Skrevet av Emne: 2.Playoff-Kamp:vs Derby Co @Elland Road, onsdag 15/5 2019, kl 20.45 på Viasport1  (Lest 48319 ganger)

0 medlemmer og 1 gjest leser dette emnet.

B_Ød

Ikkje så ofte eg er innom her lenger. Men eg må virkelig seie at eg føler med Leeds-fansen i dag. Leeds var overlegne i bortekampen, så det var utgjort at det skulle gå slik i dag. Fansen hadde fortjent opprykk i år.

Heisann Roger'n..lenge siden sist nå..flott at du tar turen innom  :D

Hvordan gikk det med Tranmere i år forressten??
Ups & Ups!!

ziganda

Nå må vi beholde de fleste spillerne. De har fått erfaring med press i kampene når det dro seg til i serien samt playoff. Den erfaringen er uvurderlig. I tillegg må nye spillere hentes tidlig nok til å være med på hele sesongoppkjøringen. Det gjelder spesielt hvis Bielsa (håper inderlig det) er trener, slik at de nye spillerne tåler intensiteten som kreves.

Tross nedtur i går har sesongen vært oppløftende.

Cherry

Nå må vi beholde de fleste spillerne. De har fått erfaring med press i kampene når det dro seg til i serien samt playoff. Den erfaringen er uvurderlig. I tillegg må nye spillere hentes tidlig nok til å være med på hele sesongoppkjøringen. Det gjelder spesielt hvis Bielsa (håper inderlig det) er trener, slik at de nye spillerne tåler intensiteten som kreves.

Tross nedtur i går har sesongen vært oppløftende.

Fullstendig enig.
Her må ALT på plass så tidlig som mulig.  Starte pre season med de spillerne vi skal benytte , og slik at de nye som kommer inn får med seg regimet ift fysisk trening.
Håper inderlig at også Medical staff gjør en "revisjon" av skader som det var mange av i troppen...kan det f eks trenes annerledes ift og forebygge...
 

Eriksen55

Nå må vi beholde de fleste spillerne. De har fått erfaring med press i kampene når det dro seg til i serien samt playoff. Den erfaringen er uvurderlig. I tillegg må nye spillere hentes tidlig nok til å være med på hele sesongoppkjøringen. Det gjelder spesielt hvis Bielsa (håper inderlig det) er trener, slik at de nye spillerne tåler intensiteten som kreves.

Tross nedtur i går har sesongen vært oppløftende.

Fullstendig enig.
Her må ALT på plass så tidlig som mulig.  Starte pre season med de spillerne vi skal benytte , og slik at de nye som kommer inn får med seg regimet ift fysisk trening.
Håper inderlig at også Medical staff gjør en "revisjon" av skader som det var mange av i troppen...kan det f eks trenes annerledes ift og forebygge...

Det siste du nevner er nok det viktigste.. kan det relateres til trening så MÃ… Bielsa justere opplegget... lykke til med den praten!

Alternativt større stall som kan tåle så mange skader..da må Bielsa fire på noen prinsipper...lykke til der også  :)

berlin

Ikkje så ofte eg er innom her lenger. Men eg må virkelig seie at eg føler med Leeds-fansen i dag. Leeds var overlegne i bortekampen, så det var utgjort at det skulle gå slik i dag. Fansen hadde fortjent opprykk i år.

Heisann Roger'n..lenge siden sist nå..flott at du tar turen innom  :D

Hvordan gikk det med Tranmere i år forressten??

Det skal spille PO-finale 25.mai om opprykk fra League 2 til League 1, mot Newport.
Heia Tranmere! (...hvis man først skal heie på et lag fra Liverpool  ;)  )

Another_Roger

Ikkje så ofte eg er innom her lenger. Men eg må virkelig seie at eg føler med Leeds-fansen i dag. Leeds var overlegne i bortekampen, så det var utgjort at det skulle gå slik i dag. Fansen hadde fortjent opprykk i år.

Heisann Roger'n..lenge siden sist nå..flott at du tar turen innom  :D

Hvordan gikk det med Tranmere i år forressten??

Etter opprykket frå National League var det mange som frykta ein tung sesong. Men det har gått over all forventning, og neste helg er det som enkelte har nevnt her playoff-finale mellom Tranmere og Newport.

Josch

Nå må vi beholde de fleste spillerne. De har fått erfaring med press i kampene når det dro seg til i serien samt playoff. Den erfaringen er uvurderlig. I tillegg må nye spillere hentes tidlig nok til å være med på hele sesongoppkjøringen. Det gjelder spesielt hvis Bielsa (håper inderlig det) er trener, slik at de nye spillerne tåler intensiteten som kreves.

