Dickhead in the crowd

Comfortably beating Millwall on a sunny Sunday afternoon might be the surest sign that Leeds United are doing things differently this season. Games against Millwall, even when we win, are meant to be fraught, grim affairs. Leeds beat the Bermondsey brigade at Elland Road twice under Marcelo Bielsa; both were exhausting, terrifying comebacks that left me hoping we’d never have to play them again. But even the busload of Millwall fans who bothered to make the trip this time seemed to understand we’re reading from a different script. When the cheese wedge chanted, ‘Millwall, give us a song,’ their short attempt at the entirely predictable Jimmy Savile shite sounded sheepishly self-conscious, laughed into silence by the rest of the stadium.

Sadly, the afternoon wasn’t completely without the usual bile. Walking back to town through Holbeck Moor, there was a plot twist. It wasn’t an away fan I overheard being lamentably racist, but a bloke wearing a Leeds home shirt, ‘joking’ with his friend that a young Asian kid minding his own business on the field was playing with “a bomb”, before walking past the child’s dad and calling him a “terrorist”. Aren’t Millwall fans meant to be the baddies?

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