After 22 games, a clean sheet for Leeds – and possible glimpse at future challenges - The Athletic 4/9/23
By Phil Hay
And so it transpired that drama at Leeds United was not
limitless or incapable of pausing. Luis Sinisterra burned what was left of the
midnight oil on Friday and by Saturday there were no more theatrics in the
tank, nothing to spice up the grind of a nil-nil at Elland Road.
Mark the date because Leeds do not do nil-nils any more than
they do normal service and for that, Daniel Farke must be slightly relieved.
The more the data grew, the clearer it was that Leeds, through different
seasons, coaches and debacles, had lost all sense of how to defend or how to
close the gate. So small mercies after an idea-sapping Yorkshire derby with
Sheffield Wednesday, the sort of game which would have remained goalless had
injury time run for eternity rather than four minutes.
Wednesday are the first team shut out by Leeds competitively
since February, some 22 matches ago. It helped that they spent much of Saturday
showing no interest in scoring but there is no overstating the punishment
inflicted on Leeds over the past few years, or how keen Farke would have been
to knock the habit out of them: in 118 league games from 2020 onwards, 218
goals conceded; in the past two seasons, 10 clean sheets registered, at an
average of one every eight matches. No wonder Illan Meslier began to look like
he had witnessed grim atrocities, the like of which he wouldn’t wish anyone
else to see.
Put bluntly, Leeds cannot go anywhere fast while everyone is
scoring against them but 90-odd minutes against Wednesday was an image of what
might be to come at Elland Road this season. Clean sheets will help Farke no
end but it will not come as a huge surprise if Wednesday’s approach — their
reluctant shape, the low-ish block, the discipline to make it work and
suffocate Leeds through the middle — is the tactic of choice for the average
away team. Elland Road is used to this. It was the conundrum Marcelo Bielsa
faced every week in the Championship and solved so often with a magic touch,
adept at either annihilating teams or more narrowly finding a way. The point
about clean sheets is that so many sides will come to Leeds looking for one
before anything else. These are the teams Leeds have to pick off.
Farke watched chances come and go against Wednesday and ran
through a list of them afterwards. There was Wednesday’s goalkeeper, Devis
Vasquez, getting an arm to a Georginio Rutter shot and another to a sliding
Crysencio Summerville dink. There was Summerville shooting over, Joel Piroe
hooking wide, Luke Ayling snatching at a header and nodding it into the ground
in yards of space at the back post. “I get the feeling my players created more
than enough to win,” he said, and realistically they had.
But there was also a trend of ideas drying up, of Wednesday
taking part in a more end-to-end exchange after half-time and a couple of good
opportunities falling to them. It was that familiar swing that occurs when a
team dominates, fails to dig out the first goal and then feels the pinch as the
game becomes finely balanced. Piroe played at 10 in Leeds’ 4-3 win at Ipswich
Town a week earlier and was influential in that position, given space to work
in by an Ipswich team who backed themselves and attacked freely. Wednesday
choking the middle run of the pitch meant Piroe was seen far less on Saturday.
It made the argument for playing him at nine in fixtures of a similar nature,
an argument that would have brewed even if Leeds had nicked a late winner.
Creativity at 10 was more of a struggle.
Leeds, as Farke pointed out, have not scored first in seven
matches this season, which might just be an odd coincidence or might point to
work he can do in the empty fortnight in front of him. The German promised
himself a good night’s sleep when this week was over with the transfer window
done, the clear space of an international break to breathe more easily in and a
ludicrous summer dealt with. The unpredictability of the past few months drew a
joke from Farke as he walked out of his press conference on Friday, shortly
before Sinisterra set off to sign for Bournemouth and give Leeds one final kick
in the guts. “I’ll be here on Saturday,” Farke said. “I can promise you that.”
A new system, new players, a new manager, a new division; it so rarely slots
together overnight and it will forever be remarkable that Bielsa was able to
make that happen.
And yet, in the year when Bielsa first made a machine of
Leeds, Farke and Norwich City beat them to promotion and the title. What is
often forgotten is that Bielsa was not far off getting Farke the sack in the
first month of that term when the Argentine took Leeds to Carrow Road, made a
mockery of City painting the away dressing room pink and routed them 3-0. Farke
clung on, just about, and he spoke about that on Saturday, about Norwich taking
five points from their opening seven fixtures, about Teemu Pukki failing to
score in any of them, about the lack of obviously abundant promise. “A
brilliant season,” he said with hindsight. “I’m experienced enough to know that
you don’t have to be where you want to be after five games.”