Tross nedtur i går har sesongen vært oppløftende.

Dette med erfaring fra play off er nok en viktig faktor. Dette gjelder ikke bare spillere, men hele apparatet. De fleste som vinner play off har erfaring med dette fra nær fortid, eller fra kamper med press i PL. Det er sjelden en debutant i play off går hele veien og vinner (Huddersfield).

Hallgeir *

Ikkje så ofte eg er innom her lenger. Men eg må virkelig seie at eg føler med Leeds-fansen i dag. Leeds var overlegne i bortekampen, så det var utgjort at det skulle gå slik i dag. Fansen hadde fortjent opprykk i år.

Heisann Roger'n..lenge siden sist nå..flott at du tar turen innom  :D

Hvordan gikk det med Tranmere i år forressten??

Etter opprykket frå National League var det mange som frykta ein tung sesong. Men det har gått over all forventning, og neste helg er det som enkelte har nevnt her playoff-finale mellom Tranmere og Newport.

Lykke til, Roger!  :)
Super Leeds since 1968

Kato

Ikkje så ofte eg er innom her lenger. Men eg må virkelig seie at eg føler med Leeds-fansen i dag. Leeds var overlegne i bortekampen, så det var utgjort at det skulle gå slik i dag. Fansen hadde fortjent opprykk i år.

Heisann Roger'n..lenge siden sist nå..flott at du tar turen innom  :D

Hvordan gikk det med Tranmere i år forressten??

Etter opprykket frå National League var det mange som frykta ein tung sesong. Men det har gått over all forventning, og neste helg er det som enkelte har nevnt her playoff-finale mellom Tranmere og Newport.

Satt og så siste semifinale i play-off, og tenkte på deg. Eneste Tranmere-supporter jeg har hørt om. Og virker som en fin fyr også.
 

Jon R

Nå må vi beholde de fleste spillerne. De har fått erfaring med press i kampene når det dro seg til i serien samt playoff. Den erfaringen er uvurderlig. I tillegg må nye spillere hentes tidlig nok til å være med på hele sesongoppkjøringen. Det gjelder spesielt hvis Bielsa (håper inderlig det) er trener, slik at de nye spillerne tåler intensiteten som kreves.

Tross nedtur i går har sesongen vært oppløftende.

Fullstendig enig.
Her må ALT på plass så tidlig som mulig.  Starte pre season med de spillerne vi skal benytte , og slik at de nye som kommer inn får med seg regimet ift fysisk trening.
Håper inderlig at også Medical staff gjør en "revisjon" av skader som det var mange av i troppen...kan det f eks trenes annerledes ift og forebygge...
Meget viktige poenger her. De bør også se om kamp ogtreningsregimet passer for spillere på 30+. Det er helt påfallende og kanskje forutsigbart hvordan Pablo fadet ut siste to mnd. Han virket mentalt og fysisk nedslitt i de to PO kampene og lenge før det!
Jon R.

Promotion 2010

LEEDS UNITED 2-4 DERBY COUNTY: OVER, AGAIN
In 2018-19 articles, Free, Leeds United, Leeds United Match Reports 2018/19 by Moscowhite • Daniel ChapmanMay 16, 2019
Football’s paradox is that being good can hurt as much as being bad. A league season is 46, or 48, or 49 chances to fail, and nobody can withstand that sort of punishment. Manchester City have one of the best teams club football has ever seen: this season they lost to Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Leicester City and Newcastle United.

No matter how good your team is, defeat stalks you game by game until it has you in its jaws. Then it releases you so the game can begin again. Sometimes you’re bitten so regularly you become immune; when you’ve got a bad team, they can only hurt you so much by the end of the season. Sometimes, when your team is good, you go so long without losing, and come so close to football’s rewards, that you believe you’ve outrun the terrors once and for all, and forget that the start of every ninety minutes is only the start of another attempt at avoiding hurt. That’s when failure bites you again, right in your optimism, with a sabre tooth through the consequences.

Marcelo Bielsa knows all this, feeling it more intensely than any other coach, and in that sense he’s the perfect coach to fail with. He once said that, after you win a match, “There is a sensation of effervescence, a sensation of the adrenalin to the top, the generous excitation and happiness. But those are only five minutes, and after that there is that enormous and huge emptiness, and an indescribable loneliness,” the same emptiness and loneliness you feel after a defeat. Football, to Bielsa, is a permanent state of painful defeat, occasionally reduced briefly by wins that are only a prelude to another defeat. He may have had that in mind as he stood in his technical area at the end of the game last night, waiting for Derby County’s celebrations to die down so he could shake Frank Lampard’s hand. It was Derby’s night. But they still have to go to Wembley.

