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Leeds v Liverpool April 21

Leeds v Liverpool and ESL

That’s two of the big guns down now and one to go!

I think we all felt that the run of games against Man City, Liverpool, and Man United would be a great yardstick to see how far we have actually come this season and give us a few clearer ideas about what we need to do to prepare for the next campaign.

To win at Man City was unbelievable – I don’t think any Leeds fan expected that – and to follow it with the type of performance we saw against Liverpool further underlined the great progress we have made on our first season back in the Premier League.

I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that the game against Liverpool was all a bit surreal. As you’ll all know, it was the first fixture I looked for last summer. My boyhood club and the one where I started my career against the club that adopted me over 20 years ago. The two great loves of my footballing life coming together at Elland Road for the first time in almost 20 years.

Sadly, not only were we unable to experience that inside Elland Road, it was also overshadowed by the announcement of a European Super League breakaway of which Liverpool were a part. To say I was gutted by the events leading up to the game would be an understatement. Liverpool is a club built on its fans and its community and it was sad to see those links and that history so close to breaking point. I wasn’t surprised by some of the other clubs in there given the way they operate, although please don’t ever try and tell me that Tottenham Hotspur are a bigger club than Leeds United because they never have been and never will be. Sunderland and Middlesbrough have been more successful than Spurs over the past 60 years!

The tone of toxicity was set before the game even kicked off on Monday. We had fans outside protesting, banners inside the stadium, Leeds players wearing t-shirts condemning the move, and Jurgen Klopp being grilled pre-match about Liverpool’s intentions rather than the game ahead. This wasn’t how we’d envisaged this battle between two of the biggest names in English football going head-to-head and renewing a rivalry that dates back almost as long ago as when Tottenham last won the league title.

So, the game was a sideshow, but it wasn’t a bad one at all was it?

I thought Liverpool were the better side in the first half, but they struggled to find the killer pass. Ezgjan Alioski and Jack Harrison struggled to defend the Leeds left and Liverpool caused all manner of problems. That they were only 1-0 up at half-time was more down to their own wastefulness than anything else and it’s fair to say that Leeds struggled to cope with the pace and movement. There were holes in the midfield at times, Kalvin Phillips got dragged around, and you’d have expected a team of Liverpool’s quality to punish Leeds more.

But the second half was a different story. We got at Liverpool, played with a far better tempo and we played higher up the pitch. We made the running, we created the chances, and were the better side. When Tyler Roberts missed that chance to equalise – and score his first Premier League goal – I thought the game may have passed Leeds by, but in the end Marcelo’s lads got their rewards when Diego Llorente scored a deserved leveller late on.

It was another good point and another good marker. The reckless approach that we saw at times during the first half of the season has definitely gone some way to being eradicated from Leeds’ game, and you do wonder if we’d tightened up a little bit earlier how close we would be to marking our first season back in the Premier League with a European return.

Maybe I’m just being greedy there because I’ve pretty much loved every minute of this season. Now we have the chance to cap it off on Sunday by beating our old friends from across the Pennines at Elland Road and eradicating the painful memories of that afternoon over there last December.

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