Some teams find comfort and solutions in weak rules. Fair enough, if cheap postponements work for you. But how much better it is to see a team like Leeds, mining gold out of a mountain of muck.
They started this mad game with seven men injured and by the 23rd minute they had lost another two. Goodness knows what loopholes Arsenal and few others might have studied to get out of it.
But Leeds didn’t have that option - no Covid cases, no leeway, no requests to rearrange. Not many grown-ups on their bench, either. They were kids mainly, and one of them, Archie Gray, was 15. But what magic they found with so little space between their backs and the wall.
First to Jack Harrison. He was the star, in the conventional sense. He had never scored twice in a league game for Leeds before this one, but here, at the 136th go, he got three.
Good on him, good on them, out-slugging the fourth-placed team in the league away from home.
We kept waiting for them to tire, for order to restore itself. It didn’t.
Jarrod Bowen cancelled out the first Harrison goal, only for Harrison to get a second. Pablo Fornals levelled that one off too, only for Harrison to get his third. He was relentless, and so were Leeds.
It isn’t something we have seen much of in this difficult second season, but when it works, when the complexity of Marcelo Bielsa’s thoughts are transmitted through his players, they really are excellent.
A buzz of energy and motion and weird geometry. And so this was quite possibly their best performance of the season, certainly when you count the number of men they have in their battlefield hospital.
If they can sustain this level, they will be safe. Their form this season, and more pertinently their injuries, suggest that is a whopping big if, but they ought to okay anyway. They have access to gears that other struggling sides can only dream of.
Now to West Ham. They could have tightened their hold on fourth and gone five points clear of Arsenal, and in that context home games with Leeds feel like a wide, easy gate to navigate. But this match looked iffy from the start for David Moyes.
They had arrived at speed, with four straight wins, including one against Leeds in the FA Cup last weekend. Here, they were flat.
Declan Rice was swamped in midfield and had less space to orchestrate, Michail Antonio saw too little of the ball, and didn’t do enough when he did. No one got close enough to Raphinha, who was involved in each of Leeds’s goals.
Too bad for them, and a good day for Arsenal, irrespective of whether folk feel they deserved one.
The first goal was well-taken, with Harrison wrapping a shot around Lukasz Fabianski after a pull-back from Adam Forshaw, who had collected the rebound after the keeper had blocked Mateusz Klich. Aaron Cresswell’s botched attempt to intercept the initial ball forward from Luke Ayling meant West Ham were far from blameless in going behind
While the goal was suitable remuneration for Leeds, what followed was more in keeping with their recent luck – both Forshaw and Junior Firpo came off two minutes apart with injuries.
In their place came two teenagers, Lewis Bate and Leo Hjelde, who had never before played in the Premier League. Bielsa might well spend the next few days scribbling lines on lateral flow tests to navigate this player shortage.
West Ham threatened a response when Craig Dawson somehow missed the target with a free-header from a corner, but Leeds didn’t learn from the scenario. In a near identical situation a moment later, Jarrod Bowen was left unattended to head in Cresswell’s corner for 1-1.
The expectation might have been for West Ham to assert themselves, but three minutes on they were again behind again, with Ayling heading Raphinha’s corner to the far post. Harrison, a fraction onside, bundled it over the line. Bielsa managed a smile.
Daniel James blew a one-on-one at the end of the half and the deeper cost of the miss became pronounced early in the second when Fornals cut in from the right, side-stepped Struijk and levelled.
That was galling for Leeds, but once more they stormed back, and again it was Harrison. The finish was superb and so was the throughball by Raphinha that rolled a tight path between three West Ham defenders.
Raphinha hit a post with a free-kick as Leeds chased a fourth, before Klich had a goal disallowed for clipping Rodrigo when the latter was offside. Evening it out, Andriy Yarmolenko also had a goal disallowed for West Ham in the final 10 minutes. When Sonny Perkins chested over from four yards their game was up.