(Prefer this as a podcast? Click here to support Moscowhite on Patreon.)

All this makes Bielsa the perfect coach for Leeds, a club that embodied his philosophy for years before he came to Yorkshire. In five seasons at the end of the 1960s Leeds won more and lost fewer games than any other First Division team, but Manchester United won more league titles. On a Saturday in 1972 Leeds won the FA Cup; on Monday they lost to Wolverhampton Wanderers and lost the league title. In 1987 John Sheridan scored one of the most gorgeous free-kicks ever taken to give Leeds the advantage against Charlton Athletic in extra-time in the play-off final, but then Peter Shirtliff scored twice and Charlton won. Long ago, before I knew about Bielsa and his philosophy of defeat, I wrote that Sheridan’s free-kick is beautiful the way autumn is beautiful, when all the leaves turn golden brown and fall to the forest floor, because they’re dying. Perhaps I was waiting for Bielsa to come along and show me why that was true.

Ah, the play-offs. What can I tell you about the play-off semi-final game last night? I can tell you that I was there, but this morning I had to open a browser tab and use Google to check what the score was. 4-2? Really? Did I really see six goals last night? And two red cards? All this happened in ninety minutes at Elland Road?

Three of Derby’s goals happened in thirteen minutes, and the game never recovered itself from that chaos. United’s collapse was so rapid and unexpected the stadium was in shock. Pontus Jansson, a substitute warming up, marched onto the pitch after Derby’s third, yelling at his teammates to get a grip of themselves. There was time, and Derby looked as likely to succumb to the carnage as Leeds, and Stuart Dallas forced them to concede an equaliser on aggregate. But amid the mayhem, Derby put the ball in the net again and Leeds didn’t. That’s all it took to ruin everything.

It’s difficult to report effectively on a game like this in the social media era, because you’re reading this on the internet, probably after following a link on Twitter, and that means you’ve almost certainly seen all the harrowing clips you need to see, even if you didn’t watch the game live at the stadium or on television. You’ve seen Kiko Casilla, a sweeper keeper in style but not in execution, for whom no starting position seems to be far enough upfield for him to be able to clear a high ball effectively; moments after he left a ball to Cooper and Jack Marriott scored for Derby, he repeated the act with Kalvin Phillips and nearly let Derby score again. You’ve seen Derby cut through the middle of Leeds and really score again forty seconds into the second half. You’ve compared the penalty Bennett got for Derby with the one Bamford didn’t get for Leeds. You’ve seen Gaetano Berardi scrambling between kicks to keep the ball, then kicking and leaving beneath a second yellow card. Seen Marriott score the last goal. Seen Frank Lampard’s celebrations reduce a lifetime of privilege and riches to the state of a drunk bank clerk running amok at a racecourse.

And it’s difficult to write about it because the result means there’s no context. That was it. The end, of something. All possibilities of redemption are deferred until August. There’s no point writing that Casilla can work on communicating with his defenders because he isn’t training today and won’t be training for six weeks. There’s nothing to gain from criticising Pat Bamford’s failure to trouble Derby’s defenders because who knows how much was due to two serious knee injuries this season, or whether he’ll be United’s main striker next season. Should we withhold comment on Pablo Hernandez’s failure to lead the team through its toughest moments of the season until we know if he’ll put himself through another season of Championship football? How much praise can we give to Stuart Dallas for putting all his determination into providing the gritty leadership Hernandez wasn’t, if he’ll be back to being a reserve utility next season? What can we say about Jamie Shackleton’s superb performance? When all it leaves us with is regret that he didn’t play more in the past, and all it gives us is hope for his future, and ours, which is what ended up hurting us so much in the first place.

My analysis of the football match, in the end, is simple: if Kemar Roofe had been fit to start Leeds would be going to Wembley. Derby’s defenders have hated playing against him this season, because he’s given them problems that Bamford didn’t. Good defending starts from the front; if Leeds had been better in attack, there’d have been less pressure in defence. This isn’t to blame Bamford; it’s to blame the fates for spinning one more thread upon this season’s gaudy tapestry of blood and injuries.

