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Luke Ayling. Bill. A hero of the Bielsa era. At the razor sharp end of the most ambitious and punishing two-season project in the history of the Championship, Luke Ayling, in the dying seconds, away from home, ran and ran and ran. Beyond exhaustion. Beyond belief. Beyond Connor Roberts or whoever the fuck they had at left-back. He ran beyond our wavering hopes all the way to the byline and set up the perfectly inelegant pinnacle of our achievement.
Before the plague, at the last gasp of communal exhortation before the grey months of isolation, pain and dissolution, he smashed the ball, gloriously, on a flying volley past a barely present Huddersfield, cowed as they were by our high, raucous pomposity. Part pisstake, part humble self-effacement, all showman, he pulled his hair free of its binding and let it flow on the tides of relief finally starting to wash away the last clinging doubts and fears of years and years and years of bitter boredom and aimless malaise.
He despaired with us when promotion seemed to be slipping away in defiance of all that was good and right and pure in the world. He stood in the cold glare of the million-eyed lens of the TV camera and poured out the truth of his despondent soul for everyone to feel. And he kept faith in the wild, punishing direction of his mentor in spite of the dark injustice and doubt of that moment, striving onward as we watched and prayed.
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