A month ago, Leeds United were merrily on top of the Championship. They had just beaten Sunderland with two late goals and Sheffield United with three. They had gone 16 games unbeaten and were playing with authority and conviction. More than that, they seemed to have the deepest squad in the Championship. The Sunderland game had turned when they had brought on Willy Gnonto and Largie Ramazani; nobody else in the division could bring that sort of quality off the bench.
Since then they’ve won one of five games and slipped to second. It’s happening again.
Saturday’s game with Swansea was simultaneously thrilling and extremely predictable. US international Brenden Aaronson put Leeds ahead in the first minute, the sort of goal that is usually said to calm nerves. But there is such a thing as scoring too early. Leeds never really got going. Illan Meslier saved a penalty and Swansea hit the post before equalising after Meslier dropped a corner. Gnonto seemed to have won it with four minutes remaining but, six minutes into injury time, Zan Vipotnik’s drive went through the Leeds keeper. The 2-2 draw meant Sheffield United, who had beaten Coventry on Friday night, remained top and Leeds are now level on points with third-placed Burnley.
The automatic promotion that had seemed probable a month ago could easily become a spot in the play-offs – where Leeds have been seven times before, never having been promoted through them. It shouldn’t matter – Sunderland, in fourth, also lost in the play-offs six times before finally breaking the hoodoo in 2022 – but the mood of a football club is a strange thing and Leeds at the moment are firmly set in anxiety. This is what always happens to them; they always slip up at the last.
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Clubs shouldn’t really have a personality, but they do. The managers, the players and the owners may change, but something fundamental always remains; an energy passed on through the generations from fan to fan. For Leeds that energy is oddly negative, something the novelist David Peace expresses not only in The Damned Utd, his novel specifically about the club, but also in the Red Riding Quartet, his disturbing and paranoid series dealing with police corruption in the years of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation.
In the late 1960s and early 70s Leeds United were arguably the best side in England, if not Europe. They won two league titles and an FA Cup, but they should have won far more: they also came second in the league five times and lost in three FA Cup finals between 1965 and 1973. Late-season slip-ups became habitual. Rationally, that was probably because they were trying to compete in multiple competitions with a squad that wasn’t big enough, but their manager Don Revie came to believe the club was cursed.
Revie was a details man. He meticulously researched opponents, planned for every eventuality, left nothing to chance. He did everything possible to give his side the best chance of winning, which stretched to an array of superstitions. He wore a lucky mohair suit and insisted his wife wear a lucky coat. He kept two lucky chunks of wood in his pocket. Whenever he ...
