It was surely fate that Kaiser Chiefs played their homecoming gig at Elland Road the night before Leeds played Wembley. In the past, Leeds has not done bands. The musical benchmark was always the Wedding Present, an angsty group of moderately ugly men in black. They sang songs about girlfriend trouble because they were from Leeds and so they could not get girlfriends. But this was to be a musical and football bonanza, the rebirth of the culturally deprived.
It was fate that the amps on Saturday night were emblazoned with LUFC and the first song was Everything Is Average Nowadays. The second was Every Day I Love You Less And Less. This was sporting history set to jangly guitar music.
You'll have noticed that everyone's been harping on about fate this week, blurring the boundaries between genius, serendipity and John Terry's inability to stand up. And, let's face it, if fate really had much to do with football, I would not have been in Beijing yesterday and I would also have found a decent site to deliver live pictures to my laptop. My mum texted me from holiday in Cyprus and offered to keep me up to date, albeit the Turkish waiter was having trouble with his aerial. That's football, it's a global game when it wants to be.
Eventually, I did find a site, possibly illegal and definitely expensive, and started to read the messages fans were posting next to the tiny screen. Someone said he was looking for porn and, although Garry Birtles mentioned something about flicking things through your legs in dangerous areas, I feel the poster had missed the point of the play-offs.
I lost the screen at half-time and, when it reappeared, Doncaster had scored in cyberspace. The commentators succumbed to emotion and said it was fully deserved, but it was their first shot on target. How bad did that make us?
I expect nothing less. It is fate, after all. Manchester United are fated to win and we are fated to lose. We get kicked in the teeth by pious pundits. We are dirty Leeds. It was interesting that, during the Champions League knees-up, Jamie Redknapp said that Paul Scholes was a dirty player. Roy Keane had told him. Those who thought Scholes was merely a bad tackler underestimated his nasty streak, Redknapp said. But Scholes is fêted and we are fated.
So Doncaster can sit alongside the other sides we have lost to on our big days - Watford, Aston Villa, Sunderland. When we lost to Watford, Neil Sullivan, our goalkeeper, scored an own goal. Yesterday he did not put a foot wrong but was, alas, playing for Doncaster. Now that's fate.
We are Leeds and we were born under a bad sign. We won't pretend that any of it reveals anything about mankind or that future generations will learn invaluable lessons from this. No fuss. No glory. No 15 points. As the Kaiser Chiefs so pithily put it, na na na na naa.