It was the summer of 2016, and England were about to play Wales at the Euros. The whole country, it seemed, was in the grip of fevered excitement at the prospect of the contest that awaited. All except me.

I was at home, reclining on a sofa and watching the game under the influence of insanely strong painkillers, after breaking a rib playing football. I don’t know if you’ve ever broken a rib, but it tends to make you feel like you’re about to die when you do basic things like breathing, walking and jumping up and down when England score a goal.

It’s probably a good thing that I spent the match in a weird kind of mental limbo, owing to the combined effects of the painkillers and about forty sleepless hours. Something kept getting lost between my eyes and my brain, levelling all the usual peaks and troughs of emotion that accompany a match of that magnitude. I remember the cheers from the street outside as Daniel Sturridge smashed in a late winner, but I don’t remember feeling anything other than a mild sense of ‘oh, that’s good, isn’t it?’

I don’t remember much else after that. I do remember finding a unicorn making a fried egg and ketchup sandwich in the kitchen and engaging it in conversation about American politics before a sudden realisation that I was standing alone in a silent, darkened room. But that’s another story.

Anyway, the point of all this (other than ‘don’t mix beer and cocodamol’) is that the experience gave me quite a chilling insight into what football would be like with all the emotion stripped out of it. I say chilling because I’m not sure I’ve got any emotion left in me after Marcelo Bielsa’s departure. It reminds me of that curious numbness you get in the immediate aftermath of a bereavement, where you almost feel bad for not feeling anything.

On Twitter, everyone appears to be at a different stage of their own personal grief cycle. Some appear to have made their peace with relegation. Some have found themselves driven to tears. Many are angry, and are venting their feelings at the board and even at the incoming Jesse Marsch. One particular tweet was addressed directly to Marsch and stated, with some serious ‘Karen’ vibes, “I fail, unconditionally, to see your pedigree to manage our club”. Quite what Marsch will have made of this I don’t know, but presumably it helped someone, somewhere, manage their feelings.

As for me, I can’t really feel anything but absence. I suspect fifteen-year-old me would have taken a perverse joy in this numbness, making myself out to be some kind of misunderstood anti-hero, wronged by the world, then playing some Linkin Park very loudly. 36-year-old me doesn’t like it. I can’t even bring myself to care about the lazy, predictable comments of Talksport’s idiot gallery. Who cares if they never understood what we saw in him? We saw it.

This morning I filled out a survey on The Athletic’s website. One of the questions was ‘Do you care if Leeds stay up?’. I clicked ‘yes’ automatically, thinking it was a bit of a daft question to ask. It was only afterwards, after a bit of introspection, I realised I’d made that choice with my head and not my heart. I want us to stay up — of course I do — but the fact remains that, after three and a half years of beautiful but fatally flawed idealism, we’ve taken the cynical, brutally pragmatic route of sacking the manager, like any other common or garden Premier League club. It has tainted this season, which was already horror movie material, beyond repair, and now I want nothing more than to shut it away in a dark filing cabinet at the back of my psyche and chuck away the key.

I worry that Leeds, post-Bielsa, might never make me feel anything again. Already, my experience of watching England, which used to mean so much more in the sunny days of Euro ’96 and France ’98, has dwindled to a fleeting distraction from the Premier League schedule. England aren’t Bielsa’s Leeds. They’re barely even Heckingbottom’s Leeds on the excitement scale. I’d get more enjoyment from eating a cardboard sandwich than from sitting through a full ninety minutes of them. The moment Kalvin Phillips gets substituted I switch the TV straight off.

I’m not sure whether this disillusionment with the national team is simply a symptom of advancing age, or whether I’m now just incapable of watching any football that hasn’t been crafted by Marcelo Bielsa. If it’s the latter, I’m in big trouble, because I don’t know how to unlearn everything I’ve spent the last four years learning. What am I supposed to do, bang my head on a door frame until the memory of Stuart Dallas’s goal against Stoke goes a bit fuzzy?

And I need the feeling to come back. I need it desperately, because I’m so used to feeling something, anything, whether it’s elation at a fifth goal deep into stoppage time at St Andrews, or despair as Jack Marriott slots past Kiko Casilla and ends the world, or feeling all the breath leave my body as Jarrod Bowen chests a cross over Illan Meslier’s crossbar, or the simple joy of watching Bielsa stop his car to embrace a fan in a wheelchair, casually creating a memory that will last a lifetime. Leeds United have never made me feel more alive.

Anything is better, anything at all, than feeling like I did that day, confined to the sofa, doped to high heaven on tranquillisers and caring with my head but not my heart. That’s the hole that Bielsa has left.

I’ll back Jesse Marsch, because he deserves that much, and none of this is his fault. But the job ahead of him isn’t just about avoiding relegation. Bielsa gave us everything: good football, results, moments when the world itself detonated, and the little flashes of humanity that characterised his reign.

He gave everything and asked nothing more in return than to share in our happiness. As epitaphs go, that’s not a bad one. ⬢