Memories flooding back but spotlight now firmly fixed on Leeds United's modern day Premier League campaign - Daniel Chapman

Elland Road’s new floodlights shone through the mist of last Friday night, illuminating United’s defeat to West Ham in ways we’d rather have not seen.

They’re impressive, but earthly.

From the Holbeck end of Elland Road, looking down the hill into its famous Beeston section, the lights loom just above the horizon of the Jack Charlton Stand roof.

As you get closer, they hide, and reappear around the corner of Norman Hunter’s South Stand, worth all the lumen they’re giving but looking close enough you could grab a bulb, like a moon so low in the sky you think you could jump there.

The lamps themselves are arranged into diamonds to match their beloved forebears of the 1970s and ’80s, but those were the tallest floodlights in the galaxy, and that was their point.

It was hard to imagine the spaceship that could take you to the top of the old pylons, unless you found the right rocket fuel on the day the Happy Mondays played in 1991, in which case it felt worth a climb.

But if your only intoxicants were John Sheridan’s midfield cocktails, the height of the lights signalled a dream, not a target. We’d been to the moon. We were not going to Proxima Centauri.

All we could do was crane our necks and look.

Height was not their only quality. During construction, they must have looked as underwhelming as the modern versions going up, just three big pylons.

You got a dozen of them to the acre outside Ferrybridge Power Station and nobody was calling them art.

The love happened when the lamps were added, and switched on, when we fell for their effect, far and near.

Far, because you could see them everywhere; young royals swooned from the windows of towers where they were locked up in far off lands.

And near, because their light was so distinctive, even when you could only see the pitch and not the source, the grass turning a turbocharged shade of green

They had to be bright to illuminate the pitch from so high, but the sheer amount of Yorkshire atmosphere between bulb and grass did something to the quality of the light.

Instead of turning night into day, they made Elland Road look like a film set, televised matches like movies.

The football pitch became a studio stage where the impossible could happen and be recorded onto tape. Was it a coincidence that when the floodlights went up, the necklines went down?

The team-oriented commitment of 1950s kids like Johnny Giles and Billy Bremner gave way to Tony Currie, Frank Worthington and the sadly departed Alex Sabella, their hair glimmering around their shoulders as they tried dazzling Leeds back to the top.

Scott Sellars, both Snodins, John Pearson, Ian Baird; those floodlights were an invitation to mullets, a little extra something round the neck to fluff out as you strode onstage.

Footballers in 2020 make more determined style choices than Peter Haddock’s moustache, but they can’t rely on the new floodlights to help them.

Back then, Haddock looked like a star at Elland Road, backlit like Midge Ure in Ultravox’s video for Vienna.

Now, in ultra-high definition 4K big-wide screen, every razor burn is visible, every zit.

The old lights would shroud you in dreams. The new ones shove you around beneath cold, harsh focus.

The West Ham game was their perfect introduction.

If the Hammers hadn’t spotted every weakness before, there was no missing them now.

Run through the space in the middle over and over; then corner, goal, free-kick, goal. In this light nobody could miss a thing, and West Ham didn’t.

The new floodlights were due to be ready for the Premier League and, in the end, they are, because Leeds haven’t really started in the real Premier League until now.

Leaving the Championship was escapist euphoria, carrying Leeds through every knockback and defeat so far in the new division.

Whatever the final scores said, the Premier League was living up to its promise as the land where dreams come true, not a barren waste roamed by set-piece experts with height on their side.

Until the new floodlights went up it had been like having the old floodlights back: home or away, every match had a surreal dreamlike glow.

The games against Liverpool and Manchester City were like a fantastical trip, an underdog tale dreamed up by Hollywood.

Playing West Ham was about as dreamy as taking an exam with no trousers on.

Literal or not, all our Premier League anxieties are lit up now.

We don’t need diamonds this season, we need to finish 17th, which is nobody’s dream.

Diamonds are what we’ve got, though. Now Leeds have to make reality live up to them.

https://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/health/coronavirus/matt-hancock-hints-leeds-could-move-tier-2-later-week-3067559

https://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/sport/football/leeds-united/yorkshire-evening-post-launch-leeds-united-only-digital-subscription-ahead-premier-league-campaign-2967964

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Thank you Laura Collins