Leeds in first FA Cup semi-final in nearly 40 years after an Easter feast of nonsense | OneFootball

Everyone likes to overindulge at Easter, and this was an FA Cup quarter-final so good it simply has to be fattening.

We’ll be honest and say we’d never previously considered what the football equivalent of eating 12 creme eggs by 11am might look like. And now we need consider it no more, for it would look precisely like this barnstormer between West Ham and Leeds.

Of course, severe sickness is an inevitable byproduct of this kind of dangerous overconsumption of delicious foolishness, and it was West Ham left with their head in the toilet feeling only regret and unpleasantness in the pit of their stomach.

Let’s look at some of the raw numbers from 120 minutes of unadulterated high-fat, high-sugar nonsense that would have any child still bouncing off the walls at 9pm.

Four goals, two of them for West Ham in stoppage time at the end of normal time, both sides amassing over 20 attempts on goal, 11 added minutes conjured from absolutely nowhere, both teams somehow undershooting their xG despite all the goals and chaos, and a wild late equaliser from Axel Disasi – a man who rates a solid 7.6 on the Joe Gomez Unlikely Goalscorer Index.

And all of that doesn’t even include Taty Castellanos scoring two of the best offside goals in history. The first was very offside, swerved in absurdly and lazily from long range after the whistle had gone. He should probably have been booked really, but we would wholeheartedly support a rule that says you can have a shot after the whistle has gone as long as it is extraordinary.

His second was far tighter and for a brief but glorious moment looked like being West Ham’s third actual goal, scored in the 91st minute after their first and second goals had been scored in the 93rd and 96th minutes.

It would have been perfectly on brand for such an unstoppably daft game of football.

That disallowed goal came after Lucas Perri – who spent 90 minutes looking like he would emerge as a key Leeds hero, then flailed through extra-time under the misapprehension that he wasn’t allowed to handle the ball in the extra 30 minutes, and then did indeed emerge as a key Leeds hero – tried to head the ball instead of catch it and made a complete bollocks of it.

But today was so full-on with the nonsense that Perri’s rollercoaster afternoon was not the standout goalkeeping storyline; that was West Ham’s 20-year-old third-choice keeper Finlay Herrick coming on to make his debut, spending the final five minutes of extra-time hearing things he may never have heard before from the 9000 Leeds fans behind his goal before spending the entire penalty shoot-out chirping every one of those insults back at the Leeds players.

He was on because a goalkeeper got cramp, so add that to the list of Things That Happened Here Today, along Ally McCoist smashing his own world records for most chuckles and most uses of the phrase ‘I really do’ in a single co-commentary.

And above all, the perfect nonsense cherry on top of a very daft cake: the exact same end result that we would have had anyway after 90 merely quite daft minutes before all the very daft stuff kicked in.

Had Leeds simply prevailed 2-0 from a good performance, this would have been a quite sensible, beard-stroking piece about risk and reward. About how it had been Daniel Farke and Leeds who had been willing to take the risks and claim the reward of an FA Cup semi-final but at the cost of losing two key players to injury of as-yet-unknown severity.

West Ham, until their post-90-minute onslaught in both normal-time and extra-time, had been largely disappointing. Their relegation threat is both the more damaging and severe, so it’s understandable they were the team less willing to take risks today, but the extent to which they appeared to have thrown in the towel right up until they didn’t was alarming.

Several thousand fans had given up too, streaming for the exits at 2-0 before trying to stream back in at 2-1, which is always one of the great sights in the game and should, all joking aside, come with a lifetime ban for any who indulge.

Leeds were great in the first half, especially for a team that hasn’t scored a Premier League goal since the internet was in black and white, buzzing all over a decidedly more second-string and visibly less certain West Ham.

We didn’t at the time know just how fitting it was, but the fact Leeds spent the first 25 minutes looking both certain to score and like they might never ever score another goal ever again, was perfectly appropriate for the day’s events.

In hindsight, the goal involving both excellent football and a large dollop of luck was the true inevitability. Ao Tanaka’s footwork was quick and precise to fashion his shooting chance, but the deflection that took the ball over Alphonse Areola and in off the bar a wicked one.

There could be no doubt Leeds were value for both the goal and lead. They had shown daring and willing that the Hammers could not match, and had a plausible penalty shout denied on what we increasingly feel is the flimsy ‘got his shot away defence’ as Max Kilman – who endured a painfully difficult afternoon hacked down Anton Stach.

It’s not a defence that applies to fouls anywhere else on the pitch. Indeed, fouling a player a significant period of time after they’ve got a pass or clearance away is generally considered supporting evidence for the severity of the foul rather than mitigation that removes the offence entirely.

Given the ever fussier, ever more nitpicky game football has become in the VAR age, we’re genuinely surprised this hasn’t opened up as a more widely discussed and debated front in the game’s ongoing culture wars.

More significant than the decision may be what it means for Stach. He was unable to continue and was later seen on crutches with a protective boot on his leg. With Joe Rodon also hobbling off, Leeds certainly ended the day with a clearer understanding of just what ‘risk-reward’ can mean. It feels not in the spirit of the occasion to dwell too long on what this game – whose joy and despair are real and valid on their own terms – means for the relegation battle but it’s also unavoidable.

The Hammers had a brief spell midway through the second half where they looked awake and alive, but it appeared to have been ended when Kilman was correctly fingered by VAR for a foul and Dominic Calvert-Lewin converted from the spot.

That, though, would prove to be only the beginning of the nonsense that ended with Leeds finally prevailing on penalties, despite the first save of the shootout coming with absolute inevitability from the West Ham debutant, and in suitably long-winded and difficult fashion securing a first FA Cup semi-final in almost 40 years.

There have been 46 different FA Cup semi-finalists since Leeds last made it in 1987, and almost none of them have fashioned a more ludicrous path through a quarter-final.