On Sunday, Leeds United Women were defeated 2-0 in Garforth by Chester-le-Street Town and dropped to 6th place on the final day of the league season. Despite their win, Town were relegated at the same ground where, earlier in the week, Hull City’s win over Leeds promoted them to the third tier. Every story needs supporting characters and, this season, United were cast as a bit-part.

It’s no fun stealing the show every campaign. Last May, the men’s side’s relegation from the Premier League was a welcome release from doing the all-eyes-on-you fretting and panicking for a third season in a row. This season’s star turn was different, but the dreary final day defeat to Southampton still left our Rob wondering whether he misses the days when Leeds United were mere extras filling the backdrop.

The chorus can be fun too. For my sins, I once performed in a student pantomime of The Little Mermaid and was cast as a fan of a fictional underwater rock band ‘Fishing for Chips’. I featured in one scene and said one line, ‘I love you Derek! Sign my rectum?’ Why is it seared word-for-word, on my brain seven years later? Because I was given a job and I gave it my all.

Could I do that week after week, year after year? Eventually you want something to break the monotony. Like most things in life, balance is preferable. For the health of a football fan, I prescribe both drama and stability but ultimately, I agree with Rob’s conclusion that, if you have to choose between the two, it’s much more fun having something to sweat over.

For the women’s side, the big question at the end of this season was (again): bottom of the upper half of the table, or top of the lower half? The final day did not bring the promotion they were hoping for, but the opportunity to improve on last season’s 6th place. Defeat to Town meant Leeds more or less equalled their 2022/23 record, scoring one point fewer as they lost less frequently but failed to convert as many draws into wins.

They have entertained, though, with more goals scored at both ends. Jess Rousseau couldn’t quite match Hull City’s Helen Lynskey to win the league’s golden boot, but she did score more than a third of United’s tally — though each might have meant more were it not for Leeds’ defence, which is yet to recover from the departure of the Whites’ long-established centre-back partnership Bridie Hannon and Catherine Hamill, since replaced by a rotating cast whose rhythm is yet to be settled.

On Sunday, the Whites’ back line couldn’t stop Chester-le-Street winger Jolie Donzo from claiming her leading role. Her own teammates wouldn’t, either. After watching her see off Jess Melrose and Lucy Turner to infiltrate the United box, none of the three blue shirts unmarked in the box called for the pass, leaving her to take the chance on herself. That’s star quality.

Hailing from New York, Donzo was brought to the UK by the i2i international soccer academy, who fulfil the wildest, British dreams of footballers from all over the world. For Donzo, this meant studying and playing for Northumbria University.

And it’s gone well. She’s scored more than 100 goals in her three years as a student footballer, while making fifteen Division One North appearances this season. It’s no wonder that she jumped for joy after she made Town’s first goal against Leeds, using wicked pace to beat Turner to the ball and tee up Jenny Ashton.

She assisted the second, too, pulling all the strings of a performance that might give relegated Chester-le-Street hope for an immediate return to the fourth tier — were it not for the fact that Donzo’s next darting run will take her back across the Atlantic, where she’ll make the next step of her football career at Coppermine United in Baltimore.

Division One North is full of stories like this. So long as teams are amateur, with players unbound by money or contracts, success is slippery, threatening to disappear with the next arising whim or opportunity. Players are swapped like Panini stickers.

Earlier in the campaign, Jolie Donzo was troubling United in a Middlesbrough shirt, having arrived at Teesside in the summer, at a time when Boro were benefitting from a huge windfall. After Newcastle United achieved promotion from D1N with a bloated squad of the region’s best players, the Lady Magpies pruned the group — the fickleness goes both ways, and a constantly-changing landscape can’t provide the stability that is key to player development as well as team success.

Leeds United haven’t had a consistent starting eleven for a while. Wisely, the Whites have used the dead time between their hope of promotion disappearing and the end of the season to experiment with the team well in advance of the new campaign which begins in August, with Jess Melrose and Molly Firth the latest fresh names to be thrown on the team sheet.

United’s final stakes-free games of the season were the perfect environment to blood the young duo, though having played a cup final in a different shirt just a fortnight ago, they might not need it. Firth and Melrose were brought on for the final ten minutes as Sheffield United Under-21s beat Chelsea in the Professional Game Academy Cup final, coming up against Blues’ first-team player and Japan international Maika Hamano.

In the Blades’ pair, Leeds have a pair of budding talents who could go on to do great things at Garforth — but will they? Unresourced, the Whites rely on player loyalty when planning the team’s future. This was simple in the case of Hannon and Hamill, who both loved Leeds United since childhood — though, in the end, the pull of a more competitive football set-up was too strong for Hamill, who has taken her loyalty to third-tier Fylde, where she ended the season top of their appearances list.

But allegiance to Leeds is by no means a given and so, while professionalisation apparently remains a distant dream, Leeds must find other cheap ways to keep players at the club if they hope to thrive in Division One North. ⬢