Analysis of everything else depends on Marcelo Bielsa’s decision about the club’s offer to continue coaching the team next season, but I can’t offer much there that isn’t hollow. Over the last nine months we’ve become used to Bielsa’s press conferences as a source of reassurance and direction; we knew the team, we knew who was injured, we knew his thoughts on winning, losing, tactics, ethics. But Bielsa only speaks when he’s mandated, so even if he decides to stay — and we must pray to those same fates and deities that always scorn us that he will — we face more months like last summer when, after an introductory press conference, he worked in mystifying silence through pre-season, while the fans tried to connect the dots between transfer rumours and bewildering lineups in friendly matches. Perhaps Bielsa will think the decision on his future is significant enough to allow the press to question him; perhaps the summer tour to Australia will include some contractual obligations to speak. Otherwise, we’re looking for a white puff of smoke above Elland Road and a whispered, ‘Bueno’, and then months without Bielsa, even if he’s still with us.

That’s the impact I’m feeling most from last night’s game: a sense of sudden destabilising loss and futility. At 8.25pm last night this season was supposed to last for eleven more days, until after a match against Aston Villa at Wembley; in a bit more than an hour that was all destroyed, and now there’s nothing. Whatever was planned for the next week is cancelled. The training pitches will be mowed to Bielsa’s specifications but nobody will be playing on them. The kitchen staff have no menus to cook, the coaches have no sessions to plan. The fans have a free scarf, a video of last night’s game, and hotel rooms to cancel.

They have their memories of the season, too, Leeds United’s best season for almost a decade. But as Bielsa said, “those are only five minutes, and after that there is that enormous and huge emptiness, and an indescribable loneliness.” Perhaps the feelings will balance out after a while, and the good memories of what happened this season will overwhelm the pain of how it ended; we’ll celebrate the life rather than mourning the death. But the defeat will never entirely leave us. Because it’s football, and no matter how good you are, it never does. I wonder if that’s why we like it.

Min første Leeds-kamp:
Strømsgodset vs Leeds, 19.september 1973

Torpe-do

LEEDS UNITED 2-4 DERBY COUNTY: OVER, AGAIN
In 2018-19 articles, Free, Leeds United, Leeds United Match Reports 2018/19 by Moscowhite • Daniel ChapmanMay 16, 2019
Football’s paradox is that being good can hurt as much as being bad. A league season is 46, or 48, or 49 chances to fail, and nobody can withstand that sort of punishment. Manchester City have one of the best teams club football has ever seen: this season they lost to Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Leicester City and Newcastle United.

No matter how good your team is, defeat stalks you game by game until it has you in its jaws. Then it releases you so the game can begin again. Sometimes you’re bitten so regularly you become immune; when you’ve got a bad team, they can only hurt you so much by the end of the season. Sometimes, when your team is good, you go so long without losing, and come so close to football’s rewards, that you believe you’ve outrun the terrors once and for all, and forget that the start of every ninety minutes is only the start of another attempt at avoiding hurt. That’s when failure bites you again, right in your optimism, with a sabre tooth through the consequences.

Marcelo Bielsa knows all this, feeling it more intensely than any other coach, and in that sense he’s the perfect coach to fail with. He once said that, after you win a match, “There is a sensation of effervescence, a sensation of the adrenalin to the top, the generous excitation and happiness. But those are only five minutes, and after that there is that enormous and huge emptiness, and an indescribable loneliness,” the same emptiness and loneliness you feel after a defeat. Football, to Bielsa, is a permanent state of painful defeat, occasionally reduced briefly by wins that are only a prelude to another defeat. He may have had that in mind as he stood in his technical area at the end of the game last night, waiting for Derby County’s celebrations to die down so he could shake Frank Lampard’s hand. It was Derby’s night. But they still have to go to Wembley.

(Prefer this as a podcast? Click here to support Moscowhite on Patreon.)

All this makes Bielsa the perfect coach for Leeds, a club that embodied his philosophy for years before he came to Yorkshire. In five seasons at the end of the 1960s Leeds won more and lost fewer games than any other First Division team, but Manchester United won more league titles. On a Saturday in 1972 Leeds won the FA Cup; on Monday they lost to Wolverhampton Wanderers and lost the league title. In 1987 John Sheridan scored one of the most gorgeous free-kicks ever taken to give Leeds the advantage against Charlton Athletic in extra-time in the play-off final, but then Peter Shirtliff scored twice and Charlton won. Long ago, before I knew about Bielsa and his philosophy of defeat, I wrote that Sheridan’s free-kick is beautiful the way autumn is beautiful, when all the leaves turn golden brown and fall to the forest floor, because they’re dying. Perhaps I was waiting for Bielsa to come along and show me why that was true.

Ah, the play-offs. What can I tell you about the play-off semi-final game last night? I can tell you that I was there, but this morning I had to open a browser tab and use Google to check what the score was. 4-2? Really? Did I really see six goals last night? And two red cards? All this happened in ninety minutes at Elland Road?

