Bielsa vs The Curse, final round Steve February 7, 2020 Leeds United 1 Comment May the 2nd, 2004. The Reebok Stadium. Not necessarily the day that the ‘Leeds curse’ took hold, but most certainly the day that we first felt I really take hold. Most of that day is a blur to me. Too young to drown my sorrows, but also too young to really understand how bad things had got. To me, bouncing straight back seemed inevitable. This is Leeds we’re talking about, and even knowing we’d have to sell practically every good player we owned, what problem would we really have in a league that also contained Plymouth Argyle and Gillingham? Where even is Gillingham? Gillingham beat us 2-1 in the second game of the season. Everything that’s happened between then and now has done nothing but reassure me that this club has a curse over it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s partly self-inflicted. Peter Ridsdale started this by dishing out blank cheques in much the same way that a Greek barman throws tissues in the air while shouting ‘YAMAS!’ but how unlucky can one club be? Every flip of the seemingly double headed coin since then has landed face down in the dog shit. Championship relegation fight? ‘Aha, heads, Leeds lose!’ repeat, repeat, repeat. The football Gods hate Leeds. Dom Matteo heading home at the San Siro had them all throwing paperwork up in the air desperately looking for the script for that game. Red lights started flashing in their office in the clouds. Distant sirens. Heads rolled. And so the curse was placed up the club. Thou shalt not enjoy success for a thousand years, or something like that. I can only presume that promotion from League One was the football Gods hilarious way of making us think it was all over. It wasn’t, obviously. Ken Bates and Massimo Cellino both saw to that, as Leeds lost more one-sided coin flips. But then Bielsa came, like a ray of light through the clouds that had taken up permanent residence over Beeston. Those clouds soon disappeared (down the M62 by the look of it) and the sun shone down on Elland Road whilst the players shone upon it. Everything was going so well. And too well. We don’t need to go over the end to last season. Listening to the Wigan fans gleefully chanting “We fucked your season up, we fucked your season up” on Saturday brought back a pain I thought we wouldn’t have to feel again. What made it worse was they didn’t even fuck our season up. The only thing that fucked Leeds’ season up was Leeds, but that isn’t a very catchy counter-chant. Whether Leeds will contrive to repeat the implosion again remains to be seen, but between now and May Leeds face their definitive battle, the one we’ve all waited for with that weird excited-fear in the pits of our stomachs since the day this stupid curse took hold. Make or, quite literally, break. Will the football Gods finally release Leeds from their rusty chains and allow them to regain their place at the top of (or at least near the top of) English football, or will they extend the sentence cast down on the club and force them to dismantle everything they’ve worked so hard to build? I’d imagine some of the Gods are already daydreaming about what could be. “Hello is that Steve McLaren? It’s Leeds United, would you like to come down for an interv” – no, even Leeds don’t deserve that. You’d expect there to be only one outcome for a club as unlucky as Leeds, but when the fans get behind them they have the ability to create the unstoppable force needed to charge at the immovable object. Of course it’s a tough ask to just believe that everything that will be ok, especially given that we’re pretty sure we’ve seen how this plays out before. Leeds don’t get nice things, and It almost feels as though the fanbase is resigned to Leeds losing their automatic promotion place, which they might. But they also might not. They might rally and win promotion. They could win promotion. Nobody needs to ask our fans to back their team, it’s as reliable as Steve McLaren being paid out of his 3 year contract after 6 months, but perhaps now is the time for all of us to just press pause on all of that pressure and frustration that’s built up over the last few months, and go into the final 16 games un-nerved, knowing that ultimately, whatever will be will be, and no amount of swearing either loudly or quietely at Patrick Bamford is going to change that. We say ‘In Bielsa we trust’ but then question everything he does, but we’re at a point where we really do have to trust him. We have to trust the players to get the job done. We have to trust that this is finally our time, and if we lose a game we have to trust that we’ll win the next one. We have to trust that Bielsa defeats all, because if the football Gods really are real then he has one hell of a fight on his hands. We have to trust that it’s going to go his way, our way. As the Gods gather around and prepare to flip away Leeds’ Premier League future Bielsa will stand up in front of them, topless (probably) and shout “PIERDE LA MONEDA. Esta es una pelea a puñetazos, ¡y estos bebés están listos para volar!” which roughly translates to ‘LOSE THE COIN. This is a fist fight, and these babies are ready to fly!’ What happens next will change everything, for better or worse. If he wins the fight, removes the curse and takes Leeds back to the Premier League then from that moment on the football Gods will become irrelevant to everyone at Elland Road. Viva Bielsa, we’ll shout. God of Leeds. All we have to do, is trust him. Written by Steve Turner (@SteveLTurner)