whole Aston Villa thing, but we got a World’s Fairest Team Award for that. How did we get from there to Jurgen Klopp roaming the pitch without the slightest hint of a decking? Even our goalie got lamped by West Ham with hardly a finger raised in response, and that was proper naughty.

Let’s rewind to last Friday night at York, then, where the Under-23s showed how it should — okay, I can feel the moral police warming up their siren wail — how it could but definitely should not be done. Especially not by children. Which is what this was, and maybe that’s what made it such a joy. So young! So brave! So stupid!

Leeds were 4-3 up with seven minutes to go against Blackburn Under-23s, maybe not the moment everyone should be losing their heads, but also a moment for yelling, ‘Knock his little head off, Miller!’ The Rovers player involved was their left-back, an eighteen year old named Lenni Cirino. A Q&A with Lenni on the Rovers website turns up this terrible take:

Q: Idol growing up?
A: I was an attacker when I was growing up, so Cristiano Ronaldo. His athleticism and everything about him is incredible. My dad has told me about goofy Ronaldo and he was brilliant as well judging by the clips I’ve seen.

Goofy Ronaldo?! Anyway, Cirino started acting up in the fourth minute when he fell over while trying to run with the ball down the wing, and took his anger out when Max Dean came to get the ball for a throw-in by flicking his studs backwards at Dean’s knee. This little pony kick was hardly crime of the century, and the referee wasn’t interested when Dean forwent a full Cristiano Ronaldo style dive-of-pain in favour of marching to the ref to tell his tale, but it’s the sort of thing players remember. Right, number 3. Kicks Max off the ball and gets away with it. Noted.

It was a bit more of this stampy stuff that got things going at the end. Lewis Bate had two nibbles at Cirino, the second a slide tackle while the ref was still whistling up the first, and as Cirino stepped over Bate, his boot came down sharp. And up came Bate. And then came Stuart McKinstry.

McKinstry was a £400,000 buy from Motherwell when he was seventeen, and his dad relocated to live with him in Wetherby, while mum and sister McKinstry stayed behind in Scotland. That familial sacrifice, and his rapid ascent to the Under-23s, indicate young Stuart has not come to Leeds to fuck around, confirmed by his penalty in the shoot-out against Fulham last week. Of all the kids involved he was the one you feared for, a slight wee winger with an Aztec Camera thatch-wedge, wide eyed, rubbing the chin where one day he might be able to tempt a beard. Fulham goalie Marek Rodak figured this was a youngster he could psyche out. McKinstry reckoned he could disguise his aim and punt the ball into the bottom corner so smartly Rodak didn’t even dive. Like I said, he’s not here to fuck around.

Especially not with Lenni Cirino. As Bate shrugged him off with a pointed finger, letting him know he knew what he did, McKinstry was barging past to make the dispute face to face. Max Dean, Cirino’s old pal, was on the scene, and then one or two of the Rovers players who were one or two inches taller than the rest. McKinstry was not happy about being pointed at, hands were slapped away, shirts were grabbed, more players were arriving, shoves were getting harder, the pointing was really becoming very direct, and a big grabby brawl was developing as players crowded in.

Enter Amari Miller. Vinnie Jones once calmed down a scrap by sprinting over to rescue David Batty from a Sunderland player, swinging his arms out and belting two others on his way past. Soccer diplomacy at its best. Miller tried similar here, jogging into the middle of things and shoving his arms out at as many different players as he could, pushing Blackburn players back as he leaned into his teammates the other way, a spirited attempt at coming between the factions that obviously ended with someone kicking him and all the feistiness going one, two, three, four, tell me that you want some more you wanker I’ll fucking do you. If any disciplinary panels are reading this I definitely didn’t see new signing Leo Hjelde swinging (and missing) with the nearest thing to a punch anyone threw, but it was nice for The New Van Dijk® to be right in the mix. At that point the coaches started coming on and the steam went out of it because these are just kids and they will get told off for this sort of thing and I think they’d realised. It was good while it lasted, though.

The referee managed to drag it out a lot longer. Two Rovers players got booked — not Cirino, somehow — and two from Leeds. Not McKinstry somehow but Dean, who revelled in stomping up, swaying his hips around so the ref could read his number, and stomping away again, and Miller. It took nearly another minute, and a chat with the fourth official (probably starting, ‘What do you think you’re doing you thick sod?’) for the ref to realise this was Miller’s second yellow and he had to go off.

Reminder: it’s 4-3 to Leeds, four minutes left now plus six that get added for stoppage time. So far, since coming from Valerenga in summer, goalie Kristoffer Klaesson has only made me hope for Illan Meslier’s continued good health and form while the new kid gets the hang of all that’s new (he looked good against Oldham in the Papa Johns this week), and he lost his mind a bit here. He’d been booked for timewasting earlier and now started chucking the ball upfield to start counter-attacks — the wrong thing to do! When Rovers shot at him from a direct free-kick in minute 95, he didn’t see it coming over the wall, didn’t catch the ball when it was in his hands, and didn’t stop Luke Brennan putting in an equaliser. And the young Rovers players didn’t stop themselves from celebrating with shushing and ear-pulling gestures — pal Cirino right there — in front of the sparse York Community Stadium crowd, much to the amusement of a family in the only visibly occupied rows of the section they were taunting. One of them held a toddler in their arms who appeared to have already had enough of the late night and had buried their face into a shoulder, until hearing all the hullabaloo they tilted over backwards to get an upside down view of what was going on. Infancy dismissed immaturity when the child realised it was just some knobhead footballers and went back to the shoulder’s comfort.

We weren’t even done yet. The clock showed 96:33 when, from the kick-off, Leeds passed back to Klaesson and Rovers’ striker Sam Burns slid in late, taking the keeper’s legs while sending the ball to his mate Sam Durrant, who demanded a penalty for a tackle by Hjelde. In yet more melee, not quite up to previous levels, Cirino tried tapping Hjelde on the cheek to calm him down. I don’t think Hjelde liked being tapped on the cheek by Cirino. The clock was showing 99:55 when Klaesson, holding his hurting legs while Hjelde took the goal-kick, was finally fit enough for the last twenty seconds to commence.

Under-23s football, then! It’s sure exciting, especially if you like watching kids fighting. And there were some great goals, too, as always from Joffy Gelhardt. His first involved skipping around a couple of defenders and slashing in a shot on the run. For his second he nicked the ball from a dozing defender, who crumpled to the floor while Joffy nipped past another and shot. Who was that young sap so thoroughly dismantled by Gelhardt? Ah, going by the teamsheet and his full beard, it was Bradley Johnson. Sorry Bradders. Cheers for coming on the podcast though. ◉