Three of Derby’s goals happened in thirteen minutes, and the game never recovered itself from that chaos. United’s collapse was so rapid and unexpected the stadium was in shock. Pontus Jansson, a substitute warming up, marched onto the pitch after Derby’s third, yelling at his teammates to get a grip of themselves. There was time, and Derby looked as likely to succumb to the carnage as Leeds, and Stuart Dallas forced them to concede an equaliser on aggregate. But amid the mayhem, Derby put the ball in the net again and Leeds didn’t. That’s all it took to ruin everything.

It’s difficult to report effectively on a game like this in the social media era, because you’re reading this on the internet, probably after following a link on Twitter, and that means you’ve almost certainly seen all the harrowing clips you need to see, even if you didn’t watch the game live at the stadium or on television. You’ve seen Kiko Casilla, a sweeper keeper in style but not in execution, for whom no starting position seems to be far enough upfield for him to be able to clear a high ball effectively; moments after he left a ball to Cooper and Jack Marriott scored for Derby, he repeated the act with Kalvin Phillips and nearly let Derby score again. You’ve seen Derby cut through the middle of Leeds and really score again forty seconds into the second half. You’ve compared the penalty Bennett got for Derby with the one Bamford didn’t get for Leeds. You’ve seen Gaetano Berardi scrambling between kicks to keep the ball, then kicking and leaving beneath a second yellow card. Seen Marriott score the last goal. Seen Frank Lampard’s celebrations reduce a lifetime of privilege and riches to the state of a drunk bank clerk running amok at a racecourse.

And it’s difficult to write about it because the result means there’s no context. That was it. The end, of something. All possibilities of redemption are deferred until August. There’s no point writing that Casilla can work on communicating with his defenders because he isn’t training today and won’t be training for six weeks. There’s nothing to gain from criticising Pat Bamford’s failure to trouble Derby’s defenders because who knows how much was due to two serious knee injuries this season, or whether he’ll be United’s main striker next season. Should we withhold comment on Pablo Hernandez’s failure to lead the team through its toughest moments of the season until we know if he’ll put himself through another season of Championship football? How much praise can we give to Stuart Dallas for putting all his determination into providing the gritty leadership Hernandez wasn’t, if he’ll be back to being a reserve utility next season? What can we say about Jamie Shackleton’s superb performance? When all it leaves us with is regret that he didn’t play more in the past, and all it gives us is hope for his future, and ours, which is what ended up hurting us so much in the first place.

My analysis of the football match, in the end, is simple: if Kemar Roofe had been fit to start Leeds would be going to Wembley. Derby’s defenders have hated playing against him this season, because he’s given them problems that Bamford didn’t. Good defending starts from the front; if Leeds had been better in attack, there’d have been less pressure in defence. This isn’t to blame Bamford; it’s to blame the fates for spinning one more thread upon this season’s gaudy tapestry of blood and injuries.

Analysis of everything else depends on Marcelo Bielsa’s decision about the club’s offer to continue coaching the team next season, but I can’t offer much there that isn’t hollow. Over the last nine months we’ve become used to Bielsa’s press conferences as a source of reassurance and direction; we knew the team, we knew who was injured, we knew his thoughts on winning, losing, tactics, ethics. But Bielsa only speaks when he’s mandated, so even if he decides to stay — and we must pray to those same fates and deities that always scorn us that he will — we face more months like last summer when, after an introductory press conference, he worked in mystifying silence through pre-season, while the fans tried to connect the dots between transfer rumours and bewildering lineups in friendly matches. Perhaps Bielsa will think the decision on his future is significant enough to allow the press to question him; perhaps the summer tour to Australia will include some contractual obligations to speak. Otherwise, we’re looking for a white puff of smoke above Elland Road and a whispered, ‘Bueno’, and then months without Bielsa, even if he’s still with us.

That’s the impact I’m feeling most from last night’s game: a sense of sudden destabilising loss and futility. At 8.25pm last night this season was supposed to last for eleven more days, until after a match against Aston Villa at Wembley; in a bit more than an hour that was all destroyed, and now there’s nothing. Whatever was planned for the next week is cancelled. The training pitches will be mowed to Bielsa’s specifications but nobody will be playing on them. The kitchen staff have no menus to cook, the coaches have no sessions to plan. The fans have a free scarf, a video of last night’s game, and hotel rooms to cancel.

