This was frustrating because Leeds could have won, and because Leeds are still a team stuck at could.
We just don't ever seem to get anywhere against these bastards in this bastard fixture. The hype, the hope, then the fizzle: this was a decent point in the parlance, and even in the rivalry-sapping friendlies we're unbeaten since promotion. And we got a long-awaited win, at Old Trafford. But all we've had from it at home, since 2002, is the angst. After getting up for this we have to get back to normal and play whoever it is next, who is it? We'll care soon. For now we're still thinking that we'll have to get this lot next year.
I felt some envy creeping into my thoughts on Sunday. Not of our opponents, not ever, but of Brighton & Hove Albion, smashing their weird seagull-eagle derby-ish rivals Crystal Palace 5-0 with a goal smashed in from halfway. How I'd love Leeds to go up against our foes and do that, like it's 1972 and Mick Jones is warming everyone up to play Southampton. At least our point at Brighton looks better than decent, now, and it's not irrelevant that a first start for Carlos Baleba, signed by our opponents from Albion in the summer, made them look a better team.
After the week they'd had, drawing with Tottenham, losing to Atletico Madrid, their one decent defender pinning their failings on sporting director/Leeds-mole Jason Wilcox, they had to look like a better team, or else. Or else what? Probably or else the same week of ex-players and hangers-on moaning on every channel that they still get anyway for 'only' taking a point from Elland Road before losing to Como and Bournemouth in their next two, so it was annoying that Leeds bore the brunt of their pointless 'reaction' here.
But manager Michael Carrick had, by national demand, to do 'something'. Unfortunately for him a complete personality transplant of his 1-11 wasn't possible, so he had to settle for moving them around a bit and getting them up for a War of the Roses. The immediate response was that, inside four minutes, Lisandro Martínez and Baleba were both face down on the turf and Youri Tielemans was limping away trying to pretend it hadn't hurt, and it looked like Leeds were going to have fun.
The game couldn't sustain that intensity, and I don't think the Premier League would allow it anyway. Referee Darren England had one of those unhelpful days when he never made clear what he thought was a foul and what wasn't. Then again, he did have to put up with Bruno Fernandes wittering at him all afternoon, and remembering Fernandes' dying swan performance while Leeds were scoring at Old Trafford in spring, seeing two of them on the ground already was a promising start. Leeds were the better team. Without doing Gary Neville's 'this is ya-nyyted' work for him, it says a lot about our guests' decline that having some players running about and looking interested in the game felt like a big step forward for them. Going forward, they didn't even have a touch in James Trafford's box until the 26th minute when, admittedly, Bryan Mbeumo should have buried a free header that he put wide.
The game couldn't sustain that intensity, and I don't think the Premier League would allow it anyway. Referee Darren England had one of those unhelpful days when he never made clear what he thought was a foul and what wasn't. Then again, he did have to put up with Bruno Fernandes wittering at him all afternoon, and remembering Fernandes' dying swan performance while Leeds were scoring at Old Trafford in spring, seeing two of them on the ground already was a promising start.
Leeds were the better team. Without doing Gary Neville's 'this is ya-nyyted' work for him, it says a lot about our guests' decline that having some players running about and looking interested in the game felt like a big step forward for them. Going forward, they didn't even have a touch in James Trafford's box until the 26th minute when, admittedly, Bryan Mbeumo should have buried a free header that he put wide.
That came just after Nico Elvedi's header was just kept out by Senne Lammens, and just before Leeds fell asleep and gave away the lead. The quarter hour before half-time was the visitors' best, and they took advantage right when the day's intensity had dipped. From a free-kick when Ao Tanaka lazily lumped for an offside Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Tarik Muharemovi? chased Tielemans to the halfway line then didn't follow him going to get the ball back from Amad Diallo. James Justin had Mbeumo marked until he didn't, right when he was getting onto Tielemans' low cross to score. You could tell it was a bad goal because you could see lots and lots of grass between the Peacocks, space given up where it should never have been.
Leeds got things sorted out quick after half-time. Noah Okafor wasn't involved in the first half, except when he went over to try joining in with Justin and Jayden Bogle on the right. Now he started getting the ball on the left and cutting in, skipping around tackles, starting moves. Spraying a pass wide for Bogle won a corner. Calvert-Lewin was halfway through telling Muharemovi? what to do when the ball came over, and Muharemovi? knew what to do, and when he headed it down onto Calvert-Lewin's chest, so did he.
Calvert-Lewin was six yards out but the slo-mo replays show, in his face, what a great goalscorer he can be. His first touch, with his chest, put the ball right in front of him — the right speed, the right height, the right room, the right location. And he doesn't take his eyes off it. This is when I'd love to be a footballer, and see what Calvert-Lewin sees in that moment, not the camera view of light on lens but the pictures as received by his goalscoring singlemind. What does the world look like to him, all of whatever the heck of the somehow created universe is, billions of light years compressed into one Puma Stellar Nitro™ Ultimate size five football? We'll never know. But we do know that putting the football into the net made Calvert-Lewin do a delirious forward roll. Maybe that's all we need to know.
Chances didn't come so well again, but they did come. They came and went around the edge of the box where Okafor, Tanaka and Anton Stach took turns at taking a Puma Stellar Nitro™ Ultimate on a trip towards creation's outer edges via the airspace over Farnley. Then from a stoppage time scramble Stach made sure he kept the ball low, but jabbed a slow shot off the side of his calf that ended up in Lammens' hands when leathering the case off it would have taken the net off the goalposts, too.
The second-guessery that Stach and Tanaka kept putting themselves through felt like a reason Leeds didn't create more. The solid stability that we have to remember to still crave, as we dream of passports into Europe, has made Leeds United's midfield a place where hard work wins points, and a place where failing to grasp inspiration means dreamlike wins remain elusive. Too often Stach and Tanaka take a Green Cross Code approach, looking left, then right, then left again before releasing a pass, while the crowd see an alternate world created and destroyed because the ball didn't move first time. And in attacking situations, like Stach's late chance and once when Tanaka was trying to feed Bogle, they seem to arrive at the ball with two ideas in mind only to go with a third, worse one, that occurs at the last minute.
I started wondering, in the second half, whether Daniel Farke will be thinking soon about what Ilia Gruev brought to midfield last season, and what he could do in this, now his knee is better. But that choice only explains the situation: Stach, Tanaka and Gruev are all tidy midfielders signed from the Bundesliga, so whichever of them you play, you'll get tidy midfielding occasionally lapsing into memories of German matches' greater spaces and slower times. So instead the question has to be about getting Harry Wilson into the side, with his speed of thought and foot, without losing the Bundestidying qualities that are helping Leeds succeed.
If a point from a game like this is success, that is. It has to be taken that way, however it feels. It was frustrating because Leeds could have won, but also because Leeds are still a team stuck at could. It's arguably a better place to be, though, than our visitors, who are still the team that should. Their net spend since Manchester City started cheating in 2009 is £1.5bn, second only to City's £1.63bn, and while the Citizens used their ill-gotten gains to win everything over and over again, their neighbours are meanwhile celebrating a point at Leeds because it might shut some of their own whinging team up for five minutes. At least our kind of disappointment is solace.
