I’d known what the result was going to be from around 3pm on Friday afternoon. This was the moment my son, Jack, texted me to tell me he’d like to watch the match round at his mate Archie’s house.
I’d known from that moment although in all honesty, I hadn’t anticipated quite so much quietly competent play, hope and cruel despair over the course of the ninety minutes.
You see, although we’re bona fide Leicester City supporters (myself since the last desperate days of the Pleat era in the early ‘90’s, my son, due to the slightly unfortunate timing of his birth, since the 2016/17 season) we live in Yorkshire – slap bang in the centre of a Leeds United supporting heartland.
Jack’s friend Archie and all his family are Leeds fans. The U14’s Sunday league football team he plays for is run by a Leeds supporter and around half the lads in the team support the Whites – as do a good proportion of his school mates.
So, I’m sorry everybody. I know I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen. I know by the rules of football supporterdom that by not insisting Jack hunker down and watch the match in a hermetically sealed bunker at home, under siege with only me for company, I am as culpable for our loss last night as any combination of visually challenged linesmen, profligate chance spurning and after you Claude defending.
I also blame Carley by the way – one of the Leeds supporting mums from Jack’s football team Whatsapp group who decided to take her dog for a walk after 75 minutes of the match because, in her words, “Leeds never win when I’m in the house.”
Of course, I’m sure like many of you on Saturday morning, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’ve seen this before. “Yes”, I hear many of you cry, “against Middlesbrough last week!” Or what about in both the recent matches against Ipswich?
But even this doesn’t quite get to the nub of it. Friday night didn’t just feel like a cruel bolt of gross misfortune inflicted upon us from nowhere. It felt far more systemic than that.
It felt, in the words of Agent Smith, somehow inevitable Mr Anderson. Like the streets ahead capacity of Leicester City to manage and control the midfield and consequently the tempo of the match for the first 80 minutes, the insouciant ease with which we carved out gilt-edged chance after chance to bury our opponents in the second half and the team’s casual acceptance (admirable though this was) of the catastrophically bad linesman’s call for Daka’s disallowed goal, were actually all just part of Leeds United’s grand masterplan to take Zion for the umpteenth time this season.