They have their memories of the season, too, Leeds United’s best season for almost a decade. But as Bielsa said, “those are only five minutes, and after that there is that enormous and huge emptiness, and an indescribable loneliness.” Perhaps the feelings will balance out after a while, and the good memories of what happened this season will overwhelm the pain of how it ended; we’ll celebrate the life rather than mourning the death. But the defeat will never entirely leave us. Because it’s football, and no matter how good you are, it never does. I wonder if that’s why we like it.

Dette. Dette var ei bra beskriving på kva eg føler for gårsdagen, utan at eg hadde klart å skrive det sjølv  :)

berlin

LEEDS UNITED 2-4 DERBY COUNTY: OVER, AGAIN
In 2018-19 articles, Free, Leeds United, Leeds United Match Reports 2018/19 by Moscowhite • Daniel ChapmanMay 16, 2019
Football’s paradox is that being good can hurt as much as being bad. A league season is 46, or 48, or 49 chances to fail, and nobody can withstand that sort of punishment. Manchester City have one of the best teams club football has ever seen: this season they lost to Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Leicester City and Newcastle United.

No matter how good your team is, defeat stalks you game by game until it has you in its jaws. Then it releases you so the game can begin again. Sometimes you’re bitten so regularly you become immune; when you’ve got a bad team, they can only hurt you so much by the end of the season. Sometimes, when your team is good, you go so long without losing, and come so close to football’s rewards, that you believe you’ve outrun the terrors once and for all, and forget that the start of every ninety minutes is only the start of another attempt at avoiding hurt. That’s when failure bites you again, right in your optimism, with a sabre tooth through the consequences.

Marcelo Bielsa knows all this, feeling it more intensely than any other coach, and in that sense he’s the perfect coach to fail with. He once said that, after you win a match, “There is a sensation of effervescence, a sensation of the adrenalin to the top, the generous excitation and happiness. But those are only five minutes, and after that there is that enormous and huge emptiness, and an indescribable loneliness,” the same emptiness and loneliness you feel after a defeat. Football, to Bielsa, is a permanent state of painful defeat, occasionally reduced briefly by wins that are only a prelude to another defeat. He may have had that in mind as he stood in his technical area at the end of the game last night, waiting for Derby County’s celebrations to die down so he could shake Frank Lampard’s hand. It was Derby’s night. But they still have to go to Wembley.

(Prefer this as a podcast? Click here to support Moscowhite on Patreon.)

All this makes Bielsa the perfect coach for Leeds, a club that embodied his philosophy for years before he came to Yorkshire. In five seasons at the end of the 1960s Leeds won more and lost fewer games than any other First Division team, but Manchester United won more league titles. On a Saturday in 1972 Leeds won the FA Cup; on Monday they lost to Wolverhampton Wanderers and lost the league title. In 1987 John Sheridan scored one of the most gorgeous free-kicks ever taken to give Leeds the advantage against Charlton Athletic in extra-time in the play-off final, but then Peter Shirtliff scored twice and Charlton won. Long ago, before I knew about Bielsa and his philosophy of defeat, I wrote that Sheridan’s free-kick is beautiful the way autumn is beautiful, when all the leaves turn golden brown and fall to the forest floor, because they’re dying. Perhaps I was waiting for Bielsa to come along and show me why that was true.

Ah, the play-offs. What can I tell you about the play-off semi-final game last night? I can tell you that I was there, but this morning I had to open a browser tab and use Google to check what the score was. 4-2? Really? Did I really see six goals last night? And two red cards? All this happened in ninety minutes at Elland Road?

Three of Derby’s goals happened in thirteen minutes, and the game never recovered itself from that chaos. United’s collapse was so rapid and unexpected the stadium was in shock. Pontus Jansson, a substitute warming up, marched onto the pitch after Derby’s third, yelling at his teammates to get a grip of themselves. There was time, and Derby looked as likely to succumb to the carnage as Leeds, and Stuart Dallas forced them to concede an equaliser on aggregate. But amid the mayhem, Derby put the ball in the net again and Leeds didn’t. That’s all it took to ruin everything.

It’s difficult to report effectively on a game like this in the social media era, because you’re reading this on the internet, probably after following a link on Twitter, and that means you’ve almost certainly seen all the harrowing clips you need to see, even if you didn’t watch the game live at the stadium or on television. You’ve seen Kiko Casilla, a sweeper keeper in style but not in execution, for whom no starting position seems to be far enough upfield for him to be able to clear a high ball effectively; moments after he left a ball to Cooper and Jack Marriott scored for Derby, he repeated the act with Kalvin Phillips and nearly let Derby score again. You’ve seen Derby cut through the middle of Leeds and really score again forty seconds into the second half. You’ve compared the penalty Bennett got for Derby with the one Bamford didn’t get for Leeds. You’ve seen Gaetano Berardi scrambling between kicks to keep the ball, then kicking and leaving beneath a second yellow card. Seen Marriott score the last goal. Seen Frank Lampard’s celebrations reduce a lifetime of privilege and riches to the state of a drunk bank clerk running amok at a racecourse.

