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At the full-time whistle, Manchester City’ players slumped to the floor. Some dropped their knees. Some laid flat on their back. Others just fell straight down with their face in the turf. Yet again, an opposition team had been put through the ringer by Leeds United and were relieved it was all over.
They weren’t the only ones. James Justin’s white socks were soaked with blood and the usually level-headed Daniel Farke headed straight for referee Peter Bankes with the adrenaline still coursing through his veins to share a few thoughts and immediately receive a red card. Farke barely had time to open his mouth before Bankes brandished the card, as if the official was pre-empting the wrath of the Leeds manager, which neatly summed up Bankes’ unhappy contribution to a fine football match that was the result of fine performances from both sides.
If this wasn’t quite the basketball game of Pep Guardiola’s City visiting Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds in 2020, it was more a high calibre boxing match with the Peacocks cast as the tricky counter-punching southpaw, all awkward angles and an ability to avoid too many telling blows before landing a quick flurry of their own. Perhaps in previous seasons City would have pummelled Leeds into an early submission like the heavy-hitters of the Premier League’s last decade. Instead, at Elland Road they entered their Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather era, all obscene wealth and a braggadocio that their skills would be enough to win on points behind the patient rat-a-tat-tat of a thousand jabs in silk pyjamas.
What made the game so absorbing was that Leeds created plenty of opportunities to hurt City and leave them playing catch-up on the scorecards, they just couldn’t quite land the required haymaker.
I was half-relieved that Dominic Calvert-Lewin could only sidefoot a Brenden Aaronson cross narrowly wide in front of goal after a couple of minutes for fear of VAR ruining what would have been an electric start as City defender Marc Guehi took a tumble in the build-up. Guehi was given the runaround by Calvert-Lewin in the first half, struggling to cope with the striker’s movement and physicality. Latching on to Pascal Struijk’s pass over the defence, Calvert-Lewin pinned the England centre-half in his own penalty area and neatly turned as his low shot went just past the far post.
For all City dominated the ball, Leeds kept picking the right moments to come out swinging. In a blur of trickery by the corner flag, Aaronson produced his finest footwork in a Leeds shirt as James Justin drew a save out of Gianluigi Donnarumma from the edge of the box, followed by Ilia Gruev upsetting Rodri with a foul as Leeds pressed high up the pitch. Jayden Bogle followed Gruev’s example, winning possession upfield and reaching the byline as his low cross was poked wide by Aaronson at the near post, while Aaronson almost recreated his goal against Scum by breaking clear from halfway only to hit Donnarumma’s feet — albeit VAR may have also wanted to check whether or not he was offside had the ball gone into the net.
For the most part, Leeds dealt as well as possible with City’s attempts at suffocation. Struijk and Joe Rodon did the dirty work of defending defiantly and Karl Darlow, when called upon, came up with a couple of Man of the Match worthy saves from Nico O’Reilly and Guehi headers in either half.
But City are experts at wearing teams down, the cumulative effect of death by a thousand passes. As the first half wore on, the physical and mental energy of the Leeds players was gradually sapped. Calvert-Lewin and Aaronson could no longer press as effectively up the pitch. The midfield started to come out second in fifty-fifty challenges and looked frazzled when trying to work out what to do with the ball when they did get a touch. Ethan Ampadu’s crazy backheader to Darlow while the ‘keeper was still on the floor after saving from O’Reilly was that of a man whose brain was slowly melting, while he was also guilty of some uncharacteristically sloppy clearances that left Leeds entrenched on the edge of their penalty area. Likewise, Anton Stach became more visibly frustrated and needed to take any chance he could get to stop for a second and get some air into his lungs — when Lukas Nmecha came off the bench after an hour, his first job was to throw Stach an energy gel.
Watching the game back, it’s telling that City almost scored the exact same goal as their eventual winner a few minutes beforehand, Rayan Ait-Nouri bursting down the left and into the box after a one-two, Leeds snuffing the chance out with nine players protecting the penalty area. The fourth official had just announced two minutes of added time, and for almost all the next 120 seconds City kept the ball, working it to the right, left, back to the right, left again. Leeds could never get any more than a foot in before the ball was coming straight back at them. With nine seconds of added time left, Stach was caught unsure whether to press or hold his shape. In the end, he did neither, allowing Ait-Nouri to run behind him and aim a low cross to Antoine Semenyo for a tap-in.
The second half was far more fractious, only adding to the tension. Rayan Cherki sneakily trod on Gruev’s shin and went unpunished. Justin’s ankles were left bloodied by a challenge with Guehi that ended with a City free-kick. Rodon pulled his hamstring chasing back to make an excellent last-ditch tackle on Semenyo.
