The phrase “doing a Leeds” is synonymous with failure on the grandest scale. Leeds United are back in the Premier League after a 16-year absence. Led by their iconoclastic Argentinean manager, they’re impossible to miss.
The phrase “doing a Leeds” is synonymous with failure on the grandest scale. Leeds United are back in the Premier League after a 16-year absence. Led by their iconoclastic Argentinean manager, they’re impossible to miss.
A soccer team that won every game 7-0 would be impressive; a soccer team that lost every game 7-0 would be pathetic; a soccer team whose games always featured seven goals, but with absolutely no guarantees as to which side would score them, would be an extremely exciting soccer team to watch.
Leeds United, under the intense (not really a strong enough word for it) gaze of Argentinian manager Marcelo Bielsa, has played a pair of seven-goal thrillers to open this season, its first back in the Premier League since the dark old days of 2004. With Bielsa somehow more than intensely watching from the touchline, looking on as if he were a Roman statue on whose nose a fly had landed and you could tell the statue knew it, Leeds lost its first match, 4-3, to Liverpool, the defending champions, on an 88th-minute penalty from Mo Salah. Then, with Bielsa still staring, sphinxlike, out at the pitch, as if unimagined vistas of mathematics were invisibly coalescing before his eyes, and also as if those vistas were doing a mediocre job defending Aleksandar Mitrović, Leeds beat Fulham by the same score, behind two goals from Hélder Costa. After the first two matches of the season, Leeds found themselves tied for first in the Premier League in goals scored and second in goals allowed. These are statistical lists that Bielsa has also, undoubtedly, looked at, at least until the paper burst into flames. (The numbers dropped off a bit in Leeds’ third match, a 1-0 Yorkshire Derby win against Sheffield United, but even that lone goal had a wild quality, coming on an 88th-minute header by Patrick Bamford.) continue reading