And it’s difficult to write about it because the result means there’s no context. That was it. The end, of something. All possibilities of redemption are deferred until August. There’s no point writing that Casilla can work on communicating with his defenders because he isn’t training today and won’t be training for six weeks. There’s nothing to gain from criticising Pat Bamford’s failure to trouble Derby’s defenders because who knows how much was due to two serious knee injuries this season, or whether he’ll be United’s main striker next season. Should we withhold comment on Pablo Hernandez’s failure to lead the team through its toughest moments of the season until we know if he’ll put himself through another season of Championship football? How much praise can we give to Stuart Dallas for putting all his determination into providing the gritty leadership Hernandez wasn’t, if he’ll be back to being a reserve utility next season? What can we say about Jamie Shackleton’s superb performance? When all it leaves us with is regret that he didn’t play more in the past, and all it gives us is hope for his future, and ours, which is what ended up hurting us so much in the first place.

My analysis of the football match, in the end, is simple: if Kemar Roofe had been fit to start Leeds would be going to Wembley. Derby’s defenders have hated playing against him this season, because he’s given them problems that Bamford didn’t. Good defending starts from the front; if Leeds had been better in attack, there’d have been less pressure in defence. This isn’t to blame Bamford; it’s to blame the fates for spinning one more thread upon this season’s gaudy tapestry of blood and injuries.

Analysis of everything else depends on Marcelo Bielsa’s decision about the club’s offer to continue coaching the team next season, but I can’t offer much there that isn’t hollow. Over the last nine months we’ve become used to Bielsa’s press conferences as a source of reassurance and direction; we knew the team, we knew who was injured, we knew his thoughts on winning, losing, tactics, ethics. But Bielsa only speaks when he’s mandated, so even if he decides to stay — and we must pray to those same fates and deities that always scorn us that he will — we face more months like last summer when, after an introductory press conference, he worked in mystifying silence through pre-season, while the fans tried to connect the dots between transfer rumours and bewildering lineups in friendly matches. Perhaps Bielsa will think the decision on his future is significant enough to allow the press to question him; perhaps the summer tour to Australia will include some contractual obligations to speak. Otherwise, we’re looking for a white puff of smoke above Elland Road and a whispered, ‘Bueno’, and then months without Bielsa, even if he’s still with us.

That’s the impact I’m feeling most from last night’s game: a sense of sudden destabilising loss and futility. At 8.25pm last night this season was supposed to last for eleven more days, until after a match against Aston Villa at Wembley; in a bit more than an hour that was all destroyed, and now there’s nothing. Whatever was planned for the next week is cancelled. The training pitches will be mowed to Bielsa’s specifications but nobody will be playing on them. The kitchen staff have no menus to cook, the coaches have no sessions to plan. The fans have a free scarf, a video of last night’s game, and hotel rooms to cancel.

They have their memories of the season, too, Leeds United’s best season for almost a decade. But as Bielsa said, “those are only five minutes, and after that there is that enormous and huge emptiness, and an indescribable loneliness.” Perhaps the feelings will balance out after a while, and the good memories of what happened this season will overwhelm the pain of how it ended; we’ll celebrate the life rather than mourning the death. But the defeat will never entirely leave us. Because it’s football, and no matter how good you are, it never does. I wonder if that’s why we like it.

Dette. Dette var ei bra beskriving på kva eg føler for gårsdagen, utan at eg hadde klart å skrive det sjølv  :)

Heilt einig! Ein engelskmann med vet i skallen, og han veit å formulere seg godt og. Det er ikkje alltid tilfelle, same kva land ein pratar om.

Asbjørn

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Interessante opplysninger fra Phil Hay fra the aftermath av playoffkampen i starten av hans kampomtale av kampen mot Derby i september 2019.

Last season’s playoff semi-final was Derby County’s moment and they left their mark on Elland Road in more ways than one.

Champagne went everywhere, soaking manager Frank Lampard, and the away dressing room took a hammering: broken ceiling tiles, rubbish everywhere, a dubious brown substance on the floor. Leeds United cleaned up and chose to make nothing of it, for fear of being seen to suck on sour grapes.

Marcelo Bielsa’s squad sat quietly in the opposite changing room, beaten and devastated, the noise from Derby’s celebrations echoing around them. There was no rousing speech from their head coach, just an appreciative and consoling tap on the shoulder for each of his players. Bielsa picked up his bags and left the ground, without saying much.

