Leeds United 6-0 Stoke City: This is how it feels

Gordon Strachan can still remember the sensation of his left boot connecting with the ball that arrowed into Leicester’s goal and put Leeds on the brink of promotion in 1990. He can also remember the Elland Road pitch invasion at full-time, and how rotten he felt in the middle of it all.

“If you look at the television pictures of the players lifting me up on the touchline you will see one very tired man. I look almost skeletal, and I think I was feeling even worse than I looked. I seemed to be in agony and, to be honest, I was mentally as well as physically drained at the end.”

His manager, Howard Wilkinson, knew exactly how Strachan was feeling. At his home, Wilkinson had a photo of the celebrations from his promotion-winning campaign in charge of Sheffield Wednesday six years earlier, in which he “looked as if I’d just come out of a prison camp”. When United secured promotion and the league title at Bournemouth a week after Strachan’s winner against Leicester, Wilkinson left his players to get pissed on the coach back to Leeds and remained in the south of England, staying at a friend’s home with his family instead.

‘I rose early the next day and sat by the outdoor swimming pool, listening to the dawn’s chorus,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘Everything was perfect, an exquisite antidote to the draining year’s work I had put in, and the unwanted excesses of the previous day. My friend John Mills’ garden, with the birds in celebratory song, was the ideal place to be.’

Strachan and Wilkinson were the masterminds of a Leeds United side so good that within two years of winning promotion they were champions of England, but the lesson remains the same: no matter how talented your team is, getting promoted is fucking hard work. Half of Simon Grayson’s team in the third tier went on to play in the Premier League, but after Jermaine Beckford scored the winner on an agonising final day against Bristol Rovers, midfielder Michael Doyle burst into tears, “thinking ‘it’s happened’ — the relief of it.” Two of the defining images of Leeds’ last promotion under Marcelo Bielsa are Luke Ayling looking haunted in a post-match interview after losing at Nottingham Forest and Gaetano Berardi propping himself up on crutches, his knee torn apart and his career in doubt, guzzling champagne on the pitch at Derby.

The league table may not suggest it, but this season has been no different. From Daniel Farke being kept awake the night before QPR away, ruminating on his team selection; to Ao Tanaka crying on the pitch at Middlesbrough, left physically and emotionally bereft from the pressure of trying to get Leeds out of this godforsaken division; to Joe Rodon screaming at anything and everything in his vicinity all season. This Leeds team have had to be relentless for two years — and Dan James still has the scar on his head from last season’s play-off final defeat to prove it.

And yet the history books will only show it came down to this day and this result: Leeds United 6, Stoke City 0!

So this is how it feels. I was confident Leeds would tear into Stoke in a repeat of last season’s play-off semi-final victory over Norwich, so much so I stuck a fiver on Joel Piroe to score and Leeds to win 4-0, but it would have been downright lunacy to have thought I’d be desperately trying to cash out on my bet with only 25 minutes on the clock and Piroe having already scored a hat-trick. By the time I got a signal on my phone Piroe was putting in his fourth and Leeds’ fifth with five minutes of the first half still to play. Elland Road was almost too stunned to know how to celebrate as the goals kept coming.

It was all too good to be true. Jayden Bogle was irrepressible from right-back, a sublime combination of non-stop running and silky dribbling. Piroe’s finishing was exquisite. Joe Rodon, Ethan Ampadu, Ilia Gruev, and Ao Tanaka dominated the middle of the pitch. Leeds were so exceptional in getting the game won so early that come the second half everyone’s minds were already on the evening kick-off in Burnley and the wait to find out whether today was really going to be The Day. At the full-time whistle the army of stewards along the touchlines had less of a job keeping the fans off the pitch than they did keeping Harry Gray from jumping into the crowd, the latest member of the club’s proudest family dynasty dancing to I Predict A Riot with the jubilant glee of a 16-year-old who’d just made his debut for his boyhood team and was about to taste his first beer.

From there it was a taxi into town and a bar to watch the Burnley vs Sheffield United match with some friends, celebrating Josh Brownhill’s brace and Chris Wilder’s misery harder than any of Leeds’ six goals at Elland Road. We had a table booked but as The Moment got closer we couldn’t help but start pacing around the bar. Sheffield United were never going to score twice in stoppage-time, yet that still didn’t stop me losing my mind as they headed a chance harmlessly wide. “GET IN, LEEDS!” There were still a couple of minutes left, and as much as a draw would have been the perfect result, I wasn’t in the mood for any more risks. Then the whistle blew and the broadcast cut to the Leeds squad spraying champagne over each other.

Five years ago I celebrated Leeds winning promotion during lockdown by jumping around my living room on my own. When The Moment finally arrived this time around it was perfection. Bliss. I was surrounded by friends, hugging, shaking each other by the shoulders, screaming in each other’s faces, bellowing Marching On Together with strangers. It was everything we missed out on in 2020 and all the sweeter for it. Getting promoted is fucking hard. And this is why we put ourselves through it all.

Taxis were quickly booked back to Holbeck to join the masses of fans, flares, and fireworks outside Elland Road. But nothing will encapsulate the feeling of promotion as much as walking to the ground carrying packs of cans amid cars beeping horns and taxis blaring out Marching On Together, and a Leeds supporter emerging from the tunnel at the end of Holbeck Moor and shouting over to us: “Which way is the off-licence?!”

We’ve had to spend too much of this season reading nerds online and listening to suits in the boardroom pointing to one of the largest wage bills in the Championship’s history as if football is played on a spreadsheet or a save on a video game. As Johan Cruyff once said, “I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.” If football was played by robots, Marcelo Bielsa “would win everything”. Instead, it’s played and coached and watched by human beings, and the lads in the white shirts this season are no different to us in the stands — flawed, frayed, and fallible to the occasional fuck up. And they’ve had to fight to the end.

If we were worried this team would lack the romance of the Bielsa era, well I’m here to tell you that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So just look at renaissance man Junior Firpo holding his hand to his heart after scoring the fourth against Stoke in what may have been one of his farewell appearances at Elland Road; or Sam Byram, the boy returned man whose career away from Leeds was so blighted by injury he was reduced to pushing himself up and down the corridor of his apartment block in a wheelchair trying to escape “a sense of worthlessness”, finally celebrating the promotion with his boyhood club that he always wanted. Look at Harry Gray, finishing the work of his older brother’s 52-game slog last season with twenty minutes of sheer glee while his great uncle Eddie shed tears of pride in the stands; or Ethan Ampadu, whose three consecutive seasons of relegation were snapped by joining Leeds and a campaign in which he lost play-off finals for both club and country, now recast as the captain finally getting to taste success.

But most of all, look at the photo of Joe Rodon’s reaction to the full-time whistle against Stoke, knowing Leeds had nearly, finally, got the job done. His arms are raised in celebration, but for once he’s not screaming or shouting. He looks exhausted, relieved. Glad that it’s all over. It’s a feeling Gordon Strachan and Howard Wilkinson will know all too well. And a feeling we should never take for granted. Leeds. Are. Going. Up. ⬢