Watford 2-2 Leeds United: Button moon — Square Ball 31/3/24

PRESSED

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Hopefully this performance is as close as Daniel Farke and Leeds United veer to making a mess of promotion this season. One chastising hour, on one night, when for once circumstances were not Farke’s friend.

So far this season has been so good in the way Farke has found ways through the phases. The EFL’s 46 game calendars mean one season in the Champo or below is made of many seasons, and a team at the end often looks very different from a team at the start. Farke has built three teams, each better than the last. First came the days of Hjelde and Poveda, and Luis Sinisterra lapping up the opening day. When things calmed down Joe Rodon and Pascal Struijk, Ethan Ampadu and Glen Kamara, and Joel Piroe behind Georginio Rutter were our spine with potential for promotion. It felt good. Who knew Struijk’s groin feeling bad would make Leeds better, coinciding with Pat Bamford’s recovery, Ilia Gruev’s adaptation and Rutter’s graduation, so Rodon x Ampadu, Gruev x Kamara and Rutter x Bamford were put together and thrived.

That Leeds have improved whenever Farke has been forced to change has been a great advert for his skill. But I think he’d have happily played dumb for the remaining eight games rather than spend brief hours after the international break sifting through sore hamstrings for players. His metaphor for the Watford game was “pressing the button” – no training, just picking players and going out to play. Farke is usually impassive on the touchline and for the first hour at Vicarage Road he had good reason to be: he couldn’t let anyone see how hard he was thinking about finding another button to press. In an ideal world, the world Farke has worked hard to create at Leeds this season, he’d have made his changes – Liam Cooper at the back, Ampadu into midfield – and found another line-up, version 4.0, that could carry on through promotion if necessary. For an hour he watched that hope falling apart.

In some ways it was only hope. After the game Farke said there was, “no other outcome, no other option” than the team he named. He hadn’t wanted to say anything about the scheduling, or the international break, or the lack of time for training. He wanted to avoid summoning the bad vibes all those things portended. But he’d said enough for us to know from weeks back that rushing from Peru to London would leave Junior Firpo as bewildered as Paddington Bear on the station platform, that giving Thorp Arch over to a skeleton crew of the injured, the young and the podcasting could disrupt the rhythm of the year so far, that four Welsh players, one Finn or both would come home in their feelings, that the medical staff watching the last fortnight of games on TV would have no eyes for the ball, only for muscles and ligaments. The players who got off the plane and went straight to the medical room made Farke’s mind up: Archie Gray could cover for Gruev, but he couldn’t also cover for Connor Roberts, and Sam Byram couldn’t cover for Gray because he was needed to cover for Firpo.

This time, if this had all clicked – Ampadu coasting into midfield again like a born Dacourt, Cooper becoming the Radebe to Rodon’s Woodgate – it would have been luck rather than judgement. So perhaps we can’t hold too much against Farke for this one. Without time for so much as a glance at this on Wetherby grass that might have made him think twice, he had to watch intently as his best idea spluttered on national television. Identifying exactly what was up goes above my pay grade and is for Daniel Farke to either fathom out or hope he can forget. Was it Cooper, experienced defender and club captain, unsettling the league’s best defence? Was it down to Ampadu forgetting the knack for defensive midfield he’d mastered before Christmas? Does Gruev do something for Glen Kamara that Ampadu doesn’t? Was it simply too soon after hernia surgery for Georginio Rutter to look himself? I might be reading too much into things, but at one point, as Dan James placed a ball before taking a corner and then replaced it and replaced it again on the white-painted grass, I wondered if his mind was taking him back to placing the ball for Tuesday night’s missed penalty. Whatever the precise reasons, United’s passing total dropped from 228 completed in the first half against Millwall to 142 in the first half here. Leeds were looking lost.

