In his latest column for leedsunited.com, lifelong supporter Jon Howe looks back over the past months and winning promotion behind-closed-doors.

Howe is the author of two books on the club, 2015 hit ‘The Only Place For Us: An A-Z History of Elland Road’ and ‘All White: Leeds United’s 100 Greatest Players’ in 2012.



Liam Cooper lifted the Championship trophy to a transfixed Elland Road crowd that was fit to burst. This wasn’t expectancy or even hunger, this was like feeding an addiction. The resulting thunder was a reverberation that had been building for the best part of two decades; closure at last. Gaetano Berardi and Kalvin Phillips hobbled around in matching leg braces and playfully wrestled each other in front of a gleeful South Stand. Then a relentless chant began at the Kop end; ceaselessly pleading with an unforgiving rhythm. Elland Road wanted Marcelo Bielsa, and however much the reluctant hero hid in the bowels of the West Stand’s inner sanctum, his bashfulness was futile.

Elland Road needed its moment, and it got it. The fabled, four-sided old dear of Beeston had been bouncing all afternoon, with a dangerous buoyancy like a 1950s fairground ride straining at the hinges. This was fun that was so manic it bordered on a violent recklessness of white noise and sensory overloads. When Bielsa lifted the trophy the stadium was finally propelled off its axis, and we were all careering skywards to who knows where; the M621 hard shoulder? To the moon and back? Or just back in our beds hours later with a monstrous hangover?

What we do know is we woke up with a thud, and yet again, for the fourth time this week, with the lumpen realisation that it was all a dream and the COVID-19 pandemic still held us captive under its scheming governance. After years of dreaming about what ‘that’ moment felt like, we still don’t know. We still don’t know.

This week’s giddy and almost impulsive announcement of a vaccine to be rolled out possibly before the end of the year, is certainly the tonic the world needed. It won’t easily reverse the economic misery, it won’t help the countless small businesses that have felt one creak too many and finally given up the ghost, and it won’t bring back the thousands of lives that have been lost. It won’t bring back Norman or any of the lesser-known but equally worthy members of the Leeds United family. But it brings some hope. And society needs hope right now.

For Leeds United fans, the vaccine won’t allow us to turn back time. That moment has gone, and that’s how it was meant to be. If only we’d known for all those years of trudging down Lowfields Road in the rain, of jumping on the Football Specials with high expectations, of striding back up Wesley Street after a victory that cheered us and felt like a corner finally turned. If only we’d known we wouldn’t get our moment.

But whilst the vaccine might not give us that yearned-for instant back, it also won’t change what ‘did’ happen. Pablo’s last minute daisy-cutter at Swansea won’t hit the post and bounce out, it will still roll in. Huddersfield Town’s Emile Smith Rowe won’t blaze that late chance into an empty stand out of spite, he’ll still tuck it home and cause spontaneous pile-ons the world over. And the entire Leeds squad won’t crash and burn after topping up their alcohol levels over a five-day period and lose both their last two games in a sorry episode of repentant over-exuberance; they will still win them both handsomely.           

And now we sit eight games into a Premier League reality, and reality occasionally bites. But we are able to take a breather during the international break and it feels like a good time to take stock, after a year where time has been distorted to veer from tedious monotony one day to whirlwind lunacy the next. A mixed start after eight games is pretty much what most of us expected, and is a fresh sensation after two seasons of almost unrelenting excellence. But the Premier League is still a strange place to be and takes some getting used to.

It is hard to understand how ‘experts’ are still trying to work out what Marcelo Bielsa is all about, it is baffling to see how much additional scrutiny Leeds United are now under, and it is strange to see ‘Leeds United’ being talked about on programmes we used to watch or listen to as a passive neutral. Maybe this is all because we didn’t get our ‘moment’? We didn’t get that release. We didn’t wave a triumphant goodbye to the EFL in a heady blur of fireworks, ticker tape and a brazenly inebriated Mateusz Klich breakdancing before us in the centre circle. Somehow it feels like we are stuck in transition because we were robbed of our natural end, and to experience it in all its fleshy glory.

Whilst the talk is that the vaccine will be rolled out by Christmas, it will take months to filter down through the most in-need age groups to bring a sense of normality across all society, and we are still talking about spring 2021 as a potential end to the pandemic’s determined grip on our lives. In terms of attending football matches, you still feel like this will be a phased return and won’t be rushed or expedited by the Government, despite this obviously welcome news coming in the same week that the issue was debated in Parliament. It still feels like we will be lucky to see a Premier League game at Elland Road this season, and the prospect of re-establishing the swaying, goading, bursting-at-the-seams vibrancy that witnessed Luke Ayling’s volley in the 2-0 win over Huddersfield Town last March, feels increasingly distant.

Perhaps only then will we get closure and get our moment? In whatever form it eventually comes. I have spent years deriding the overblown pomposity of Premier League gimmickry, but I would trade my vinyl record collection to see that plastic podium the ref picks the ball off in all its real-time synthetic pretentiousness as Leeds United stride triumphantly out before a bursting top flight crowd at Elland Road.

I don’t know when or if the vaccine will bring that back, but it delivers some hope. Until then we will stare longingly at the vast treasure trove of ‘Champions’ merchandise, special edition local papers, celebratory craft ales and official club books and DVDs we quite agreeably over-compensated with at the end of July, and re-imagine the physical and emotional attachment that has been so cruelly taken from us.

That cheap t-shirt we drunkenly bought from the phone case guy on Briggate may have shrunk two sizes in the wash by then, and it may display more of our lockdown 2 weight than we’d like, but we will wear it in that moment of glorious deliverance at Elland Road regardless. We don’t know when that will be, who we will be sat next to or however many fans will be there to share it, but we all deserve that personal moment, and finally, we might just have some certainty that it will come.