When the director leaves the cameras rolling

Stop the ride, I’m going to be sick. Another last minute goal, another roar shaking Elland Road to its foundations, another week of daring to believe that things might actually turn out okay. Why can’t Leeds United just be normal?

I’m done with this season, seriously. It feels like it’s been scripted by a drunk M Night Shyamalan. It’s more than twenty years since he caught everyone out with The Sixth Sense, and there’s a reason nobody watches his movies any more: too many ‘twist’ endings just leave you feeling dizzy. I don’t feel euphoria right now, I just want to lie down until all my senses stop spinning.

If the story of Leeds United was a movie it would have ended under the lights of Elland Road on that warm, jubilant summer night in 2020. Bielsa raises the Championship trophy, the champagne corks pop, the camera pans upward for the fireworks, and the scene fades to black as Marching On Together plays, before the cinema lights come up and the ushers begin to clear away the popcorn. Sixteen years of misery and humiliation, finally banished. That’s a proper ending.

Football doesn’t work like that. Happy endings don’t exist because football clubs are immortal. Their stories never end, not even when they meet an untimely demise and have to undergo a phoenix-style rebirth deep in the bowels of the non-league pyramid. Nobody will ever live to witness the full story of Leeds United, currently spanning 102 years and counting. All we can hope is that the chapters we’re fortunate enough to live through are happy ones.

Lord knows how this particular chapter is going to end, but it appears to be gearing up for an almighty ‘Sliding Doors’ moment on the season’s final day; a moment that will reverberate through the years. The Brighton game was the 2021/22 season in microcosm; an unrelenting, miserable slog, punctuated by flashes of hope. Whether it will end in similar fashion is anyone’s guess. It would be typical of this season for Leeds to find salvation in the dying minutes of the eleventh hour. It would be typical of Leeds to do the reverse.

The weirdest thing is how calm I feel about the whole thing. Not on matchday itself, obviously — I spend those producing enough nervous energy to power a floodlight — but most of the time I’m managing to keep a degree of separation from the mess this season has become. I feel like I should be angrier — much, much angrier — at the complacency, the recruitment failures, the persisting whiff of Socios and the idiotic, misjudged PR gaffes that just keep on multiplying. Somehow I’m not. Why that is, I’m not sure.

Perhaps I’m still in the grip of post-Bielsa ennui. Or maybe I’m just bone-tired. Football has always been my escapism, but I feel like I’ve spent most of this season trying to escape from it. Maybe I’ve just lost patience with its capricious habit of fucking up otherwise pleasant weekends and putting me in a bad mood that affects my family and friends. Or maybe it’s something else.

The last time Leeds got relegated I chucked my replica shirt into a corner and sulked for a week. This time, should it happen, I won’t. This doesn’t mean I don’t care, or that I’m resigned to relegation — if we give up now, we fully deserve it, and everything that follows — but I’ll process it differently because it won’t be the end of the story. Relegation in 2004, three years after Champions League football, felt like the end of the world. Relegation to League One felt like the implosion of the universe. In reality, it was neither. Life is just a series of peaks and troughs after all. Or ups and downs, if you will.

Football is full of little endings. Matches end, happily or otherwise. Seasons end. Beloved players and managers depart. Even Neil Warnock appears to have finally fucked off (although if by the time you read this he has risen from the grave like a spectral, eyebrowless revenant and begun haunting Doncaster’s stadium, I can only apologise for speaking his name and awakening him from his infernal slumber). Everything is transient.

The Bielsa fairytale has definitely ended. At times this season felt as though the director had walked away and left the camera rolling, capturing all the moments that belie the happy ending: Ebeneezer Scrooge succumbing to smallpox in a grubby Victorian hospital, Sleeping Beauty and the handsome prince going through an acrimonious divorce, Charlie Bucket developing a life-changing sherbet addiction and losing the chocolate factory. And we, the fans, find ourselves compelled to keep watching and watching, as Dan James toils up front and Raphinha flounders at right-back, despoiling the memory of that happy summer’s day two years previously, because maybe, contrary to the evidence of all our senses, this season’s ending will be happy.

That’s football. Bielsa is gone, but the story of Leeds United continues. It will not end in my lifetime, nor yours. It is overlong, and oddly paced, and some bits make no sense, but there are few clubs who can boast a finer tale. It will take you through every possible emotion, and you’ll feel them just as keenly every time. It will make you terribly tired, but part of you will never tire of it.

However this season finishes, whether in relief, relegation or some heady combination of both, it’s just an end, not The End. And, right now, that’s enough. Stop the ride, I want to get off. But you’d better believe I’ll be back for more. ⬢