ANTONIO ANTONIO ANTONIO
Leeds United 1 West Ham 2
Leeds United. What a reinvention. From a cynical team of bruisers who’d been sentenced to almost two decades away from the top flight only to return as this svelte compendium of one touch purveying football genius, easy on the eye and selling everything that is good about the game by the lorryload. But they haven’t won yet in 2020-21. And you want them to, if you love football, so when they take the lead through Raphinha after a rare ball-watching error from Soucek allows Klich to set up Leeds’ top scorer to strike the ball home from the edge of the area, you can’t feel too bad about it. Then Raphinha hits the post and the critical east end muse returns. In the last action of the half Fornals finds himself one on one with the twelve year old Leeds’ keeper Meslier, who shape shifts into a twelve foot human manhole cover to block the effort which bounces out of harm’s way into touch.
The second half sees strength begin to prevail over subtlety, but Soucek’s equaliser is VARred off the scoresheet for an earlier foul on the keeper from Antonio. Klick misses a great chance before Bowen’s beavering in the area leads to a shot that Junior Firpo obligingly deflects into his own net via his left buttock. Antonio then has a further couple of half chances until Rice picks him out in the final minute to elegantly sidestep challenges before rifling home the winner.
Leeds’ manager Marcelo Bielsa sums it up poignantly in his post match translation with the telling analysis that ‘in the end, all of our sacrifices crystallised.’ Leeds have equalled their worst start to a season, but are still playing the beautiful game as it should be played. It’s unlikely we will have to wait too much longer for their first win of 2021-22.
1 Lucasz Fabiański, 3 Aaron Cresswell, 4 Kurt Zouma, 5 Vladimir Coufal, 41 Declan Rice (c), 21 Angelo Ogbonna, 28 Tomas Souček,, 8 Pablo Fornals, 9 Michail Antonio, 20 Jarrod Bowen, 22 Saïd Benrahma
Substitutes: 11 Nikola Vlašić, 7 Andriy Yarmolenko, 10 Manuel Lanzini, 16 Mark Noble
Goalscorer: Junior Firpo (Own Goal), Michail Antonio
