Leeds United 2-2 Everton: Normal For Us

This was a great game and that helped keep the blues, and the Blues, from winning a rainy day. Elland Road was full again and that was the making of a score draw, that might have felt like an underwhelming result if we’d watched it on TV.

A crowd makes a difference to a football match but being there makes a difference to the fans. Leeds United need this, in what could be a fairly aimless season. All the anger we couldn’t dissipate after Old Trafford, because of the background knowledge that losing so heavily probably won’t change anything about the overall season, found its solution against Everton. It didn’t matter as much that we didn’t win, because the game was an experience.

This was the Premier League as I remember it. Not the seventeen years ago version, that Mateusz Klich bridged by scoring an equaliser here, Elland Road’s first home goal in the top flight since Alan Smith’s penalty against Charlton. Maybe we should have chaired Klich around the pitch, too. That goal was for Leeds in relegation, but this match took me back to ascendent Leeds, the late-nineties version I grew up with, the end of George Graham’s management and the start of David O’Leary’s, before the babies were title challengers. I felt it as I walked to Elland Road in the rain, because of how unfamiliar that has become. I was nervous as a sixteen year old going to games, when I didn’t know the unwritten rules, and I was nervous now, walking down under the station and over the river, not sure if the rules were still the same after eighteen months. The streets on Saturday weren’t how they’ve been for a year and a half, they were packed with people and R2 buses and chants and drunks, and the new pavement liveliness took me back to the energetic thrill I got from being a kid, in the corners of rough pubs I’d never dare enter if I wasn’t at the football, nursing a pint of bitter and hoping the police don’t come checking ID. I didn’t feel the rain then or now.

Any worries about how the crowd would adapt to all the emotions of the day, from remembering lost players and friends to crying with anger faced with a touchscreen drinks order point, was soon eased. Football crowds adapt easily. In the minutes before the players came out, Leeds fans taunted Everton with songs that, for legal reasons, I’m better not discussing. Then there was a full-throated rendition of Marching on Together as the two teams lined up, the Leeds players revelling in it, the Everton players forced into listening. Before kick-off, a list of names was read out, to stadium wide applause, paying tribute all at once to more people than anyone could do justice to, or be expected to cope with. I wonder where Eddie Gray was at that moment, and I hope he felt glad about the love as well as sad about so much loss. Then an anti-racism gesture was applauded, the game started, and ‘Get into ’em, fuck ’em up’ was the first in-game song of Elland Road’s post-lockdown era. Within minutes, Everton were being taunted again, and the South Stand was sure a ‘fat ginger bastard’ in the away end was going to cry in a minute. Because all that is what football crowds do. You can’t explain it, you can’t really say it’s a good thing, especially if you’re a big-boned scouse redhead come all that way. When commentators say they’ve missed crowds, then correct themselves because obviously they don’t miss everything about crowds, they know that honestly you can’t separate it. It’s hard to think of any other phenomenon encompassing so many switching sentiments, like those crowd shots of Manchester United fans when they heard about Aguero’s goal, or like when Leeds fans move seamlessly through remembrance, support and piss-taking in successive breaths.

Back to the late-nineties, then, for the match itself. Leeds played a lot of games like this in O’Leary’s first season. There’d been a good season under Graham, and the team was good, but we knew it wasn’t great. Lucas Radebe, Nigel Martyn and Harry Kewell were class, Jimmy Hasselbaink was always scoring. We liked Alfie Haaland and thought David Hopkin was okay. David Wetherall and Gary Kelly were the furniture, Gunnar Halle and Clyde Wijnhard were odds and ends. We could turn up to Elland Road to watch us playing Everton, or Spurs of the time, or Martin O’Neill’s Leicester, or Aston Villa, all decent sides, and we’d think we would probably win. But sometimes we’d lose. Maybe it was my youth, or that the internet wasn’t an option, but I don’t remember the micro-analysis of the squad and club’s progress match by match, not compared to the anxiety about stepping forward or back that’s attending this summer’s worries about not buying a midfielder. We had a good team that was probably going to do well and watching them play was fun. Being in the ground helped, then, because it was the best way to enjoy it, and it helped against Everton on Saturday.

