Leeds United are in the red zone – and their midfielders aren’t helping — The Athletic 14/4/24
By Phil Hay
Sammie Szmodics scored and like that, Elland Road’s battery
died. Eight minutes to go but a sea of thousand-mile stares in the stands said
the game was gone. Optimism spent, the bubble burst. And gone it was.
It will seem to Leeds United like a split second since they
were in the throes of self-confidence but the fortnight behind them has posed
unanswered questions, not least among the club’s own crowd. They know how it
goes around here: positivity running into doubt before stumbling into one of
those holes Leeds are so good at digging for themselves. The thing they always
wonder at Elland Road is who is waiting to smash the open door in their face.
Who in this performance will play the part of Jack Marriott?
A 1-0 defeat to Blackburn Rovers yesterday was a show Elland
Road had seen so many times: the required outcome crystal clear, the struggle
to make it happen draining sanity drip by drip until the knife edge leaves only
two possibilities — either Leeds spring something from the hat or the worst
happens. And up popped Szmodics to activate option two at the end of the
clinical counter-attack Blackburn had been seeking all game.
Daniel Farke had no way of dragging it back from there. If
Leeds’ season goes wrong at the last, one of the abiding images of him will be
his vain protests in stoppage time, begging Blackburn to rein in their
time-wasting and speed up play. His first-team coach, Christopher John, was
sent off for losing his head over a penalty decision Patrick Bamford didn’t
get. These are the worst moments in management, when no one can hear you
scream, when a first home defeat of the season drops in mid-April and does so like
a concrete bollard.
“You’re working for a pretty emotional club with a great history,” Farke said afterwards. “I love to work for such an emotional club but the shirt can be pretty heavy, because of the expectation.”
As results flickered over the past fortnight, the clamour
around Farke was for a change up front, and those of a Leeds persuasion calling
for Bamford to be dropped got their wish. Or got their wish to a point. Bamford
out, Mateo Joseph in was the shout on the streets and Farke met the noise
halfway by going with Joel Piroe. But a different tactical decision, one taken
in the centre of midfield, served to highlight a limitation in the team Farke
has built and one he might rue if promotion gives him the slip.
Leeds, for reasons that are not always apparent, suffer
mental blocks in recruiting for certain positions. Their inability to sign good
left-backs is legendary and should the last three games of the Championship
term tee up a summer of prep for the Premier League, they will be back in that
specific shopping aisle during the next transfer window.
They were bitten more severely, though, by going light on
central midfielders in Marcelo Bielsa’s final season as head coach — not quite
getting Conor Gallagher from Chelsea, not quite offering enough for Lewis
O’Brien at Huddersfield Town — and an aspect of the recruitment strategy under
Farke was to cover the bases there; to create choice, to mitigate injuries and
form, to avoid the pretence that someone like Robin Koch or Pascal Struijk had
the attributes to moonlight there.
Three of Farke’s four most expensive signings, Ethan Ampadu,
Glen Kamara and Ilia Gruev, were central midfielders. The outlay on those three
totalled £17million ($21.2m), and Farke biding his time before committing to
Kamara and Gruev late last summer was indicative of how critical it felt to
pick well from the market. A consequence of that business was that Archie Gray
would get plenty of minutes on the pitch but rarely play there, taking the
baton from Luke Ayling at right-back instead.
Gray, though, is the central midfielder on Farke’s books
with the most attacking mind; forward-facing, an ambitious passer, more of an
eye for goal. Ampadu is particularly good at progressing play but Leeds’ style
under Farke — and no disputing that it has largely worked — involves a midfield
that holds steady, advances possession to a certain point and then looks to the
fire around the fringes to do the rest, the very definition of a platform. The
build-up plants the seeds for shots and the build-up plants the seeds for
finishes, but the goals and assists, the hard currency, consistently come from
elsewhere in the squad.
Between them, Farke’s four recognised central midfielders
have not scored one league goal. Gray thought he had at home to Leicester City,
only to see a twice-deflected shot recategorised as an own goal, and that in
itself — the impact of the strike, an impact Leicester still seem to be
suffering from now — reiterates the fact that goals matter more than how they
materialise.
Gray has seen his chances of chipping in at a steady central-midfield rate diminished by so many appearances as a full-back but the numbers show very limited attacking output all round: a combined 11 shots on targets among those four players, a combined seven assists, 11 Opta-defined ‘big chances’ created for a side who have created 87 across the squad.
Given that Leeds have been dominant in so many matches, and
given that their goals have been spread across 14 players, the midfield unit
coming up blank has almost taken some doing. With the season’s anxiety at its
height — the red zone as they might call it in the U.S., the vinegar strokes as
Viz magazine would have it — this is when contributions from unlikely sources
count most, like Kamara weighing in with his first league goal for 15 months or
Gruev coming up with the second of his senior career.
Leeds needed some of that at Coventry City last weekend.
They needed some of that against Sunderland on Tuesday. Their opportunity at
promotion seems destined to come down to individual players continuing to do
exactly as they have been doing all year.
Perhaps prodded by the urgency of the task in hand
yesterday, Farke was drawn into mixing it up against Blackburn. Bamford made
way for Piroe, Wilfried Gnonto replaced Dan James and Connor Roberts took the
place of Kamara. It was that third change, Roberts for Kamara, that launched
Gray into midfield, the position he likes best and where his potentially
stellar career will surely play out long-term. The shake of Farke’s line-up
carried with it the prospect of harnessing Gray’s imagination and livening Leeds
up.
That was the theory but despite the passages of the game
where United could have beaten Blackburn, this is how Leeds tend to lose under
Farke: chances appearing but not with the relentlessness to make a team
crumble; ideas running low towards the end and leaving everything in the lap of
tricky runners out wide; substitutions not paying off and a cheap concession.
It went without saying that salvation was not going to come
from the centre of Farke’s midfield and the sole strand of relief was Ipswich
Town’s 1-1 draw with Middlesbrough. Three games to go and nowhere to hide.
Inspiration has to come from somewhere.