For all the fight, there were far fewer chances. Stach began the half teeing up Calvert-Lewin, whose touch and hit were well blocked, while Bijol eventually replaced Rodon and with his first touch scruffily headed a corner just wide. In a moment that summed up why the game was won and lost, Aaronson tried to take on Ruben Dias and was outmuscled, Gabi Gudmundsson was beaten in the follow up tackle and Cherki flicked the ball up to Rodri, who floated a pass out to Ait-Nouri in his own half. Ait-Nouri reached the bouncing ball, knocked it over Stach’s head, then checked back to beat Stach for a second time so City could settle down before building an attack again. They are good, really good, unfortunately.
But Leeds pushed them all the way, as evidenced by their exhaustion at full-time. It was a game in which there was a lot to like that nonetheless left a sour taste in the mouth. Not just for the result, but the unwelcome headlines about the boos that met a short break so City players Ait-Nouri and Cherki could break their fast during Ramadan and have a sip of water.
There are so many layers to this that are impossible to entirely unpick as a blogger writing a match report, but there is equally no use pretending it didn’t happen or wasn’t an issue. I have no doubt that part of the booing was borne out of an ignorance what the break was for amid a growing frustration about the stop-start nature of modern football, like Donnarumma feigning injury against Leeds at the Etihad so Guardiola could have an extra team talk at a time when the opposition were in the ascendency and building momentum. The first song to start up after the break was ‘Sky TV is fucking shit’, which has become almost a one-size-fits-all chant for an ‘against modern football’ sentiment.
Likewise, I have no doubt there were also more sinister undertones to the booing, which continued in some quarters even after other fans had seen the message on the big screen and stopped upon realising what the break was for. I can’t be the only person to have seen and heard racist abuse at Elland Road. It exists, and it helps nobody pretending otherwise — particularly when people using social media to argue the booing was more nuanced than outright racism are being replied to by users with Leeds United avatars doubling down with further outright racism.
What can be done now is similarly difficult to know where to start. Appearing on Sky Sports News, the football writer Jonathan Liew made a point when being shown the back page of the Daily Mail and their reporting of what happened at Elland Road by asking the presenter to also show the front page to highlight “the climate, the atmosphere that we have created over years, possibly over decades, through the open antagonism towards Muslims, towards Islam, which faces no consequences”. Does Leeds United have a racist element in its fanbase? Yes. Is that element any different to the rest of society? I’m not so sure. Football has always been a microcosm of its wider culture.
Absolutely bang on by @jonathanliew.bsky.social The Mail calls out racism on its back page, while promoting unsubstantiated, outright racism on its front page. 🎯
That doesn’t mean we should just accept it as commonplace, though. For all the stereotypes and lazy tarring of Leeds fans with the same brush, United supporters were rightly praised around the turn of the 1990s for their collective efforts in calling out racism through initiatives like the Marching Altogether fanzine. The campaign started when Leeds were in the doldrums of the Second Division and members of the National Front were selling their publication ‘Bulldog’ outside Elland Road. Before long Leeds were the champions of England, the wider city was changing for the better and fans were hero-worshipping black players like Chris Fairclough, Chris Whyte and Rod Wallace.
Howard Wilkinson was also an influential voice in calling for change from the terraces, alongside players like Gordon Strachan and Vinnie Jones. The club had originally tried to bury their heads in the sand until Marching Altogether empowered fans to speak out and no longer stand for such intolerance. Which is where the club needs to step up now. Prior to the City game, there was no mention on the official website explaining that there was going to be a break, why that was the case, or the fact this has been happening in the Premier League for the last five years. Instead ‘club sources’ confirmed to Graham Smyth that the game would be paused in a story that went out on the Yorkshire Evening Post website on Friday evening, AKA a time where news goes to die.
While there were no Leeds players fasting, there will have been Leeds players affected by the booing. Joel Piroe’s father is Muslim, for instance. How the hell must he have been feeling in that moment? If the club wants attitudes to change, then the best way to do so might be to ask the players and management to be collectively brave enough to engage with the issue themselves, much like Wilkinson, Strachan and Jones over three decades ago. That is, indeed, if the club do want to change attitudes. It doesn’t help when the Red Bull logo emblazoned across the kit and around the stadium is linked to a media company that propagates conspiracy theories and right-wing ideology, inviting neo-fascists to discuss topics like, “How dangerous are our Muslims?”
Like I say, there’s a lot to unpick here. Ultimately, there is enough to dislike about modern football. Fans are being priced out of games in a league where clubs, in the words of Andrea Radrizzani, “throw money away — because they have so much of it but there is no real need for it.” We travel around the country at ridiculous times at the behest of multi-billion pound broadcasters, watching financially-doped teams blatantly cheat on and off the pitch. A sixty-second break so a couple of players who haven’t eaten out of respect for their religion can have a quick sip of water, to me, seems far easier to stomach than the rest of the shit we put up with.
Leeds United likes to pride itself as swimming against the tide of bullshit, one of the last great anti-establishment clubs. The 13th minute at Elland Road on Saturday evening felt more like the establishment manifest. I like to imagine Leeds United as the home of superheroes, but to be able to do that then we have to make sure we’re picking the right villains. ⬢
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