West Ham 2-2 Leeds (pens 2-4): FA Cup classic breathes fresh life into London Stadium as spirited Hammers suffer penalty shootout agony – but fans are LOCKED OUT after giving up on Nuno Espirito Santo’s team at 2-0 down!

Who said this stadium has no atmosphere? Who said the roof couldn’t come off? Who said it would always be a silent shadow of Upton Park? Tell that to anyone inside the London Stadium last night, who will tell their friends and family they were there to witness one of the most remarkable FA Cup quarter-finals in living memory.

Tell that, too, to the thousands of fans who left early and could only hear the roars from over their shoulder. They will have to tell theirs that they weren’t, no matter how much they pleaded with stewards to be let back in or, when that didn’t work, attempted to storm the turnstiles.

To close your eyes, you would never have known that the final throes of this insane Cup tie was being played out in front of a sea of plastic seats.

They will have to say they weren’t there when Mateus Fernandes tapped in after 93 minutes to breathe hope, nor when Axel Disasi took us to extra-time in the 96th, and certainly not when Taty Castellanos thought he’d won it at the start of extra-time and set off around the old race track and into the fans like he was an Olympic sprinter back in 2012.

Or when Jarrod Bowen rattled the upright from distance and substitute Pablo followed it in only for his effort, too, to be ruled out for offside.

They will have to say that they weren’t there to see 20-year-old academy goalkeeper Finlay Herrick, who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page and played 10 games on loan at Boreham Wood earlier this season, replace the injured Alphonse Areola just before penalties and save the first spot-kick in the shootout.

They will, however, be able to say that at least they didn’t have to experience the agony of a shootout defeat that denied them a first FA Cup semi-final in 20 years while the 9,000 Leeds fans in attendance celebrated their first since 1987 after Lucas Perri saved efforts from Jarrod Bowen and Pablo.

So much for the FA Cup being an unwanted distraction. So much for it being an inconvenience for two clubs in a relegation battle and an unnecessary opportunity for star players to get injured ahead of a nerve-wracking run-in that will see these two sides face off again in a final-day showdown when Premier League survival could well be on the line instead of a place at Wembley.

For three hours and six minutes, not a soul was thinking about relegation and certainly not for the last breathless half an hour when West Ham pushed and pushed and pushed for a winner against a Leeds side left punch-drunk and bewildered after watching their two-goal lead courtesy of Ao Tanaka and Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s penalty evaporate before their eyes in stoppage time.

To complete the utter carnage, the shootout was taken at the West Ham end after confusion over unconfirmed reports that Daniel Farke had been told on his arrival that Leeds, should the game go to a shootout, they wouldn’t be able to take their penalties in front of their own fans.

In the end, the two teams tossed twice to decide who went first and from which end they would shoot and sources insisted that had Leeds chosen to shoot in front of their own fans, they would have done.

Incredibly, West Ham were losing 2-0 until the third minute of stoppage time and will still leave wondering how they didn’t win it. Taty Castellanos fired two shots over the bar before nodding the biggest of the lot against the foot of the post just after the hour from a teasing Adama Traore cross.

Leeds had controlled so much of the game while West Ham had been content to hit them on the counter-attack but, by the end, all ideas of control and contentedness had gone out the window.

When Leeds fans look back in years to come at the heroes who got them to their first FA Cup semi in 39 years, they will see the names of Tanaka and Calvert-Lewin in the history books alongside Pascal Struijk who slotted home the winning penalty.

Max Kilman’s name should be there, too, who played as big a part as any in Leeds’s triumph.

It was before West Ham’s defeat at Aston Villa before the international break that Nuno Espirito Santo decided he’d rather rip up the three-at-the-back system he’d worked on all week when Jean-Clair Todibo pulled up in the warm-up than play Kilman.

Having had no choice but to do so here without the injured Todibo or Konstantinos Mavropanos, everyone saw why. The £40million centre-back was hugely fortunate not to award Leeds a gift of a second from the spot when he hacked down Anton Stach so clumsily after the German got his shot away yet neither referee Craig Pawson nor the VAR thought it worthy of a penalty.

He was not to be so lucky the second time around. Sebastiaan Bornauw was the victim this time. Pawson was sent to the screen and soon declared to the stadium that Kilman had made a ‘careless challenge’ that would result in a penalty. That, if anything, was a generous assessment.

When they showed the replays on the big screens even the West Ham fans couldn’t grumble or complain. They just sat in silence and then booed Kilman the next time he touched the ball.

Leeds will be desperate to see him again on the final day, though you imagine there can surely be no way back for him now.