Don’t worry (about Burnley), be happy (Watford are awful too)

It’s been so long since Leeds United played a game in the Premier League I’m starting to wonder if after dozing off the night after the Newcastle game I slept through another sixteen years of Yorkshire consortiums, Ken Bates, and all the rest. Kiss me, Marcelo! Right now Leeds feel less like a football club, more like the first act of an episode of Casualty, Pat Bamford limping bravely to work on a building site full of IOSH breaches. As such, maybe we should start paying more attention to the world beyond Beeston, on a weekend where two of our relegation rivals battled it out with their fresh reserves of winter power.

But first to Manchester. Middlesbrough’s drawn FA Cup tie at Old Trafford on Friday night ended in unexpected joy as one by one the crucial shoot-out penalties went to former LUFC captains. Sol Bamba carries joy with him at all times, living up to that with a warm grin for the referee as he approached the spot, then reminding everyone of his Paris Saint-Germain upbringing with a class penalty into the bottom corner. Lee Peltier doesn’t enjoy Bamba’s iconic status at Leeds, although one day someone might compile his desperate emailed pleas for people to turn up to games into a book. He scored too, but missed the opportunity of cementing himself in Yorkshire affection by maybe slapping Cristiano Ronaldo with an extradition order or something. The hero of the night, though, as he was for us more than ten years ago, was Jonny Howson, now Middlesbrough captain, now shorn of his ill-suiting beard. He looked slight up against Harry Maguire in the coin toss, but menacing, like someone found him down by the docks in a 1940s gangster movie. After scoring his penalty, he remembered where he was and reminded everybody in the Stretford End where he came from, falling short of a Leeds salute but spreading his arms wide as if nobody behind the goal needed telling that here stood a son of Elland Road. The shame is that most of them probably did, and were too busy staring down phone cameras trained on Ronaldo to notice what our Jonny was up to. But it went down well in West Yorkshire, which is obviously just what all the Middlesbrough fans wanted from their big night. Giantkill a cup tie wearing a Boro shirt, but with a head and heart that’s all Leeds, and worry about how it looks on Teeside later.

For entertainment purposes it was wise to stick with former Leeds academy players over the weekend, although Lewis Cook and Leif Davis had a different sort of day for Bournemouth, getting knocked out by Boreham Wood, who gave a late bench cameo to Dave Hockaday’s failed rehab project, Nile Ranger. For a while it was said that Massimo Cellino, no stranger to prison himself, was actively seeking lists of ex-offenders to sign for Leeds because he wanted to do a public service or something. Also they’d be cheap. He might follow with interest the future of the Leicester fan arrested for trying to take on a group of celebrating Forest players, another incident among the leagues-wide bottle throwing and racism that has me wondering if it’s just that everyone has lost their mind this season and why.

Unfortunately for BT Sport they were saddled with Burnley versus Watford, the biggest do-we-have-to Premier League fixture of the season so far. Even the clubs involved had postponed it twice, and the weather in Lancashire must have given them ideas about calling it off again. If I were Roy Hodgson, I would have resigned from my new job as Watford boss on arrival at Turf Moor, but it turned out he was the one viewer who couldn’t take his eyes off this waterlogged excuse for top-level football. “I was so engrossed in the game, it was only at half-time when I saw how wet I was,” said Roy. I get that some managers just love the hands-on joy of coaching, and in Marcelo Bielsa I see someone who wakes up every day fascinated by the challenge football still presents after a life of work. Every day is new. But what it is Hodgson, aged 74, going to do at Watford that he hasn’t done a thousand times before? There was a miserable passing of batons in the rain to his former charge Sean Dyche, happy to be along the touchline from his old boss again. If Dyche keeps going until he’s Hodgson’s age, that’s another 24 years. The year will be 2046. He will still be playing 4-4-2. His centre-forward will still be very tall.