He thought it was the end for him at Leeds, convinced the club would see no promotion as a one-time opportunity missed, and his staff began packing up at Thorp Arch the following day.

He sent a message to Kalvin Phillips asking to meet him in person but then cancelled on the midfielder without explanation. It took a call from the club, asking to discuss his contract, to alert Bielsa to the fact that his services were wanted.

The fallout from that tie was very different in Leeds and Derby. Bielsa went off to lick his wounds, travel around Brazil and regroup for another shot at reaching the Premier League. Lampard went off to Wembley and later carried on to Chelsea.
Tell me - I've got to know
Tell me - Tell me before I go
Does that flame still burn, does that fire still glow
Or has it died out and melted like the snow
Tell me  Tell me

Dylan

auren

Ã… være Leeds-supporter krever et tonn med tålmodighet og evne til å reise seg etter å ha blitt dratt ned i søla ikke bare 1 gang, men år etter år etter år... Man spør seg hver gang om det er verdt å bruke så mye tid og energi på denne klubben som bare gir deg skuffelser år etter år. Etter så mange år i ingenmannsland finnes det ikke lenger noen vinnerkultur, det være seg blant spillere, trenere, eiere og administrasjon. Sist gang det virkelig var noe å juble for var vel i 91/92 sesongen da det siste ligamesterskapet kom med Håvard Wilkinson ved roret.

Men når du våkner midt på natta fordi Leeds nok en gang har feilet, begynner det å dra seg vel litt langt av sted. Slik det er blitt nå hjelper det å stå opp og ta fram et bilde av mitt 10 måneder gamle barnebarn og bikkja for å forstå at det finnes noe som er viktigere her i verden enn Leeds og fotball.

Denne sesongen så lenge ut til å bli sesongen da skrittet opp i Premier League skulle tas, men neida, de greide å rote det til igjen. Når det drar seg til og viktige avgjørende kamper kommer, kommer den berømte rullegardina. Mangel på sjøltillit, stayerevne og vinnervilje lyser lang veg. De får fullstendig hetta som resulterer i håpløse valg, idiotiske taklinger på farlige steder på banen uten tanke for konsekvenser. På den annen side er det jo egentlig rart at man kommer så langt som man gjør med den spillergruppa man har.

Hadde det vært noen vinnerkultur i klubben hadde styret/eiere tatt grep og styrket laget siste halvdel av sesongen slik at opprykk hadde blitt en realitet. Det er greit at man nå har eiere som styrer skuta økonomisk fornuftig, men litt satsing og risiko må til for å oppnå noe. Et opprykk til Premier League betyr et hav av nye inntekter og helt nye muligheter til handling og satsing.

Det blir vel som før når denne sesongen har kommet litt på avstand. Når ny sesong starter i august med blanke ark håper vi at denne sesongen skjer det, selv om vi da får med lag som Huddersfield, Fulham og Cardiff å gjøre i tillegg til resten av kobbelet.

Leser i Yorkshire Evening Post at Bielsa er klar for forhandlinger om å fortsette som trener. Det er jo et lyspunkt midt oppe i det hele. Tror jeg tar en titt på bildene av barnebarn og bikkje (den sover jo) før jeg prøver å få litt søvn.

God natt, eller snart god morgen
Takk for at du setter ord på det mange av oss føler. Jeg er fullstendig knust, og lurer på om det er noe vits å følge med på noe som virker skjebnebestemt :(

Jeg bor i Skien og min lokale klubb er Storm som i år spiller i 3. divisjon etter å ha feid gjennom 5. og 4. divisjon med kun ett tap (opptur!). Ligger for øyeblikket på bunnen av tabellen (nedtur) Så er det Odds Ballklubb i Eliteserien som i øyeblikket innehar 2. plassen (opptur) som jeg følger. Har sesongkort begge steder. Og så er det Leeds i England da med mest nedturer siden 91/92 bortsett fra semifinalen i europacupen mot Sevilla. Etter det ble det jo et brak uten sidestykke! Ikveld blir det en tur på Skagerak Arena for å se om Odd fortsetter den historiske flotte sesongåpningen (opptur!).
God fotballsommer!

Odd tryna som bare det på tampen av sesongen. Dummet seg ut i to kamper mot Haugesund. Typisk det. Eier jo ikke vinnerkultur det laget.

auren
"Guardiola said: 'You know more about Barcelona than I do!'"
Marcelo Bielsa, 16.01.19, etter Spygate-foredraget sitt.