Last Christmas: An ode to Ethan Ebanks-Landell, the perfect loan player

Ben Meakin pays tribute to a much overlooked Christmas hit.

Ben Meakin (Blades Pod)

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart…

At the end of August 2016, Sheffield United picked up the phone, dialled Wolverhampton Wanderers, and struck a deal to take defender Ethan Ebanks-Landell on loan. It proved to be a great bit of business for the Blades, but one that often goes overlooked when considering some of the loans that United have landed since.

In one corner: Morgan Gibbs-White. Dean Henderson. James McAtee. Tommy Doyle. Ben Brereton-Diaz. Jesurun Rak-Sakyi. Alfie Gilchrist. That’s two full England internationals, three England U21s, a Chilean international and Chelsea’s youth team captain.

In the other corner: Ethan Ebanks-Landell, who hasn’t played above League One level since he joined United, and lists MK Dons, Shrewsbury and Rochdale on his subsequent CV.

And yet, I put it to you, dear reader, that he is — was — the perfect loanee. So this is my ode, to Ethan Ebanks-Landell, the man who captured our hearts for a few months as the nights lengthened, and then quietly faded away with the winter snow.

But the very next day, you gave it away…

“EEL” joined a team that was still finding its feet; indeed, Chris Wilder’s first win as Blades manager had only arrived a few days before the Wolves loanee parked his car at Shirecliffe for the first time. He made his debut in our first away victory, at Gillingham, and a few weeks later was a starter for the Blades’ first clean sheet of the season – game eight of a campaign that few then would have predicted would end with 100 points and a rollicking promotion.

United weren’t porous pre-EEL (Prebanks-Landell?) but they weren’t 2024/25 airtight either. It seems incredible that a defence that included Chris Basham, Jack O’Connell and Jake Wright were struggling to keep the ball out of their own net, but the reality was that the arrival of Ebanks-Landell gave the back line – still feeling its way into a 3-5-2 – a huge boost.

After a few weeks of shakiness — yes, O’Connell and Basham in particular were still very uncertain with the ball at their feet at this time — Ebanks-Landell exuded the confidence of a player from a league above. He brought a bullying level of physicality and athleticism that we hadn’t seen from a United centre-back for some time, and with that arrived the goals.

A powerful 96th-minute equaliser at Fleetwood boosted his early popularity among Blades fans; he then followed that with two more a few days later in a 4-0 demolition of Port Vale (in which United had four further goals ruled out).

His arrival coincided with the Blades going on a brilliant 14-game unbeaten run in games that he appeared in — eventually ended by bizarrely effective bogey side Walsall — in which United took 34 points from a possible 42 and moved firmly into promotion contention.

Matches with Bury don’t tend to live long in the memory, but Ebanks-Landell’s decisive contribution in a cold late November home game pushed him into cult hero status among United fans who had been driven half-mad by six years in League One.

On a strange old evening, Bury had held out with ten men after former United player Jacob Mellis was sent off just before half-time. The Shakers then went down to nine men with 85 minutes on the clock, and still the Blades could not break through. Injury time was announced; the goalkeeper made a good save and then a Bury defender made a breathtaking goal-line clearance from the rebound (a moment, incidentally, that prompted me to childishly rage to my wife that this is why we’ll never get out of this fucking league, because every bastard team plays like their life depends on it when they face us).

This year, to save me from tears…

93 minutes gone. Paul Coutts plays a one-two inside the box, cuts it back and there’s EEL, sidefooting the ball into the bottom corner. We had Billy Sharp, Leon Clarke and Caolan Lavery on the pitch at this point, but who pops up with the striker’s finish? Ethan Ebanks-Landell.

A few days later, away at Charlton, the song took hold.

It was dumb, it was fun, and it barely even made sense. In that respect it shared much with the recent chants of “Sausage Rohl” – it even annoyed pooh-poohing fun police Wednesday fans who took to Twitter from the relative heights of the Championship to mock us for singing about a League One loan player.

But it was the perfect song for the perfect loan player. A Christmas song by its nature has a limited shelf-life. Once January rolls around, you’d no rather hear more Christmas music than you’d eat another cold turkey sandwich. Like its subject, it was a song on loan – here for a good time, not for a long time.

I’ll give it to Ebanks-Landell…

Ethan Ebanks-Landell was the perfect loanee. He’s not even close to the best player we’ve ever had on loan. In fact I’m not even sure he’s in the top ten in the last decade. But he was exactly what United needed at the time: a loanee that helped us find our feet, and that we swiftly outgrew.

Loan signings are supposed to be a short-term strategy. Low investment, zero return beyond the loan itself. We know this only too well: fans have been dazzled by Gibbs-White, Doyle and Brereton-Diaz only to have their love go unrequited by the simple fact that United are not in the same ballpark, in terms of status and finances, as those players’ talent levels commanded. Circumstances granted us a honeymoon period with Henderson and McAtee, but all parties knew it would only ever be an extended fling.

Whereas the opposite situation arose with Ebanks-Landell. Those same defenders I listed as struggling in the early weeks of 2016/17 soon became an unstoppable machine and, in the case of Basham and O’Connell, modern club legends. EEL suffered a dip in form in early February (after we’d successfully extended his loan), with a home defeat to Fleetwood the nadir, and was no longer an automatic starter the rest of the way.

He came off the bench late on as the Blades finished the job at Northampton, but by that point he must already have known that the team was moving on from League One and leaving him behind. His Blades career arc went from “ooh, new signing” to “this guy is good” to “can we keep him?” to “who remembers Ethan Ebanks-Landell?” at super-quick speed. United moved up to the Championship and beyond; EEL has stayed where we found him.

I’m sure there are no hard feelings: he’s had a solid professional career that was unquestionably given a shot in the arm as a result of his 34 appearances for the Blades. Since then he’s been a first-team regular at every club he’s been at, even if you’ll currently find him heading away National League crosses with Rochdale next to fellow ex-Blade Kyron Gordon and current loanee Jili Buyabu.

But the next time you hear the unmistakable opening bars of Wham!’s Christmas classic, or even find yourself tempted to sing this song with the words Tyrese Campbell as its final line, please spare a thought for Ethan Ebanks-Landell: the perfect loanee.