Watford were delighted. Stand-in coach Tom Cleverley’s 3-4-1-2 was poisonous. It landed four strong midfielders right in the midst of United’s uncertainty, where referee David Webb’s enthusiasm for playing on through hard tackling was great for the overall good of association football as a fun contact sport but the last thing Leeds needed just then. Watford could afford three at the back because Bamford was rendered pointless. At the other end, Emmanuel Dennis and Vakoun Bayo were direct in ways that not just ye olde Cooper and Byram don’t like, but that Rodon and Gray were struggling to cope with. Both Watford goals came from up high. First, Byram won then lost the ball on halfway, one of those turn-and-turnovers that Farke detests – the ball went right where Gray was beaten, then was pulled to the penalty spot from where Illan Meslier was not beaten by Dennis’s shot, then was by Bayo on the rebound. Second, Cooper was beaten in the air near halfway by Dennis, who had got up, gathered the ball, raced upfield, rounded a few players and scored before anyone could figure out how to stop him. In between was the first hour’s saving grace, Crysencio Summerville, coming back to the form that was eluding him during the team’s recent run. From the wing, a dribble, a curling shot at the far corner, saved. Fine. Next time do it again, do it better, and score a great goal, followed by an ears-and-name celebration signalling that Summerville is ready to be back to his best.

Getting Leeds back to their best in this game meant some hard choices for Farke, and he made them on the hour. Hard, because a lot of people will say he should have made these choices in the first place: Firpo, tired as he was, came on at left-back, Byram went right, Rodon and Ampadu were reunited at centre-back and Gray was invited into his future in midfield. Hard, too, because the next thirty minutes set this up as the best side until Gruev is back, and that means tough weeks ahead for Liam Cooper. He has a contract for seven more games (we’re not contemplating the play-offs, thank you very much) and, while I’ll always contend that in the long run fans remember players for what they did rather than for how they ended, he will not and should not want his last meaningful acts in a Leeds shirt to include being so dazed by Dennis for the second goal that he was waving his arm for imaginary offside, or getting yelled at by Sam Byram, or getting hauled off sixty minutes in. Turning Leeds back into a side that could get a result from the last half hour may have meant ending a Leeds United career and Farke, always attentive to the part of his heart that is still playing, knew that. But Cooper knows that elegant sacrifices are part of football and that, if his best chance of lifting the Championship trophy with an audience is not playing, that’s what he has to do.

The last half hour was much better, helped by Dennis leaving the field and Watford losing their impetus, but more by Leeds putting ability before condition. Farke will contend that the data cautioned against risk, and few fans would think a fatigued Firpo could make so much difference, but there was a rightness about the later line-up that seemed to relieve tired legs and heads by being easier to play within. We can talk another time about the second sub, Joel Piroe, coming on as if he was wearing somebody else’s boots, but returning to a platform of normality meant that when Mateo Joseph and Jaidon Anthony arrived, looking fresh, all they had to do was score. Joseph did exactly that after Summerville pulled back from the byline and, after his first touch of the night was a scuffed shot, his second was a netbound rebound. Minutes later Anthony nearly did that, after Summerville on the byline shot this time, but Anthony’s netbound rebound was brilliantly saved.

In the end it’s an away point, which Farke said some weeks back was all he wanted from the remaining away games. It was also an education, a sharp hour when Farke was stuck with the results of the only option he felt he had, until Firpo’s fitness allowed half an hour of the plan B everyone will say should have been plan A. It was a clarifier too, in that sense and another, as hopefully this knocked the dust from minds and bodies ahead of playing Hull City on Monday. Firpo should be fit for that, maybe Gruev too. The lads from Wales can take Glen Kamara out for a conciliatory ice cream. Mateo Joseph can cheer them all up with tales of what a fun international break feels like.

Drawing also meant continuing this unbeaten year, a statement of resilience that Leicester City would swap one of their legal teams for. It wasn’t enough to keep Leeds top, but that’s because Ipswich Town, while also turning in a lousy performance at Blackburn, still managed to force their way through a 1-0 win because they’ve been brilliant at doing that for nearly eighteen months, the bastards. The sport of football in general could have a think about how its product is going to keep holding up through making its high profile holiday games into such post-international, under-trained slogfests of weariness that even the most capable coaches are reduced to pressing the button and finding out what happens while it happens, but that’s a bigger story. The word from Watford is that Leeds didn’t make the best of a bad situation but they made something better of it than the worst. The rest of the season starts again, again, on Monday.