Drinking tears and holding hands

I'm feeling perky today. I'm wearing a light jacket, outside! The sound of the lawnmower tidying up the churchyard near my house is like crack after a long winter. There's not even sunshine, it's just all fucking brilliant. A great game of football can do crazy things for your mood.

Leeds beating Man Utd at their place, and not even doing it in a flukey way but by being really good, effectively disappearing any residual worry about relegation as they did so? Fan fucking tastic.

To watch it with a Man Utd fan, and a neutral who said he 'couldn’t see how Leeds could win it’ before kick off - that was even better.

The first Yanited manager to win all six of his first home games, everyone has been crowing about how brilliant Michael Carrick is, the answer to their prayers, 'give him it permanent' etc.

One loud and thrilling defeat by Leeds United later and his pants are officially shat.

‘The ref did a bad,’ he moaned when asked about his team's performance after the 2-1 loss. Actually, it was more extreme than that: "one of the worst decisions I've seen."

Turn the clock back 48 hours and he was telling a news conference how much he was looking forward to the stadium coming alive, how he had 'made his players aware' of the significance of the rivalry - as though he'd sat them down with a powerpoint, quizzed them on it later, so they'd know just how many feelings they could hurt.

"It's why we're involved [in football] - for these types of games," he said.

Winning a big game is brilliant, of course, but losing one - well, in that case, the feelings were just too much for stroppy Mike.

If anything, Manchester United defender Lisandro Martinez getting sent off for pulling Dominic Calvert-Lewin's hair turned the match in his side's favour after Leeds had dominated, but in his confusion, Carrick veered between claiming a hair pull isn't a red card offence and claiming it hadn't even happened.

'No hair was pulled in the making of this sub-par performance from my rusty players'.

In the event, Carrick had a ready-made excuse for their crapness, with Man Utd not having played for 24 days due to the international break followed by the FA Cup quarter finals - which his team were knocked out of before he took charge.

I guess no one has to reflect on how he could have handled that differently if the narrative is dominated by the question of what violence looks like. But he looks too flustered for me to believe that the finger pointing was anything more strategic than a defence mechanism kicking in after one too many Bruno Fernandes crosses found the wrong head.

Shame, for him, because taking on the responsibility of coaching Manchester United isn't easy. It wasn't easy for him to earn the respect of the footballing world, either, winning lots of games and doing it with a cool demeanour, refreshing amid a sea of crackhead managers, his predecessor included.

But he's thrown it away because he can't hack losing.

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Meanwhile, the occasion let someone else off their chain - one who is usually 'so on top of his emotions', as noted by Gary Neville.

Daniel Farke deserves to fall to his knees with his joy because he, too, has earned respect.

On the basis of his poor record with Norwich City in the Premier League, swapping him out after promotion in the summer seemed a savvier choice than waiting until he'd wasted a few chances to win points and getting rid at Christmas.

But he took the chance he got and, following the blueprint of the hare, slowly but steadily established Leeds as a solid, often exciting Premier League side.

It's a beautiful thing to see the players that you love beaming with happiness, and Leeds fans have seen it twice this spring - bounding toward Lucas Perri and Pascal Struijk after earning a place in an FA Cup semi-final, and taking in the appreciation of three thousand very happy fans in Salford on Monday.

People on the internet accused the travelling support of 'celebrating like they'd won the league'. Unfortunately for Arsenal or Manchester City, just one team can do that. But being good means nothing in this league apparently - it's the best, or it's misery.

For too many clubs in the top flight, the answer is misery, nailed on, over and over. In this way, it's a shame that so many teams are happy to 'throw' their cup games amid the anxiety of not falling out of the bottom of a league that they never had a chance of winning, anyway.

Maybe after two Championship titles in five years, Leeds know better than most that winning anything feels quite nice.

Thanks are due to Lisandro Martinez, for making it even easier to enjoy the win than it would've been had there been no controversy and Leeds had won the game uber fairly and properly squarely.

Football is a contact sport, not an argument you have with your big sister in the back seat of a car on a long journey.

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While Leeds fans ask ‘are we there yet?’, Spurs are putting the wrong fuel in their car seven junctions back. You feel for them, such a big club, suffering such a big disappointment.

Their captain, Cristian Romero, seems to have born the larger of the brunts on offer in north London at the moment. In January, he did a naughty by making the shitshow happening behind the scenes at Tottenham public with a sly Instagram caption criticising the club hierarchy.

He must have been in trouble for this as he later apologised. But what difference does it make, him 'revealing' trouble in the offices, when said trouble is painted all over the pitch?

On Saturday, the trouble got bigger as West Ham's win against Wolves dropped Spurs into the relegation zone for the first time since 2015.

On Sunday, Tottenham passed up a chance to get the hell out of there by losing to Sunderland. In defeat, they also gave a performance that made fans think that there would be more defeats, which would make the chances of surviving very small indeed.

During the second act of this tragedy, Romero went down with an injury. He was suffering and was subbed off, making headlines as he walked off the pitch with tears in his eyes.

Ben Foster, a former Premier League goalkeeper who has spent his retirement opening up about the mental toll of being a professional footballer on his podcast, 'the Fozcast', and generally advocating for men to talk about their feelings, gave his verdict on Match of the Day:

"If I was one of his team-mates there, I want him to be walking off the pitch grabbing everybody, getting everybody firing. They've still got 25 minutes there until full-time.

"The tears, I feel, send the wrong message. As a captain you shouldn't be doing that."

Romero's wrong tears would be his last act of the season, as a medial cruciate ligament tear has counted him out of the rest of Spurs' doomed campaign. It also means he won't play at the World Cup with Argentina. This made another Ben, in my office, cross because when Romero cried, he wasn't even crying about the relegation which Ben is worrying about.

It's easy to see why Nick Hornby called his book about the top level of English football 'Fever Pitch'.

When Leeds were threatening to get promoted last season, it may have been a defence mechanism of my own which made me ambivalent about the pleasure of competing in a division so sterile and uncompetitive, with outcomes cast before August's first kick.

And it's easy to say this as one of its 'winners', but the intensity of emotion that this season has inspired has been amazing - and frightening.

Men drinking men's tears while others go hand in hand, jumping into a brighter future.

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