Wout Weghorst was going to be the big difference maker for Burnley, the 6ft 6in hero to drag them off the bottom of the table by sheer height alone. On this evidence, no. The height didn’t even help at long-throws, which kept drifting away from wherever he went, as did Aaron Lennon’s occasional crosses. Maybe Charlie Taylor will find his head when he’s back in the team. One Weghorst shot was half-blocked and hit the bar, but that wasn’t his moment. His moment came when James Tarkowski, with his pair of England caps, decided keeping the ball was a better option than giving it to the actual midfielders and carried it upfield on a break. Approaching the penalty area he realised he was out of his depth but that was no problem, there was an option left and, in Weghorst, an option right. There was only one pass to play. You can’t not give the ball to your multi-million pound January striker, the new big lad replacing the old big lad, wearing nine on his debut in a must-win relegation clash against a key rival in the rain at your home ground. You have to give that guy the ball and let him be the hero. Tarkowski gave that guy the ball. That guy shanked his shot high into the stand behind the goal. If there’s a moment that will relegate Burnley I think that was it, when the realisation set in about who they’ve signed to replace Chris Wood, the fans itching around the collars of their newly printed replica Wegs-9 shirts. Weghorst would have scored that goal on YouTube, but this was Turf Moor.

Inevitably the game ended 0-0 and Watford seemed delighted by their clean sheet. It was their first since beating Liverpool — no, they did — 3-0 — yes, remember? — 707 days before. Their plan seems to be for Hodgson to sort out the defence, bolstered by Samir, shuffled in by the owners from their other team Udinese, and then when Emmanuel Dennis is back from suspension and Ismaila Sarr is back from winning the Afcon, the goals will start flying in up the other end. (Watford have scored 23 in 21 games so far.) It’s more likely that they and Burnley will end up trying to nil-nil their way out of trouble. Let’s see how that works out for them.

They’ll be trying to drag Everton or Brentford down to help them clamber up. Or Leeds, I guess, as we’re sandwiched between those two, but let’s not. The Blues and the Bees had a little practice face-off in the FA Cup on Sunday, and Thomas Frank, with a new contract and a recent haircut, couldn’t resist the big Frank Lampard Junior welcome party on Merseyside. A 4-1 win for Everton without even using any of their newly borrowed Toffeemen seems like a statement but the clues to eventual failure are in the flimsy manner of the success: it was all achieved because Lamps is a players’ manager who was putting an arm round people last week and telling them to enjoy their football, presumably while Duncan Ferguson was in the corner smashing bricks into his own head. Smiling through is all very well when they’re sweeping Brentford aside in the cup but times will come when Lamps’ grin will be the last thing the players want to see, when the hand on the shoulder makes them shudder, when the drive home from team-bonding ends in a Cheshire hedge. His whole schtick, from the chucklesome press conferences to the club videos of him telling the players to “enjoy the ball”, is a chubby-cheeked echo of his true managerial ancestor. “By all means enjoy it,” Neil Warnock told his Sheffield United players before an FA Cup tie at Arsenal, “But enjoy it by being fucking disciplined here.” Lampard is now infamous for his joke-open then serious-point interview style, but fluff his hair up into curls and give him a Sheffield accent and it’s only Warnock’s whole act gone glossy. They even scored two of their goals from corners, another one from a lob up the middle. “We looked shit on our offensive set pieces and we conceded two that were both avoidable,” said Thomas Frank, who while everything else goes wrong (five defeats in a row, sixteen conceded) can always fall back on being the cool art teacher who swears.

Lampard’s first Premier League test is at Newcastle on Tuesday night, a battle between two outwardly affable managers hoping their seasons don’t blow up and cost them a future shot at the England job. Watford go to West Ham that night while Burnley welcome Howson’s vanquished. Wednesday night, while we’re at Steven Gerrard’s Villa, ignoring him and saying hello to his assistant Gary McAllister, Brentford go to Manchester City while Norwich are at home to Palace. I’m officially still not worried! ⬢