LEEDS SERVE ANOTHER FEAST TO AN EMPTY HOUSE
THE newly-named Norman Hunter Stand stood testament to those who did not live to see this precious day and so, too, did the banner remembering Trevor Cherry, laid out by Leeds United staff. But there were few more devastating reminders of what football is currently missing than the ghostly silence of this grand old place.
Elland Road was hardly packed to the rafters when it last hosted a Premier League game — 5,978 watching an already relegated Leeds draw 3-3 with Charlton in May 2004 — but they could have filled it three times over for this long-awaited day.
Marcelo Bielsa reiterated that the team’s attacking instincts will not change. ‘It’s an error to stop doing the things that have made you successful,’ he said. But he did not deny that conceding seven goals in two games was a concern to him.
The first 180 minutes of the club’s new top-flight chapter tells us that Mateusz Klich is going to be a very significant part of the narrative. The Polish player brings a feistiness and combative presence, breaking up play, as well as vision.
Before half-time he scored a penalty for 2-1. And the game was 50 minutes old when a ball reached him in midfield. Klich had turned through 360 degrees in search of a way to thread it forward when he saw Patrick Bamford up ahead.
The pass he released bisected Kenny
Tete and Michael Hector and found the forward, whose first touch brought control and second released the shot which sent Leeds 3-1 ahead.
The self-belief was unmistakable as Bamford then drove past Denis Odoi and measured a ball into the path of Helder Costa, who crashed in Leeds’ fourth.
Costa has also seized this new platform. The Portuguese had time at the back of the six–yard box post to select his spot, when Kalvin Phillips’ corner was bounced off Joe Bryan’s shoulder in the game’s early minutes. He slammed a half-volley in off the underside of the crossbar to open the scoring.
Leeds’ Robin Koch slid in rashly to dispossess Bryan in the area just beyond the half-hour mark and Aleksandar Mitrovic despatched the penalty.
Bielsa’s goalkeeper Illan Meisler might also have done better when the first of two goals in five minutes just beyond the hour mark brought Fulham back into the game.
Bobby De Cordova-Reid sent a ball under the Frenchman’s body after Andre-Frank Zambo-Anguissa had spun away from Phillips and sent him through. Mitrovic delivered the third — leaping above Liam Cooper to power a header from Tete’s pinpoint cross. When substitute Neeskens Kebano immediately hit the post, there was a game on.
However, Bielsa had men like Tyler Roberts and Jack Harrison to drive Leeds forward again after the Fulham fightback. It was a match that deserved a crowd.