This is supposed to be fun, this Premier League thing. Isn’t it? Is it? Last year was better craic, sitting at home baking banana bread and stuff, while Bielsa and the boys toured empty stadiums and caused a ruckus, disrespecting the sanctity of the Premier League and upsetting Paul Merson et al. This year, not so much. Everyone’s been injured, sacked, or just generally not having fun. We’ve gone from looking up the table and seeing Arsenal to looking up and seeing Brentford. Stuck in a relegation battle with the skidmarks of the Premier League, we’ve had to scrap for each point in hope of not going to Reading on a Tuesday ever again.

Granted, in issue four I said relegation battles are fun and we should enjoy them. But hey, we all say things we regret. It’s almost as bad as saying you expect your club to challenge for European football while still doing everything on the cheap. With each passing game it has become increasingly difficult to digest the football on offer and, at this point, I’d like to get to the end of May without further damage to my hairline and general wellbeing while remaining in the Premier League. The fun times are gone and we have to settle for Raphinha doing his best Rory Delap impression and Jesse Marsch taking inspiration from Jurgen Klopp and Michael Scott.

Three blissful years of Marcelo Bielsa’s football has spoiled us all, not just for the football itself, but for its ability to act as a palate cleanser after the dogshit sandwich that was the Heckingbottom ‘era’. If you dig deep into your repressed memories, you’ll recall a sixteen game stretch when a Brassed Off extra was dressed in a Leeds United tracksuit and bored us all to death with incoherent football that still inflates my opinion of Thomas Christiansen. Hecky is an extreme reminder that Bielsa was a one-off, but that doesn’t mean we have to revert to type now El Loco has returned to his ranch. Or do we? Maybe it’s what we deserve for abandoning Bielsa at the first sign of trouble.

Marsch was brought in because the board felt a change was required to stay up, and they believed he fit their succession plan for Bielsa, which was presumed to mean playing in a similar way and being supportive of all that came with Bielsa’s total revolution of Leeds United as a sporting organisation. The immediate reality for Marsch is that he has to pick up enough points to keep us up, implement his narrow style in a team used to attacking wide areas, and deal with a Ted Lasso-happy media. Easy.

Even after the joy of Joe Gelhardt reviving the season against Norwich, the performances and style haven’t quite matched those exacting standards of the Widows of Bielsa, a group I’d include myself in. It’s too much to have expected this squad to perform at such a high level again and Bielsa said as much at the end of last season, yet with the return of some, but not all, key players along with an easier run of games since Bielsa’s sacking, we might have expected to see more of the gegenpressing football we were promised. Especially given the players have now emerged from the winter of their discontent and aren’t so starved of being told how special they are. Instead, we look harder to beat but easier to defend against, at least when playing teams we expect to compete with. In fact, the only resemblance to Bielsaball I’ve noticed is Dan James leading the line and tackles flying in.

We can turn a blind eye to ugly performances when the requirement is merely to survive and said survival mission is progressing well, but when we spend a Monday night watching Crystal Palace being made to look like the 2010 Spain side, then you start to worry. The belief that the result is all that matters is valid in our situation, but it’s not a stick to beat the purists with. You can accept that each point takes us one step closer to safety, while questioning the longevity of an approach that seems to forego a coherent attacking plan in favour of aimless passes and the width of a primary school playground game. If the result is all that matters, why bother watching the football? Why not just wait until the game is over, check the score and react accordingly? The ‘answer’ to that potentially runs deeper than I’d realised.

Our right to enjoy football being somewhat dependent on the positive outcome of a match could be blamed on the materialistic nature of modern football, but perhaps it goes back much further than that. I’m just about old enough to remember Ceefax in all its glory. Page 303, get your scores here or even follow it live on 337 as the vidiprinter gave you the goals as they happened. For younger readers, it was like seeing Jeff Stelling stuck in a Pokemon game. No sound, just line-by-line text updating with goals as they came in across the land. It was bliss. Older readers (sorry) will remember World of Sport’s Results Service and the Grandstand vidiprinter, a far cry from instantaneous updates from betting companies and Portuguese streaming sites.

Perhaps there was less requirement for beautiful football then. With fewer televised games, we were often waiting for Match of the Day for our football fix. We got to see the very best of each game, unaware how the other eighty minutes looked, left to make up our own minds. Unless you were at the match, of course. Nowadays, every single game is available to watch, legally or otherwise, so the desire for entertaining football is more pronounced. You wouldn’t sit through ninety minutes of a boring movie, so why do it with football?

When football returned after the first Covid lockdown, I was quite an insufferable person to be around, more so than usual. Each day was dominated by thinking about Leeds United and promotion. I spent each of those games feeling like I had been thrown into a cement mixer of emotions. I always wonder what effect that sort of silly stress has on the body. Would it be better if I could just know the result and not have to watch the match? The health benefits are extensive, I’m sure, but my conclusion was that there’s no fun in that.

There is beauty in the process, even if that beauty is watching one-time debutant disaster artist Pascal Struijk strolling onto the pitch to shore things up against Barnsley in Leeds’ biggest game in sixteen years. By the time you read this, we may well be blowing up the beachballs for Brighton or nervously calculating what results we need to go our way to stay up. In fact, we might be another poor performance away from the Championship. Whatever happens, just sit back and relish the mayhem, or question the sanity of it all. Both approaches are valid.

Substance? Style? In an ideal world, why not have both? We’d all love to see us play nice football and win, but Marsch has decided it’s best to get it done by any means necessary this time. It ain’t fun, but if it works, we’ll have to take it, for now. Bielsa’s football at Leeds was like Mars Delight, something different to be enjoyed by the masses before it disappeared forever, whereas Jesse’s Leeds is an Aldi own-brand Titan bar. It tastes a bit like Mars, but it’s not quite the real thing, let alone a Mars Delight. Marsch’s purpose-built Survivalball might suffice until the summer, but when 2022/23 rolls around, I expect to be entertained. After all, I need some justification for my season ticket being 10% more expensive, even more so in the Championship. ⬢