Yerry Mina, Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Richarlison played an important part, and I’d like to thank them for their efforts to distract us from the seriousness with which we’ve been forced to view the game over the last eighteen months, abstracted through television coverage and clickbait hype. They were taking us back to an afternoon of pantomime. What a great villain Mina would make, tall and handsome, dominating the stage, but never a hero of the drama because he keeps doing ridiculous things. His go-to complaint seemed to be an easily bruised jaw, and as he hammed up his grievances, he only looked dafter because his sparring partner was Pat Bamford. When the two grappled in the south-east corner, thrashing around the floor then tickling each other’s tummies, Bamford’s threat to Mina was summed up by the way he couldn’t wait to march to the referee with a full explanation of all the bad things the other boy had done to him. While Mina acted wounded in the background, the whole thing was about as silly as it gets on a football pitch. And it was great! I’ve never paid any attention to Yerry Mina before, but if he’s still in Everton’s team next time they come to Elland Road, it’ll be great to hear the pre-match murmur when the team is announced: ‘Isn’t he that dickhead who had a fight with Bamford? Let’s boo him.’

Richarlison settled for old-fashioned moaning about not getting free-kicks, a fairly low level way of making himself notorious. Calvert-Lewin’s effort was also pretty standard, but more specific. He was easily disliked for winning the penalty from Liam Cooper, even though the VAR replays showed a nailed on shirt pull dragging him down. Doesn’t matter about right, an Everton penalty wasn’t fair, and it was his fault. He scored it, too, celebrating in front of the home fans, shushing them, pointing to his name, topping it all off by doing a silly dance. It’s got a strong case for being the best part of the game. My memories of our normal times in the Premier League are dotted with moments just like this, of some smartarse from another team winding up our fans and taking the atmosphere up a notch. Sometimes we’d lose, but that was less relevant than what a particular bastard had done. From out of my memory banks comes Willem Korsten, who Graham snatched for Spurs after a loan with Leeds and O’Leary, and who didn’t even do much in the game, but whose presence on the grass near my Kop seat was enough to send the fans around me wild with rage. I still hate him. I’ve no reason to. But it’s more fun than it sounds when you’re trying to explain it.

Calvert-Lewin was not the best part of the game, because Leeds scored two equalisers, that first one from Klich a reprise of his South Stand shot that kickstarted the Bielsa era in August 2018, the second a curving rocket from Raphinha, after Cooper set him up from Kalvin Phillips’ cross. The goals and the noise merged. It hasn’t been like that for eighteen months and it was brilliant. Everton had dinged themselves ahead early in the second half, Abdoulaye Doucouré playing a one-two with himself off Pascal Struijk’s legs and playing in Demarai Gray for a really good finish from a really bad angle. Leeds were often exposed to plays like that, and Illan Meslier is already earning his place up near the top of the Premier League’s ‘most saves’ chart, but it wasn’t an afternoon to analyse. We’ve had nothing else to do but analyse since March 2020. There’s not much to say about Everton: Rafa Benitez is doing some Warnock things with them, massive centre-halves, a target man, and a bunch of fast attackers confusing our markers; they kicked off by teeing up a gridiron style punt downfield. When Marcelo Bielsa’s football is at its best it defies deconstruction, and there was a spell of that after Jamie Shackleton and Tyler Roberts added energy and forward running to the last half an hour, during which time Leeds equalised and tried to win by attacking so fervently they were giving Everton just as many chances to score. You could look across the Everton box and see Roberts, Harrison, Bamford, Dallas, Raphinha, Shackleton and Ayling all swarming around the ball, and it’s so risky you can’t help but get caught up in the thrill of it, and not worry about being caught out. Until blue shirts are sprinting past Cooper and Struijk and taking shots at Meslier and, well, but isn’t it good to feel so alive?

Football’s a great sport because you can enjoy so many different things about it. It’s not always about quality or technique. A match between two teams of total donkeys can be more entertaining than a World Cup final, but an amateur 100m sprint isn’t going to come close to an Olympic final. Community ties and familial inertia keep people going to watch non-league football, but it’s not only habit, it’s the promise of incident. You can get the same rush when the ball is bundled in from a yard in a scramble after a long throw as when Raphinha fires across the penalty area inside the back post. You can feel the same energy from shouting rude words at an antagonising opponent whatever team they play for, at whatever level. It was Yerry Mina on Saturday but it’s universal. ‘Ref! Do something about their no.13!’ At Leeds United, now, we’re lucky, although we haven’t been during months of some of the best of it, because Bielsa’s football creates a whirlwind in which all the things we love seeing in a match can happen. That’s my main thought after seeing Elland Road full again. Yes, it’s good for the players to experience an atmosphere, for other teams to feel intimidated by it or act up to it. But there’s great football being played there that crowds can feel part of, so it’s good for us, too. ◉