This Feels a Bit Like Last Time 

It’s always hard to gauge what you want and expect from a season when your team has just been promoted to a higher league. The obvious first aim is survival and consilidatation so not to waste the previous year’s efforts.

But when you’ve won promotion, you’ve done that on the back of winning most of your games, especially when you’ve blitzed the league with 93 points and a ten point margain over second. You’ve become accustomed to expecting your team to win, you’re used to it and your still riding high on europhia. Yes, staying up will do just fine, but you secretly want more.

Especially when your Leeds United. West Brom and Fulham seem delighted just to be in the Premier League despite getting beat most weeks. For Leeds it seems like this is home and despite a sixteen year absence we’re anxious to fight our way through the cannon fodder that make up the bottom half of the league and start mixing it once again with the big boys.   

to a new league in 2010-11 in the Championship.

After losing our first game at Derby and getting battered in the first half at Forest, but turning the tide to earn a draw, we quickly found our feet and won three on the bounce. Suddenly, we were looking at the possibilty of back to back promotions and when Jonny Howson smashes us ahead at Barnsley in the third minute you’re thinking this league is a bit too easy... until we end up losing that game 5-2.  The next cluster of results bring us our ups and downs as the song goes. 4-1 up just before half time at home to Preston, lose 6-4. Going behind with 20 minutes to go against Bristol City until Luciano Becchio steps off the bench to score a hat-trick. 

Fast forward ten years and Leeds show what their about in a 4-3 loss to Liverpool on opening day. It’s then our turn to be on the right end of a seven goal thriller against Fulham and then comes a more solid win at Sheffield United. Then, after a fully deserved point against Man City you’re pinching yourself whilst spending the international break watching Kalvin Phillips play for England and three of your new signings stut it out for Spain and Germany and you're wondering what can Leeds really achieve this season?

Back to it and an unfortuante defeat to Wolves is rectifed a few days later with an astonishing performance and 3-0 win at Villa Park. 'We're all going on a European tour'?

And then, bam. Two 4-1 defeats in the space of a week and we're spending this international break licking our wounds with most of those England and Spain starters on the Thorp Arch treatment table, or in Rodrigo's case self isolating, wondering where the next win is going to come from with some tough looking fixtures upcoming.

Or, who knows we could go on a twelve game unbeaten run to propel us up the table for an exciting 2021 as the class of 2010-11 did? Ok, In the Premier League that seems unlikely but, we are finally where we've been striving to be and this time with the best manager in the world and with players such as Hernandez, Raphina and Koch as opposed to George McCartney, Abdoulye Faye and Lloyd Sam. 

The 2010-11 club season review was titled 'a rollercoaster return' and that is just what we are experiencing now, so strap in and enjoy the ride.

By Lawrence O'Sullivan